Beyond Sight: The Photographs of Nicholas Hughes

For many viewers, and writers on his work, Nicholas Hughes’ photographs are compared with music. But what is he listening to? And more precisely, what is he hearing? He cites diverse listening ranging from the classical to the modern; from Wagner (think of the grand, restless, Romantic sweep and mythological power) to Elvis Costello (his carefully crafted song-writing cut with a social conscience). The pitch of Hughes’ work is somewhere between similar poles: an epic, ethereal sense of the Sublime, underscored by an earthly, ecological message. Hughes’ many series of photographs are conceived as if they were songs rather than photographs. He finds his visual inspiration by locating the rhythms and harmonies of the earth. Despite his ethereal subject mater, this is what gives his work a clear, distinctive voice. It rises and falls in cycles with a plaintive cadence.

Among the traditional genre distinctions of the ‘high’ or ‘fine’ arts, the emotive, abstract quality of music is most often seen as the apogee of creative endeavour. At various points in its history, photography has struggled to be considered in such poetic terms because of its inherent descriptive and commercial capacities that imply a prosaic nature. Making musical allusions for any visual artist, but especially a photographer, therefore signals a high, metaphorical purpose. This is a strategy of risk, for the photographer working in this way might be considered misguided, or even grandiose, standing against the tide of the medium’s most widely accepted techniques and modes of application. It is often experimental photographic practice that takes on this challenge. Historically, it also arises at moments where old and new technologies intersect and where significant social and political upheaval are prevalent. If we can look without judgement at how the medium is used, focussing rather on the resulting visual qualities and the integrity of its author’s message, such photography can have a powerful message to convey: like music, it short-circuits the accepted intellectual routes of critique, appealing at first instead to the emotions, and through them, to the non-thinking, intuitive parts of consciousness.

Aligning pictorial expression with musical qualities is not new. Taking their cue from the Symphonies in paint by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, photographers first took on this ambition from the 1880s, through to the 1920s, the time of the Pictorialists. During this time, technological innovation and World War changed the face of the planet in unprecedented ways. This was the twilight of the 19 th century and the dawn of a new age. The titles of photographs in exhibitions shifted, typically from the names of people and places to those such as Harmony or Tonal Study. Specific subject matter became less important than the tone or mood implied by the work. This approach was inspired also by Japanese art, specifically by the visual patterning, and study of proportional balance of light and dark known as ‘notan’. Crepuscular scenes, and a deliberate softening of focus, completed the ambience. This blurring might be seen to reflect a social mood: a yearning for a fading past, and a lack of surety about the future. It would be satisfying enough to understand Hughes’ images as a form of neo-Pictorialism: a subtle set of exercises in colour harmony inflected with melancholic atmosphere. Its tenor is suitable for another transition between centuries where we find humanity once again overwhelmed with speeding technological developments, international conflicts, and in deeply uncertain times.

2 Returning to precedents in photographic history again for a moment, Hughes’ work has a still more specific twentieth-century, Modernist lineage. Any photographer pointing his or her camera to the heavens and making abstractions from nature contends with the legacy of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed series of pictures of the sky. Made between 1923 and 1936, he titled them initially Songs of the Sky and then Equivalent. Utilising clouds, sun and moon – subjects available to everyone – these small, jewel-like works imply that remarkable photographs need not rely on unusual subjects. Moreover, the factual object of a photograph is not the end in itself. Like notes of music, the images could act as the point of departure for a parallel psychological or emotional state evoked in the viewer: just as the sky is unhinged from the horizon – resulting in a free interpretation of the orientation of the photograph – so there is no fixed reading as to what the image may mean.

