I’ve had an interesting few days photographically, getting some new filters and discovering their limitations but finding some great stuff along the way.
I didn’t have to go far. Summer in Swanage brings out the lovers and a few new hearts have popped up. One beautiful example along the foreshore (where I discovered that adding too many macro filters results in a loss of focus!) and this example close to the cemetery. The temptation here was to photograph the heart and then turn around and photograph the cemetery, but the cemetery also happens to have the steam railway running past it and the engine workshop and some old wagons and things right alongside. Every time I’d walked by I’d seen the side of a rusting wagon and been drawn to a particular patch that had been roughly painted and damaged and painted again but I’d never photographed it. So this was the perfect opportunity.
In my head I was thinking of American abstract expressionism (the style of the painting, and the ‘railroad’ too) but at the same time of Howard Hodgkin, who I’ve always thought of as an abstract expressionist even though he isn’t. His pictures are always ‘of’ something, less about the act of painting or the inner self and more about the subject. Or so I’ve read. As an image the ‘landscape’ relates to the colour field paintings of people like Rothko and Clifford Stills too. Or so it seems.
If I were to print the ‘landscape’ side of this image on its own and to give it a title, I’d call it “The Cemetery” I think. Like all the best abstract work, there’s little in it relating to a cemetery but you can guarantee that if you look and think for long enough you’ll find something!
Taken here: where the green arrow is.
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