Foreword to ‘Nowhere Far’ by Brett Rogers

In an era when the speed of image production and circulation exceeds anything we have previously experienced, the opportunity to slow down, take time to reflect and meditate on our relationship to Nature is becoming a rare yet essential tool for survival. To pursue a practice focussed on man’s relationship to Nature is a hard-won task for a 21 st century photographer keen to avoid the obvious tropes of documenting environmental change or the deleterious impact of growing materialism.

Nicholas Hughes work may best be described by the term ‘slow photography’ to the extent that he prefers to use analogue film and heavy large-format cameras – which by necessity slow down both the activity of the photographer as well as the gaze of the viewer. The rewards are sensory as well as spiritual, providing the possibility to reengage with the experience of being in the landscape.

In turning not just towards Nature but equally to words and music, Nicholas Hughes has over the past 15 years consistently created series which whilst alluding the environmental destruction wreaking the planet, finds moments where the residue of the Sublime is still palpable. With many of the titles alluding to musical analogies, these works fall within a poetic/symbolist landscape tradition, which found its photographic origins in the turn-of-the century Pictorialist movement. Yet whilst one can appreciate the continuity of this particular approach in his work, Hughes embraces a modernist formal language informed by aspects of Minimalism, Abstraction and even gestalt theory.

Brett Rogers, Director
The Photographers’ Gallery (2017)

The Sound of Space Breathing 2015 - 2022

How do we set about repairing our dysfunctional relationship with Nature and fully waken to all that we are offered by return?

In the making of my work, I regularly crave isolation to reduce distraction and regain concentration levels, walking which plays a major role in my practice allows me the time to shed the everyday preoccupations that our increasingly frenetic world throws at us. The silence this can afford can be complimentary to Photography in many respects.

Rather than seeking out the worlds’ beauty through travel – I take considerable time to study my immediate surroundings, the aim being to seek out the beautiful in the immediate as an aspect of our responsibility to the present. The recent lockdowns perhaps offered this potential to many who wished to become better acquainted with their own locale.

We do not often take or have the time to just be, although we refer to ourselves as human beings, we are more often than not - engaged in the act of doing.

Nicholas Hughes
2022

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.

Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2017)

“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.

Jay Griffiths
2017

Aspects Of Cosmological Indifference

The visual reverie of dust particles rising through the projector beam of a darkened London theatre formed the genesis of this series, an observation of light and matter that offered a glimpse into the formation of the universe itself.

Whilst concern for the environment has become more of a mainstream preoccupation it remains to be seen if we have not already used up nature’s goodwill towards us. The slash and burn ecocide of previous generations suggests the future is unknown and the tipping point may already be passed. We fail to heed warning signs at the risk of great loss, yet nature offers a greater lifespan by virtue of the fact that it could eventually profit from our disappearance, as evidenced by the recent return of rare and endangered species as well as the emergence of its original forested state at Chernobyl, which remains uninhabitable by humans due to the nuclear reactor fire of 1986. Whilst we continue to rapidly evolve our resource dependent lifestyles, the Cosmos may well shrug its shoulders - completely indifferent to the mesmerizing mess we make of this planet.

Current trends within landscape photographic practice as evidenced by work included in the recent exhibition Landmark at Somerset House (2013) are in some ways akin to the forensic exploration of contaminated landmass without the condemnation, suggesting the photographer is not far removed in exploitative terms from the industrial polluter. I am left with aesthetic indigestion whilst others pay homage to the skills of non-committal observationists – who offer little resistance while Rome burns once again.

Published in ‘Photographies’ (Routledge), Nicholas Hughes (June 2013)

LANDSCAPE STORIES - Interview with Nicholas Hughes

1) What poetry or artist has influenced you the most? Where can the roots of your work be found?

It came mostly through words for me reading or listening to the likes of Seamus Heaney or Elvis Costello as well as Henry David Thoreau and Junichiro Tanizaki and their pronouncements on the virtues of quieter living. Visually Turner and Mondrian have played a part as has my free spirited friend and painter Raf Appleby, however the roots of my work were formed in the disaster of Chernobyl and the consequences of the aftermath for the mountainous regions of North Wales. My growing awareness of environmental issues and the threat posed to the natural world instilled in me a need to explore the consequences and make my own interpretations.

2) Are there any photographers or movements that have influenced or inspired you?

I engaged with the thinking of American photographer John Phal and his desire to approach truth in a more subtle manner – whereby rather than presenting straightforward scenes of destruction he chose to show the threat of for example Three Mile Island nuclear power plant bathed in glorious light.

3) How do your projects evolve from when you start shooting? How important is your preparatory work?

It is essential for me to let a sequence of images evolve from a location. This may be a consequence of a change in physical location but equally through development of the concept and constructing my mental response to an environment. It is part of the process to absorb a place over time and through seasons. Usually work made in earlier years is revisited and re-approached as a consequence of the knowledge gained. I have my existing concerns and through observation I search for entry points that cross my philosophical stance, through experiment I seek to evolve these into new representations. The manner in which I now work relies far less on a recording of existing light and shape and is a consequence of how I enforce certain appearances upon my subject matter. With a camera and darkroom this can possibly be a longer process than for example that of a painter.

Interview by Gianpaolo Arena (Italian/English)
July 2012

Interview with Die Nacht

The work of UK-based photographer, Nicholas Hughes concerns depiction of the spiritual within a contemporary context allied to environmental concerns. His growing interest in the perception of the mystical within photographic imagery produced his ‘Immaterial’ series upon completion of his MA studies at the London College of Communication in 2002. These works for the most part looked at curtain material in a very abstract and painterly manner under varying lighting conditions. These were followed by the series ‘Edge’ which depict snow and seascape captured in subtle monochromatic tones and his series ‘In Darkness Visible’ that presented a primordial urban forest in central London as well as the sea both captured in increasingly dark tones.