Representing or reflecting human emotions in the external forms of nature has many sources, but some of its immediate pre-photographic roots relevant here can be found in the eighteenth-century concept of the ‘Sublime’ (as expressed in the writings of Edmund Burke, or the paintings of John Martin). Experiencing and exaggerating the immensity and power of the natural world – such as mountains, chasms, the open sea at night, or roiling cloud forms – made man seem insignificant. The Sublime imagination was a form of pleasure tinged with terror. Such experiential interpretations of landscape combined meteorological, psychological and autobiographical meanings. Captured with the exactitude and alchemy of light sensitive materials, and emerging at the same time as Gestalt psychology, Stieglitz’s brooding photographs of skies gained added meaning. Gestalt principles hinged on theories of visual perception describing how people tend to organise disparate visual elements into groups, or unified wholes according to their similarity, continuation or proximity. It is a way to make links and locate meaning, even in the most abstracted circumstances. Simultaneously answering a practical concern and perhaps hinting at the answer to a metaphysical question, Stieglitz wrote on the reverse of some of the Equivalents: ‘all ways are up’.

In addition to my own curatorial and art historical perspective, it is perhaps the very openness of Hughes’ work that suggests a need to locate it among such nodal points of historical precedent. His understanding and blend of the Sublime, Pictorialism and ‘equivalence’ – alongside intimations of a study of psychology and spirituality – unashamedly stakes a claim for photography’s poetic, abstract values rather than primarily as a vehicle for transmitting visual information, or reporting directly on daily events. Unlike some contemporary conceptual art photography, it does not deal in the currency of irony, or linguistic and critical theory. If its abstracted imagery is then open to the criticism of appearing merely decorative, it is equally open to evoking a psychological-spiritual realm for the viewer that can reward metaphorical readings.

Hughes speaks of reflecting an inner condition in his images, withdrawing from city life to the country in search of wilderness and personal inner space. To our detriment, we often see ourselves as separate from wilderness, perhaps to protect us from the power of untamed nature that is ultimately indifferent to humanity. James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia paradigm’, is useful to consider here: that Earth is a living system with cultural understandings of human society as a seamless continuum of that system. In Gaia, the organic and inorganic components of Planet Earth have evolved together as a single 3 living, self-regulating system, much like a tended garden. The localised idea of a garden is comparable with our inner condition. This is a space that we cultivate, as much for our own sake as for the plants it contains. The garden presents us with the possibility of participating in a cycle of healing.

Hughes cites as an influence Hal Ashby’s film Being There (1979), based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski. The central figure, Chance the Gardener, played in the film by Peter Sellers, is an enigmatic character, isolated from the outside world for most of his adult life. Chance is illiterate, television is his main source of information, and tending a garden is his only experience outdoors. He is a naïve who ‘likes to watch’. Once set loose in the real world, chance encounters catapult him into high society. His gnomic pronouncements on gardening are taken for sage wisdom, or parables of economic prediction, and endear him to high society and the media. Eventually, he is elevated to a position where he effects American politics. The film is both comic and profound, raising issues about the effect of media culture on individuals and society, the nature of influence through chance, and the restorative, or chaotic, power of a state of innocence. Hughes’ interest in the film points to a concern with all of these issues in his own work.

Seeking the curative powers of nature, and a correspondingly reduced carbon footprint, Hughes’ journeys to find subject matter have been reduced physically to the walking distance from his own home in Cornwall, striking out overland towards the coast, and finally to the sea. Siding with the seasons to work mostly in early spring and autumn, his journey has correspondingly expanded conceptually, out beyond these set parameters, reaching towards the infinity of the ocean and its ever-distant horizon. He cites as inspiration a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s lecture and essay, Walking published in 1862, and now recognised as one of the founding texts of the environmental movement:

The walker in the familiar fields … sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some faraway field. … These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

