The Luminous Darkness of Nicholas Hughes – published on the occasion of the exhibition “In Darkness Visible’ at the Photographers Gallery, London, (September – November 2007).

Romanticism is not often seen in contemporary British photography which is more known for its garish colours and overexposed lives, yet it plays an important role in the photography of Nicholas Hughes. Perhaps because he was first attracted to painting and studied the classic romantics like Constable and Turner or the more recent ones such as Lowry and Nicholson that he became attracted to landscape as his major theme. Perhaps it was because he became interested in environmentalism at an early age, recycled bottles, and worked for Greenpeace that his awareness of the fragility and preciousness of nature drew him to photograph the landscape.

Indeed, it could be argued that it was the English painters of the 17th and 18th centuries who invented “the landscape”as a genre. Unlike the European romantics like Caspar David Friedrich who inevitably tagged their paintings with overt moral or historical content, they simply painted what was before them as it was: a sort of landscape qua landscape. Hughes fits largely within this tradition, yet he is driven to bring a more modern sensibility to his theme.

The two series of photographs on the walls of the Print Room at the Photographers’ gallery he calls Verses in the same sense that Richard Misrach uses the words Canto to describe the chapters in his own ongoing environmental elegy. The Verses set a mood and a line and give voice to thought. Verse I, a series of luminously dark images of trees and branches set against a foggy night sky are intensely spiritual and secretly political. These multi layered photographs are constructs deeply woven of images piled upon one another on one negative much the way a painter assembles an image by putting layer upon layer of paint but allows the under colours to shine through. They glow in the centre as though evoking a spirit of the forest that once was.

In fact, this spirituality is the basis of Hughes’s work. It is both an allergy and a lament for the lost forests of Britain, a land where trees have been consumed to build the ships that built the empire and were cleared for farming in the intensely cultivated countryside. It is a country, of course, where the oldest forest extant - aside from some primordial fragments in north Wales - is the “New Forest” ordered by Henry VIII as a strategic reserve for the Royal Navy. Hughes came upon this project in the course of his occasional cab rides across London where he would look at the trees passing by his cab window. He imagined London as it was, still full of trees, when places like the Church of St-Martin-in-the-fields was not yet surrounded by the hurly-burly of Trafalgar. With this work Hughes ask us “Where are we going, what have we done?” He then decided over the course of two winters to “construct a forest built from accumulated memory and the ghosts of trees.” Hughes’s forest is allegorical, and the glow from within the centre of the images is something that Turner or Blake would understand as coming from the soul of some “Great Being” that calls upon us all to mend our ways.

Verse II reflects a different sublime: the sea, more specifically the Irish Sea. Symbolically, of course, the sea stands for everything spiritual, limitless, eternal, unchanging, the reservoir of life itself. His mentor Lowry described the sea as the source of everything, constant yet unfathomable: “It’s all there. I never get tired of looking at it, but I still don’t know the answers.” For Hughes, this is also true, but it takes on a more personal, even political, importance. His seascapes are radically different in technique from his constructed forest images. They are straight forward images, but they share a similar, contemplative sensibility.

As a Child, and later through his adult life, he used to look out at the sea from Wales and from near Liverpool. His awareness that the Irish Sea is one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world and that it received regular doses of radiation from nearby Sellafield, aka Windscale, nuclear power plants and was struck by the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster gave him the impetus to study something that could not be seen but which affects us all. Visually, his images are also very dark and luminous, more resembling colour field paintings or Richter or Rothko and, to an extent the sublime greys of Sugimoto’s own seas. They glow from within like the lacquer of ancient Japanese bowls so praised by Tanizaki in his marvellous piece of aesthetics on traditional Japanese houses, In Praise of Shadows.

Hughes’s contemplation of the sea is also guided by a sense of hope. He notes that his framing “helps reduce the noise and distraction” yet still presents the “deep swirling chaos with shafts of enlightenment.” In each of his pictures there is a glow, a loom, a line of light sailing in from above much the way it does in his images of the deep forest he created in overbuilt central London. He looks to show that “in the face of this awesome power we are left with the hope of light in the ensuing darkness.”

What Hughes is doing with both Verses of his elegy is asking us to “slow down, to find the still small voice of calm that in the darkness may yet be visible.” His luminous photographs could well be considered paintings in the sense that they are often multi-layered constructions. Yet they remained pure photography and bound by the possibilities and limitations of the medium of film and a 4x5 camera. Hughes is indeed both writing with light as the root of the word photography implies and using the camera as one of photography’s inventors, Henry fox Talbot, described it, as the “pencil of nature.” By challenging himself to work within traditional media, Hughes is able to extract through the silver halides, the tarnished silver beloved by Tanizaki, a luminosity of light that is life itself: spiritual, fragile, and sublime.

Bill Kouwenhoven
©Hotshoe 2007