In search of the Gothic
Developing a photographic style
The Gothic. It’s a feeling that seeps from some paintings, music, novels, plays and, of course, photographs. If you visit the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise and be attentive, you will know what I am getting at. But you can find it anywhere.
But here’s the question: how do you find your own style of photography? My answer is not to search for it, but rather to allow it to develop. It will take time, perhaps years, but at least it will be an expression of how you see. It won’t be phoney.
This summer I visited Heptonstall in Yorkshire with a friend and wonderful photographer (Andrew Sanderson). At the cemetery I was very attracted to the grave stones in the church yard. It was as if the stones were marching towards me like soldiers as I took the picture. That’s the feeling I had.
This image stayed in my mind for a few months until I decided to offload it in the form of a Bromoil print. And here is the result of what I saw in my mind’s eye:
Many of my pictures seemed to point in a certain direction, as if trying to say the same thing in different ways. If I was to name that direction I would use the word ‘Gothic’ as a shorthand, although I realise that the term ‘Gothic’ comes with a lot of pre-supposition.
I have always been drawn to the Gothic and French Symbolism. Notwithstanding the perils of historical interpretation that reading through a gothic lens might admit, I have been drawn to Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Margaret Attwood. My popular musical tastes have featured Neil Young, Drive-By Truckers, Kings of Leon, Black Crowes.
Photographically, I admire Atget, Walker Evans, William Mortenson, Kertész, Bill Brandt, Cartier-Bresson and, of course, the ante-bellum architectural photographs of Clarence Laughlin. I would argue that all of these photographers extolled a gothic disposition. Walker Evans is often described as a ‘straight’ photographer (whatever that means), but one only has to look at his Billboard pictures to get a sense of the Gothic:
And so, I have found in my own photography a predilection for the abandoned, the dispossessed or disenfranchised, the contrarian view, cemeteries and decay, a pointing towards the ‘third world of photography’, as Laughlin put it, a realm beyond documentation looking beyond an object’s physical status and commonplace meaning to reveal the symbolic suggestiveness of objects.
This style has emerged of its own accord, somehow, and only on reflection after several years have I come to recognise it and make sense of it in terms of how I see.
Letting a style emerge organically from a lifetime of photography has afforded me an opportunity for self-discovery, surely one of the great things about photography? As Wynn Bullock once wrote: ‘What is important is not what you think about (objects), but how they enlarge you.’ Artificially imposing a stamp on my work might have led to some earlier success, but who’s counting? Not me. Short-term gains, perhaps, but what long-term pains?
