If it looks good it is good. I was told this by a former academic at a riverside meeting in a well-appointed fishing bothy by the river Tweed. I think he'd been a long time outside of academia because he'd obviously lost the capacity for independent thinking. What he was trying to tell me was that if a landscape looks good, for example one of the well manicured estates of say a very wealthy Borders landowner, then all is well with the management of farm and land. Which of course is utter nonsense and merely serves to embed specific types and patterns of land management into the social consciousness. All of which brings me to a new photographic project.

After several years of hard work, research and experimentation, I found my way gradually into an emerging photographic practice which I think I can sustain and develop with some value in the outcomes. That's as far as it goes for now.  More than five years research and a good intention at the end of it. Obviously I don't live in the fast lane when it comes to creative work. Furthermore I don't have the time or the inclination to jump around more than absolutely necessary. With music, which I consider to be my established practice, I spent and wasted a lot of time poking my nose into corners that were best left unpoked.

If we want to put things into boxes I've been working photographically with still life and landscape, both of which carry the potential for complex understandings of ourselves, our deep history and our attitude to the natural environment. Let's leave still life aside because I still have some work to do there. With landscape I had very quickly rejected the idea of making a one-off fantastic competition winning shot (not that I ever seemed able to produce such a thing) and instead delved into a research-based approach to establishing different series of images, made and remade over reasonably long periods. Something verging on the long-term and large-scale, which is how I work with music. I gradually folded this down into a radius of a few miles from where I live simply because this is the most accessible landscape I can find. And a rich seam it has proved to be.

I'm always looking at the work of other photographers, far more so than I do with other musicians. Robert Adams had a substantial impact when I was quite young as did the work of several English landscape photographers, both historical and contemporary. But it was the work of the English landscape photographer Jem Southam who paved the way to an understanding of how I might proceed. Southam works in terms of decades, visiting and revisiting his chosen sites in and around a part of South Devon where he lives, refining his vision and understanding of place. At first I thought his pictures were very good, of course, but then the penny dropped and I began to see the layers of meaning - cultural, poetic, social, historical and so forth, all wrapped up in photographs that are unspectacular from one perspective but undeniably brilliant from another. Pictures which accrue interest the more you look at them and read or listen to his ideas.

I'm currently foraging around the length of the Jed Water, the small river that flows through Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. I recently followed it upstream to its source and discovered a massive tree felling operation in the forest around the upper reaches of the river, just short of the border uplands at Carter Bar. These ugly sitka spruce matchsticks, underneath which nothing grows, are simply a commodity. The forest, the Dykeraw plantation, is owned by Tillhill Forestry. Some of the documentation on the forest and its management are edifying, especially when they talk about environmental impact. Sitka is ugly when it grows and even uglier when the plantations are clear-felled to leave a scene that resembles a Paul Nash painting of the aftermath of trench warfare. Absolutely no redeeming features. Whatever happened to 'if it looks good it is good'? On entering Scotland from the A68 you see huge tracts of land torn out of the hillsides. Public amenity destroyed for some kind of profit, perhaps subsidised by the public purse (though correct me if I'm wrong). My vision for Borders forestry is based around a 100 year plan by the way but that's for another time. 

Nonetheless this is what I have to work with. An intriguing gentle river that starts its journey near the border then courses through the felled forests, gaining some small majesty along its course through wide plains and tight valleys, flanked at times by eroding sandstone scars (including James Hutton's Unconformity no less, just five hundred metres from my house), till it bends around Jedburgh Abbey, past two rugby grounds, finding its way at last into the Teviot and from there to the Tweed and the sea. There's an enormously complex bundle of human and natural history in there. I've had it on my doorstep for two decades and regret that I'm only now beginning to see it as a relevant photographic project.

I recently published Jericho as a digital download and before that I wrote three short articles on recorded sound and sympathetic magic.  I'm currently at the R&D phase of a new project for radio called Contagion. This will combine my interests in electroacoustic composition and photography, taking account of the ideas developed across the three Marcel Mauss articles in the form of spoken word layered with different sounds. 

The pandemic has forced many of us to dig deep in our respective practices. Some good work in different media is emerging from engagements with the domestic and other immediate environments. In Contagion I want to look at and listen to those objects in the domestic and personal environment which carry sympathetic resonance of the kind discussed in my articles on Mauss and magic. Listening will involve activating and energising objects of interest, paying attention to interior and exterior spaces and using recording technologies to reveal sounds beyond the everyday experience. This will be followed by a deep consideration of the musical potential of such sounds though this won't be a musical composition as such. Looking will require taking stock of the hundreds of possessions accumulated over years that we insist on hoarding for sentimental or even irrational reasons, then figuring out how to represent these as photographs, whether as still lifes or as elements in a documentary investigation. An (anarchic?) archive.
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Even if I am experimenting I like to work methodically so I decided quite early on to categorise my still life experiments into three areas of activity: colour, form or assemblage, ie the shapes and composition of the objects and how to work with the table or tables in my studio. I could add light to those three but I have a good diffused natural side light and haven't yet taken to artificial lighting slight remains as constant as natural light can be. In fact the whole business of getting the table right - the angle, height of shot, colour of cloth, backdrop, is perhaps the most problematic of all and I still haven't found all the solutions. I do often wonder how other still life photographers solve these matters.

​Here we have three corner shots, all jpegs straight from the camera (these are test shots after all) with slightly different arrangements of four simple elements. For me the most successful is the first shot. The apple distracts the eye and the angles are too obvious. The second shot uses a wider aperture which throws the apple slightly out of focus and I think this enhanced depth of field pulls the eye around the image more effectively. The light however has changed in number three, for the better I think,  and this is one of the most interesting aspects of working with natural light, the changes between shots and a measure of unpredictability which perhaps goes against the grain in a studio setting. But it teaches me to look ever more closely which I believe is one of the cornerstones of becoming a better photographer.