My mind experiences the world in fragments.
You might call it a kind of selective memory or maybe even ADD but, when I read a story or watch a movie I can never remember the whole thing.
When I first read “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” I loved the book instantly. I gave it to anyone and everyone around me, pressing it into their hands with teary eyes and a touch of melodrama. But, in a conversation with my mother, after I had forced her to read it too, it became clear that I had completely missed many of the important plot points and some of the subtleties of the story.
However, what I remembered was this one scene and it seemed so profound that it left me breathless.
Carlo is in love with the eponymous Captain Corelli and no one knows it but us. They are Italian soldiers occupying the Greek island of Cephallonia during WW2.
After the Italian Armistice they are betrayed by a German who had been their friend and the entire division is executed. Carlo throws himself in front of Corelli, sacrificing himself to save the life of his friend.
Years later, as the island recovers from the ravages of war there is an earthquake and the ground splits open, exposing Carlo’s body to us for just a few minutes, reminding us of his sacrifice, then swallows him up once again.
It is as if a scar on the landscape is opened up for a moment, revealing the rawness beneath, and then closes again. The moment is full of emotion and understanding of our relationship to trauma and remembrance. How it can come from nowhere, rearing up again when we think we are safe.
It’s a scene that left me sobbing…..and apparently made me forget many of the details of the book. (BTW – if I’ve recounted this episode completely wrong, please don’t tell me. I love my version.)
Before I began my self portrait photography, before I was trying to tell stories with my work, I was an aspiring landscape photographer. I loved the quest to capture those beautiful moments that remind us of our connection to and place within the natural world.
When I was asked why I loved landscape photography I answered that there are times in nature when everything goes very still and time seems to move at a different pace. You can feel everything around you breathing, from the tiniest blade of grass to the gigantic ancient trees. And those moments feel like little pieces of God.
When I look at great landscape photography, I feel that. I feel that communication of a kind of wonder that is almost spiritual, that can’t be communicated in words. An experience that can only be shared by provoking it in another person.
That’s what I love about landscape photography and that’s what I would love to be able to do some day.
I felt this same communication of an experience that is beyond words, when I watched Terrence Malick’s beautiful film “Tree of Life.”
At times in that film, I could feel the trees breathing. I could feel my connection to them and theirs to me.
At the time, I was just beginning the “Tales from the Moors Country” project and I was trying to translate that communicative experience I got from landscape photography into my self portrait work.
I wanted to create a love letter to the landscape of North Yorkshire, but I also wanted to create an homage to the stories of our imagination and how the landscape provokes and inspires them. And I believe these moments of grace, or magic, or whatever you want to call it, are an enormous part of what causes us to create stories, in order that we can understand our place in the world.
The big story matters. It absolutely matters. But the moment has a power that the big story lacks. Its simplicity gives it extraordinary communicative power.
The moment stays with us, as the big story falls away. Moments are signposts. Whether it’s a sudden rush of clarity that changes the course of your life, or simply an experience that brings you closer to understanding another human being.
In my own humble way, I want my work to concentrate on the moments. I want to concentrate on the stories and images, the jumble, the nonsensical that is somehow oddly comprehensible.
I want to provoke in you the same emotions that these stories and experiences provoke in me. I want to connect my imagination with yours and see where the collective journey takes us.