“This subtle light” by Jay Griffiths

I can hear these photographs. Utterly non-human. Non-orchestral. Gasps and summingness, the sound of space breathing, the music of all that is. Water is given voice; clouds are portrayed speaking unearthly for themselves; trees sound wholly telluric and leaf-stems speak like consonants in the vowels of the air.

In this desire to give voice to the natural world, Hughes’ work follows in the Romantic tradition. Romanticism also leaves its signature in his trust in intuition and his awed vision of space, a yearning for wildness and the contemporary sublime. But there are acute differences. Romanticism portrayed nature with fierce vitality, stupendous, vivid and green, and set human nature alongside it in passionate integrity. In Hughes’ work, the tonal difference is absolute. The human voice is not here. Humans are silent. As absent as if they had never been. Future fact. His work may choose a scale too large or too small (the subliminal speck or the gaping sky) for the human scale and it may select time scales too fast or slow for the pace of the human footstep.

Part of Hughes’ working practice has been a deliberate restriction of distance so that he only photographs what he can find within walking distance of his home. This is partly an ethical wish to limit the environmental impact of his footprint, and partly, it seems, because the tension of restriction can be highly creative. Such concentrated locality lessens the sense of the photographer as observer and extends the feeling of the photographer as dweller. It also tightens the focus (in both a photographic sense and in attentiveness) and it concentrates the field of his vision, as his series ‘Field’ punningly attests.

In Hughes’ hands, the camera longs for wilderness as an elemental hunger and, finding it hedged in on land, seeks it instead in sea and sky, the as-yet-unfenced spaces, enormous in size. But there is wildness at the opposite end of the scale, too, the dust particle world, the micro-wild.

Hughes is absorbed by photographing the things which leave the lightest footprint, barely a tracery of touch in the light. He captures the thinnest lattice of grey twigs in mist, or picks out a thin rill of silver light in the current of a river, finding in the touch of wind on the waves a record of slightest light.

‘Aspects of Cosmological Indifference’ took its genesis in watching dust particles in a light projector’s beam, in a dark London theatre, and the series grew into a metaphysical reverie, a bruised fascination with dust at the formation of the universe and dust at the end of life, and particles from the smallest places to the largest levels - in the colours of sunset and sunrise or constellations of stars swept across the sky. He used dust as a tiny portal, a way in to something of enormous meaning - treating it as the ‘ephemeral patina of our existence’ says Hughes.

In the fineness of his work, Hughes focuses down to the elements. The air, in ‘Field’ has the grandeur of what is everlasting, the air’s midnight blue, in ‘In Darkness Visible’, is audible, a ringing blue. In ‘Edge’ the air itself is photographed, made visible by the wind on the waters, like a vast breath. When he photographs water in ‘The Relentless Melt’, it sings as bright and sharp as starlight. The earth speaks in mysterious stories in ‘Aspects of Cosmological Indifference’ and he captures fire directly in the deep turbulence of orange sunset, and indirectly in the very photons which he records like a diligent secretary of light. He renders each element of value. A sun. A pool. A thread of cloud. Equal. The eye which beholds everything as both selved and essential will make no hierarchy - it is a stern kindness to see nothing in nature unbeautiful or undeserving; every tiny part and particle matters and anything can be beautiful. This is where ecology and aesthetics and ethics meet: everywhere there is something worth the looking. As all is photon-worthy in deserving the light of the sun, all is photo-worthy.

In its politics as in its aesthetics, this is the polar opposite of the endless tawdry sameness of celebrity culture, one human face endlessly repeated under different names, and all endlessly outshouting all other forms of the natural world, denying their right to be heard and to be given acknowledgement and attention.

Hughes speaks of modernity’s obsession with material gains and consequent damage to the natural world and he writes with a bleak accuracy: ‘Whilst we continue to rapidly evolve our resource-dependent lifestyles, the Cosmos shrugs its shoulders, completely indifferent to the mesmerising mess we make of this planet.’ His work stands as a refutation of the great deceit of modernity: that we can live and move and have our being apart from nature. The loss will be ours.

Nature is: humanity might be, his work suggests. It is sombre, uneasy work, bleached of human colour, showing a world without (or after) humans - a world we have wasted, and out of which we have exiled ourselves.

His work makes me sad. In my bones. Grieved. Bereaved of cherished human things, of home and huckleberry and honey. It leaves me missing, longing, yearning. Yet it speaks simply of a possible and ascetic truth, that this will all remain when there is no human eye to view it. And this truth matters so much more than sadness. Further, this willingness to speak truth to humanity’s power over the natural world could - notionally - avert the devastation it describes.

We are ghosting ourselves. Looking at the empty spaces, the lives we will have ceased to live. This politics has a whispered narrative: that if we humans collectively had honoured the wisdom of an ecocratic vision which accepts every thing’s right to thrive, and had we not thrust our grandeur so rudely at the world, we might never have had to envisage that world without us.

Hughes seems to reach a vision of humanity’s self-exile in parallel to his own experience, for the strict limits of his working practice create a self-imposed exile, one where he is, however, at greater liberty in his mind, agreeing with Svetlana Alpers writing in ‘Modern Painters’: ‘Artists often need to be withdrawn from the world for the purpose of attending better to it.

’His attention is drawn by the penumbra, the edge, the uncertainties and modalities, all that glimmers and suggests, the opposite of flat declarative rhetoric. His work is a meditation on what is subtle, in its etymology: what is sub (under) the tela (the net or warp of a fabric) so what is subtle is the finest thread - delicate and finely woven. In ‘Edge’ he makes the sea look like fabric, and creates a snowfield so subtly inflected it is almost pure whiteness.

His work seeks the subtleties of paradox: the stillness in the heart of motion which offers a meditative calm and a sense of the sublime - a galaxy’s spiral self-entire, as perfect and nothing-needing as a drop of water. Fast time meets slow time, in ancient light on right- now water. Hughes’ photography is a meditation on the implacable vastness of time and space, the billion-year stars, the endless cycles of time in the oceans whose tides and currents ceaselessly fill and empty the shores; our sun rising and setting into eternity. That time’s patterns are within the rhythm of nature is, to him, the ‘reassurance’ of what Susan Sontag called the ‘relentless melt’. His work seeks the moment in the fleet light of camera images, the blink of the shutter, capturing leaf-reflections in a river, accented with exquisite exactness in their dialogue with the wind at that precise second. Humans too, he says are ‘no more than fleeting passages of time. Universally we swarm and are gone.’ Yet, in keeping with the idea of epiphany in spiritual traditions, he sees the moment and only the moment as the gateway to the eternal. By analogy, the particle and only the particle is the gateway to infinity in space. In this spiritual vision of transcendence, humanity’s place in nature is given what Hughes calls ‘a sonic reassurance’; as if there is redemption by recognising our place in the natural world, combining a physical and metaphysical insight which he perceives in the moments when, as he says, ‘I can feel the music.’ He is photographing harmony.

Life and death in their tidal reminder repeat that everything is both transitory and part of a wider rhythm, and the photographer’s aim, he says, is ‘to reach beyond the everyday as though piercing the skin to another world.’ It is the unegotistical sublime. Losing oneself in what Hughes calls ‘the point of slippage’ and gaining a world of beauty at any - and every - moment. This is the paradox of transcendence, that the eternal is found in moments of constant evanescence; and that the ethereal is found in the real, when the quint-essence, the fifth element of ether, is added to the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.

It is as if his aim is to photograph the very breath of a god he doesn’t need to believe in, and the viewfinder is ceaselessly looking sub specie aeternitatis, under the eye of eternity, when everything is new under the gaze of the sun.

Jay Griffiths
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