Doug Chinnery Photographic Expressionism, Writing & Printing
There is a particular quality of light that arrives on Uist in the late afternoon of a clear day in autumn — low, slanting, the colour of weak whisky — that lasts perhaps eleven minutes before it shifts again. If you are inside the house when it comes, you miss it. If you are outside ... Read more The post On Noticing first appeared on Doug Chinnery Photography .
It is the fourth of July, and I could be forgiven for thinking it was the fourth of March. The rain is coming in sideways across the machair, the wind is up, and the Atlantic is doing that low grumbling thing it does when it wants you to know it is still in charge. Eddie ... Read more The post Companions in the Studio first appeared on Doug Chinnery Photography .
There is a folder on my hard drive that I have never shown anyone. It is called, plainly, the bin. Inside it are several hundred photographs that did not, in the end, become anything. Some are nearly good. Many are beyond embarrassing. A few are pictures I was, for a season, quite sure of. They have ... Read more The post Failure, False Starts and the Bin first appeared on Doug Chinnery…
There is a particular silence that falls over a studio when the work has stopped flowing. It is not the comfortable quiet of an afternoon s concentration, the small companionable hush of brushes drying or a print easing out of the printer tray. It is something heavier. The room holds its breath. The camera sits on ... Read more The post The Fallow Time first appeared on Doug Chinnery Photography .
This morning I walked Eddie along the lane near the cottage in a thin, persistent mizzle. May, apparently. The Scots have a wonderful word for such days. 'Driech'. North Uist had other ideas. The island had put on its November face: low cloud, wet grass, a pewter sky pressed down over the crofts, the road blackened by rain, the lochans half-erased, the distance withdrawn into itself. Somewhere…
The cattle grid at the end of the track had been iced over for three days. I had walked past it each morning with Eddie, who paid it no attention because his paws do not slip the way mine do, and each morning I had glanced at the field beyond it and kept moving. Flat ... Read more The post Living With Not-Knowing first appeared on Doug Chinnery Photography .
There is a small loch about ten minutes from the house. Nothing remarkable about it. A scoop of fresh water held in a saucer of peat and stone, ringed by a few wind-shaped willows and one stubborn rowan that ought, by rights, to have given up years ago. I have walked past it so many ... Read more The post What a Photograph Forgets first appeared on Doug Chinnery Photography .
Ever since the earliest days of photography, this new method of creative expression has sat uneasily in the art world. Many steeped in the more traditional techniques of painting, drawing, sculpture, along with a large proportion of gallery owner’s, collectors, critics and museum curators have viewed it as a somehow less worthy art form. Perhaps ... Read more The post What is Photographic…
Grainy sand damp crackling in seafire A sentinel shore chalkscrawled on lemon farls The slabbed tangle of shattered glass Unsought by flyblown faces of the gone Nearer the edge of wild air, of brightness here Sinking ever as blue dusk abandoned this night The flood flow from road to eely grike A tide, moondrawn, lay ... Read more The post Under a Moondrawn Tide first appeared on Doug Chinnery…
Ink Stained and tangled seaweed Smouldering in seafire Broken on sentinel shore Halting hightide out in rushing rhythms Cottage smoke whispwrithes into a silverblack, lightless night Wild edge and wild air whip and froth Under a creeping moons midwatch And yet to go still against the cold pull There to weave and unweave shadowshoals And ... Read more The post The Haul Home first appeared on Doug…