Hughes makes use of a large format camera and produces the resultant images as traditional C –types. His intention in making minimal, abstracted ‘landscape’- images is to engage the viewer and make them feel a part of the image. It is through contemplation or absorption into Hughes’ work that viewers are able to lose themselves and are driven toward a meditative state.

Hughes’ approach to a minimal style has given him a preference for still quieter imagery. Spirituality often considered the opposite of the material is prevalent in Hughes’ new body of work ‘Field’ presented here.

His work has received growing international attention through exhibit at the 5th International Photo Festival in Seoul 2005 and at ‘Earth’ The Houston twentieth Biennial Fotofest in 2006. He was shown at the Photographer’s Gallery London in 2007 and 2009 and has also been seen at the world’s major photographic art fairs in Los Angeles, New York and Paris. Most recently he was shown at the Victoria and Albert museum in London (2009-10) and his first solo exhibit in New York is at the Nailya Alexander Gallery from 6 th September 2010 – October 3oth 2010. His work is held in a variety of public and private photographic collections worldwide.

Interview with Franziska Spindler (German/English)
June 2010

DPI Interview

dpi: As a photographer, you express the scenes reflected in your eyes as well as in your mind. What’s the scene you would like the viewers to catch in your pictures?

Nicholas: There is a variation around a theme within my work – essentially I am searching for visual representation of the human relationship to nature. The majority of my landscape work purposely seeks to exclude any signs of our existence, preferring instead to concentrate on that which resides in the psyche. You could say that I wish to make an impression wider than the framed image itself - something that resonates with the viewer – Ideally work that will engage a level of contemplation - of silence. There is a level of ambiguity rather than too fixed a meaning.

dpi: In the collection of “In Darkness Visible” especially the Verse I, despite contrast between the dark and the misty light, your works still capture an incredible sense of stillness. Would you please talk about this series of works? What inspired you to do such a theme?

Nicholas: In reaction to media led sensory anaesthetisation, and worn by the inadequacy of late political rhetoric, my intention in Verse I was to construct a forest from accumulated memory and the ghosts of trees. The city park offers an escape valve – a window leading the weary city dweller to reconstructed, consumable nature. Having spent a period of two winters’ visiting a central London park this work inverts the decorative Arcadian layout in an attempt to restore a sense of the natural in this cultivated, somewhat synthetic city ‘wilderness’. Through these works my aim was to provide an emotive and atmospheric lament for that deeply ingrained aspect of the human psyche, our deeply held association with the primeval forest as spiritual home, which is lost, but may, in contemplating these visual idylls be exhumed. These works act as a plaintiff call for that which can be regenerated. During this period I was going through a good deal of change in my life in which stillness was hard to find. Resolving to spend endless days waiting in a familiar vantage point for moments of light to reflect this desire was a good way to settle my senses. In Verse II the framing of the camera helped to reduce the ‘noise’ of distraction whilst still portraying the swirling wild morass of life, indecision, strife, entrapment and the possibility of change. The observation of deep swirling chaos with shafts of enlightenment impresses one with a disarming sense of frailty. In the face of this awesome power we are left nurturing a tender hope for light within the ensuing darkness. One recognises the possibility of slowing down, and discovers the still small voice of calm that in the darkness may yet be visible.

Interview by DPI Magazine (Taiwan) Chinese/English
November 2009

In Darkness Visible for Next level (2008)

We live in times of mass consumerism and unashamed greed, all the while longing for a stolen moment of peace and contentment, the ancient routes to which are long since overgrown with tangled vines of instant gratification and acquisitive temptation. It is telling that in a world of overwhelming sensory possibilities, we find it is often only through exploration of the internal that we can seize a sense of calm, running away from our daily lives to more seductive and exotic locations, in unconscious search for a purity lacking in our everyday surroundings.

However, these escapes are fleeting. A holiday here, a discussion there, a quiet moment in a quiet place; escapes that may not necessarily result in perfection but offer a rare and welcome pause. For many, it is viewing art that serves as the closest form of meditation in modern life. The very idea of such metaphysical transcendence through art is deeply unfashionable, but it is a guilty pleasure that many share, a gift from the past, a whispered folk memory that we choose to conceal but would never dare to relinquish. It is in this realm of symbolic references and signifiers that art can seduce us with whispers, quiet yet affecting, revealing forgotten aspects of the secret language that surrounds us.

Nicolas Hughes’ photographs unashamedly nurture these neglected yet resilient qualities, transforming the symbolic elements within his imagery to emphasise the semiotic content, to be read consciously or unconsciously.

Laura Noble
2008

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.

Bill Kouwenhoven
©Hotshoe 2007

Of Old Time and Of New Eternity

Our passage through time and space and the flux created by this confluence, and what this might say about the human experience, has been one of the great preoccupations of artists since even before the days of Einstein. Running counterpoint to this, another perspective has seen our relationship to these concepts as being more static. Proust suggested that in theory we are aware of the turning of the Earth, but as the ground seems not to move in practice we do not perceive it, and so it is with the passage of time in our lives and our reception of it.

It is such a stillness that looms over and seeps through these distant landscapes. This is not the stillness innate to the photographic image, the inertia created by the capture of the singular event of a unique position at a unique time. Instead we perceive a pre-existing, elemental stillness that is inherent in the relationship between subject and author. It is as if the camera has not stopped time but been stopped by it, and has not limited space but is made to stand as a witness to its own limitations.

More conventional imaginings of the sublime are established upon the notion that the frenzy of nature at war shows us its power, its energy, its immensity. However perhaps in this immediacy nature loses that element of the eternal that is paramount to its being, that concept of vastness in both space and time.

By David low
(as published in Next Level June 2006)