Into The Unknown - by Bill Ward

I first came across ICM and Multiple Exposures many years ago back in 2011 via the photographer and educator Doug Chinnery. He was writing in a magazine (the excellent online landscape photography magazine “On Landscape”), and I instantly connected not just with what he wrote, but with what I saw. Like Doug, I'd started as an out and out landscaper and was fascinated with long exposures. That sense of movement, the ability to convey a feeling, a mood, with a camera was something that had always appealed to me. The power of possibility. Not simply just to “capture” something, but in the same moment to “create” or “make” something too. I instantly saw all that and more in Creative Photography. I've been practising it ever since.

Like many photographers, my photography has always been concerned with feeling, emotion, mood. But also, specifically, time. I've always been interested not just in the places I go, but more importantly the time that I spend in them. It's this that forms the basis of my work: specifically, how it felt to spend this particular time, with this particular place.

Even when I’m photographing alone, I tend to think of Photography very much as a collaborative experience: a collaboration between me and wherever I happen to be. It's a genuine attempt to go out and meet Planet Earth very much on its own terms and see where it takes us. I have a thing about trying to stay open – open to whatever materialises. Sometimes it can be just a long walk. That in itself is often enough - you don't have to come back with an sd card full of photographs to have had a fabulous day out. But often I'm just seeing what happens: having a look at what Mother Nature is offering on any particular day and responding accordingly.

What happens next depends on a bucketload of variables: weather, time of day, place, light, wind, direction, all sorts of things. One of these variables, though, is me: a combination of what I've emotionally brought with me, and how that happens to interact, on this particular day, with what's going on around me.

For me, this is where ICM/In Camera Multiple Exposures come in. Anything can trigger it: it could be my mood, something to do with the conditions, the subject matter, anything. It rewards so many things that I love: experimentation, perseverance, bravery, imagination. The ability to start with one thing and end up with another. The freedom to explore what comes up, as it comes up. The absolutely definitive lack of a “right answer”.

That sense of possibility with Creative Photography is for me unmatched by any of the other photographic disciplines. I love the organic nature of it - how it rewards trial and error, serendipity. I'll often start very simply, just gently moving the camera, and seeing what happens. Then try different movements, some smooth, some sudden, opposite directions, you name it. Sometimes I'll layer exposures – 2,3,4 sometimes more (always at the time, in camera for me – never after the fact). Whatever occurs to me at the time. Then bit by bit you start to see something emerge. It's often not what you were necessarily expecting at all. But if you're looking closely, and you're open enough, you'll see it. That “Eureka” moment when your imagination takes over, your senses seem to multiply, and you begin to head in whatever direction this particular idea takes you.

One final thought. Creative Photography has a huge number of strengths. But what I truly value it for above all others, is its ability to get to the “Essence” of a thing: a time, a place, a feeling. Its ability to take the documentary reality of whatever it is you happen to be interested in, and get beyond it, somehow, underneath it, or even inside it. To take the bare facts of an encounter, and distill them, almost rearrange them, into something purer, neater, more concentrated. I often say that what I really like about it is not its physical precision, but its emotional accuracy. How it often seems to be much clearer at summing up how a place “felt”, on this particular day, at this particular time, than any number of documentary photographs ever could.

This for me is its core territory: emotion, mood, essence. The tangible feeling that you get from a place, a moment, an experience, of being transported somewhere else entirely, that sense of “otherworldliness”, that is often so difficult to capture in a straight photograph.

As Douglas Adams once wrote via his fictional detective Dirk Gently in “The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be”.

* A version of this article first appeared in The ICM Photography Magazine.
www.icmphotomag.com