Thoreau’s references to chemistry, fixing, fading and a glass surface must surely refer to the practices of photography, even if he does not name it as such. Hughes literally acts as Thoreau’s camera, likewise looking for, and attempting to register, the transcendent within the outer appearances of nature. For Hughes, finding unspoilt areas of wilderness untouched by human presence proved nearly impossible. Only the sky or the ocean offers the edge of human interference and with it a metaphorical rather than an actual space. The spatial and temporal ambiguity of his subject matter creates this shift in perception. In this elemental realm clouds become interchangeable with waves. Hughes achieves such fluidity and creative blurring of form predominantly through a mastery of the craft of analogue ‘in-camera’ and darkroom processing techniques. Multiple exposures, adjustments of contrast and inversions of colours are at play. In a few instances, light touches of digital manipulation are admitted. The interpretive and creative activity in these stages of ‘post production’ 4 enhances, and continues after, the vision seen or felt during the initial exposures. More recently however, Hughes has done away with manipulations, finding a new clarity in a single exposure where he senses a transcendent moment. He describes this process in a way that echoes descriptions of meditative or mystical experience common across cultures and the ages: he is still, his breath becomes blended with the wind; he is at one with a moment lifted out of time. Feeling bodiless, the elements align and he becomes pierced by the beauty of the world. No longer an observer, he is infused in the scene. A sensitive chaos of flowing forms crystallises and suggests the interconnectedness of all life, a pantheistic view of existence. He senses a greater force at work that humbles and realigns humanity. The picture is an illusory trace derived from that moment. Throughout all Hughes’ work, as in nature, light is the ultimate dematerialised marker of cosmic time. And a photograph can be a kind of deciphering device for connecting us to that place beyond regular chronology and perception: as its etymology reveals, it is literally a form of ‘writing with light’.

For Hughes, some of his series’ represent ‘a post apocalyptic allegory of nature’s renewal regardless of our folly’. The cosmos will ultimately be indifferent to mankind’s destruction of his environment. It will heal itself. For this reason, he chooses not to dwell on wearying negative depictions of destroyed landscape to make his point. Instead, he notes, ‘by engaging a more sensory response I aim to persuade of the virtues of preserving that which remains’. There is then, a sense of having made peace with inevitable destruction. And despite some scenes of turbulence, the images are imbued with a calming assignation, or instead generative vortices of form. Drawn from elements of actual everyday natural cycles, the works are the imaginings of such decline and renewals on a cosmic scale.

Hughes’ works resonate with many of the issues raised by artist and writer Suzi Gablik, especially in her book The Re-enchantment of Art (1991). She argues for a more meaningful art that breaks the legacy of detached modernism, orients towards a feminine ethos, embraces compassionate action, and is unashamed to speak of the soul. In a massively burgeoning era of materialism and non-sensate media communication, the artist is a vital organ of communicative sense perception. The artist that brings awareness to states of ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ must necessarily, if paradoxically, use items in the material world – be they photographs, tools of digital technology or musical instruments – to create signs that point to the ineffable. If there is some air of pretence detectable in this, it is because the words and signs used always fall short of the actual experience. All they can do, like making an indication on a map, is to draw a circle around the place where the true centre lies. Here we can agree with John Fowles, who in his polemic of nature writing, The Tree (1979) explained, ‘The very act of observation changes what is observed … the catch lies in trying to describe the observation.’

And here we must return to music, to a specific piece to which Hughes listens when back in the studio, editing the images he has gathered on his walks. Contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has become well known for his music described as sacred minimalism. His composition Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) was originally composed for piano and violin, and is a deceptively simple piece of around ten minutes’ duration. Rising triads are introduced gently and repeated, gathering force and fading again as the aching melody rises and falls. The work is symmetrical, a musical palindrome that reflects its title in its structure. Like Hughes’ photographs, 5 it implies a regenerating cycle and seems to oscillate between the figurative and the abstract. When we are hypnotically attuned to the music and give our full presence to its effect, the choreography of the notes, like the elements that make up Hughes’ images, seem to pause in a moment of grace. We are momentarily lifted, all of our restlessness and need forgotten, glimpsing an awareness of something vast and beyond description.

Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London