Week 13: Kate Kirkwood

The rotating gallery features the work of a young emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.

This week, Peter Eavis interviews fellow countrywoman Kate Kirkwood.

Peter Eavis: Kate, from your photos, I am pretty certain that you live on a farm in northern England. Maybe tell us what the part of England you live in is like, how you came to be there, on this farm, what you do each day, and how you fit photography into your routine.

Kate Kirkwood: I live on a hill farm in the Lake District in Northwest England. Hill farmers survive by raising hardy sheep, and some cattle, on fairly rough pasturage and open fells. I rent the farmhouse from the National Trust, and my neighbour farmers rent the land. So I have the pleasure of living on a farm, and sharing the life of it, without the responsibilities. I came to the Lake District with my family twenty years ago, completely by accident. Having moved to London from abroad, we were struggling to find somewhere to rent and a woman we’d met in Greenwich Park exercising her retired sheepdogs said, ‘Why don’t you rent my farmhouse in the Lake District?’ I didn’t even know where that was, then. We bundled our stuff and small baby into a borrowed VW van and just headed up here, in the middle of winter… and stayed, shuffling between a few places in the area before settling here. I pay the bills by working freelance for a few small book publishers. It is an uncertain kind of existence, though, being never sure when the work might not come, or when the tenancy might end. I take photographs in the between times, when I need a break from work or if I am out and about on an errand.
PE: You’ve put together one of the most impressive visual documents of rural scenes I think I’ve seen. Did you have any sort of photographic or visual arts training?

KK: Thank you for saying so. I feel like I am still at the start of this documentation, still learning how to do it. I have not had any formal photographic or art training, but have learnt from looking at the work of others, both those who have been acknowledged as groundbreaking- the greats- and also from the work of the many others who are learning, too, and who I have found through Flickr.
The encouragement and healthy criticism, which are fundamentals to that community, are really useful.

PE:  What do you shoot with? Why that particular camera?
KK: I began wanting to seriously learn to take photographs a couple of years ago, and bought a Fuji Finepix E900 after a friend recommended it; it’s a delightfully deft little camera which I still use when appropriate- I can strap it to me when I go for a run, for instance.
But now, thanks to the generosity of my fabulous brother, I have a Nikon D60, which I also chose on recommendation and from reading a few reviews of cameras in that price range. It is light and has enough little tricks for me. I still feel wonder for the magic of digital. I try hard to be interested in the gizmos and the rapid developments of photographic technology, but if I’m honest it is really the act of looking, the happiness of finding a moment, an image, by whatever means, that excites me most.

PE:  Beyond the beauty of what you see around you, why do you photograph?
KK: It really has been by looking through my camera in the past two years that I have discovered how beautiful it actually is, and also how painfully difficult nature and rural life can be sometimes but how these difficulties can offer a kind of beauty themselves- even if that beauty is simply an acknowledgement of the state of things, and how universal and recognizable most difficulties are.
I feel compelled by both the subjective and the broader ideological power of photographs.
Taking photographs has allowed me to feel I belong to this place; it makes me at least believe I might offer a truth about beauty or desire or difficulties from this experience.
I like the generosity in the call of ‘look!’ that a photograph utters. It still feels very novel and exciting for me. I also simply love unwinding by going out with my camera before or after a day of work. It is a wonderfully meditative, selfish practice; I love it.

PE:  I’ve always been intrigued by the expressionistic power of landscape paintings or photographs. Your landscapes trigger all sorts of emotions and reactions in me. Why do landscape renditions have that power, in your view?

KK: I’m so pleased you feel this response to some of my photographs. I find it very difficult because the genre is riddled with cliché. With the risk of offering another cliché here, I do believe that the hankering to return to the land, a very ancient hankering, still sits in people’s hearts.
It’s an idealism, it is a utopia which is the polar opposite of living to earn money; it is the place where, at last, an animal might look you in the eye, hold your gaze, make you an equal.
I like what John Berger says: ‘The human imagination … has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.’

PE:  I don’t know any living photographers who are good and whose primary focus is in rural scenes, can you recommend any?

KK: I am glad you asked about photographers of ‘rural scenes’ rather than ‘landscape’ as I find that photographs that reach towards the pristine utopia of landscape (and here I am thinking of the hundreds of images of the Lake District that form a special, boring genre of their own) uninteresting because despite being beautiful these images somehow don’t contain a grain from the photographer’s heart; there is no tenderness. Photographers who inspire me are those who recognize a certain fallibility, vulnerability, in our rural places, and position our relationship with nature more centrally than nature itself. They are not necessarily rural photographers but have scenes from rural life in their portfolios.
I like what Ed Van der Elsken does in this photograph: the whole expanse, rural Europe, the farmstead … it takes the eye a while to find the couple. It is a happy surprise.
I like Faye Godwin’s work – these two, for instance – but she died three or four years ago so perhaps shouldn’t be included here.

I also enjoy some of the work by Allessandra Sanguinetti, especially where she demonstrates an unflinching eye.

There are scenes from rural life in Josef Koudelka’s portfolio which I really like.

Joel Sternfeld is also an inspiration; I think anyone who sees his elephant photograph will never forget it.

I feel I should like Ansel Adams (sorry, yes I know he is not a living photographer but I thought I’d mention him because he is often exhibited, talked about); all that grandeur, scale, incredible beauty.

But it is only his images where something shifts the scale or accents it, something human or animal, that I really like. This photograph; it evokes an emotional response in me, there is something special about the tiny horse, grazing in a dash of light:

A British rural photographer whose work has been instructive is James Ravilious. But mostly when I think of the photographers I have fallen in love with they are not necessarily rural photographers at all. I look at and love all sorts of photography and I think lots can be learnt from being curious about all of it.

PE:  Do you wish you had more sunlight? Isn’t that the biggest drawback of being a British photographer- poor light?

KK: Often I can only get out in the early morning or in the evening and I’ve grown to really love the light of those in between times- not quite day, not quite night. I love the days of constantly changing weather and light which we have in the north of England; the oblique sun in midwinter; the surprise of shafts of light breaking through suddenly on a gloomy day, and sometimes the very wetness of the air produces wonderful effects. Even on the worst grey, lumpy day, when the sky is like a damp tarpaulin, hung low, things happen to colours.

PE:  What things make you satisfied with a photograph? Perhaps flag one or two of your own works that you think really work, and say why. I ask, because I always like to hear what people are aiming to achieve with their photos and then how they’ve gone about achieving it.
KK: My photograph called cowsinthelastcrackoflight (above) was exciting to catch. I went out to get some washing off the line and saw the distant crack of light on the horizon. I took my camera and as I wandered up the curve of the field, the shapes of the cows gradually came into view. I had not expected that and was glad I had kept walking even when I thought it was too dark to photograph anything. One or two rose to their feet, uncertain of what I was up to. And we just stood and looked at each other, and then a minute later the light was gone.

I was pleased to get fellroad, midwinter (above) too. It is on a road I frequently travel on, it is a wild open place and it always thrills me to go over it. The photograph needed very little in it to work. I think that’s what satisfied me about it. The murky, misty green light, the shape of the road and then by luck the headlights, suddenly.
Both the two previous photographs include something that could be described as Barthes’ good old trusty punctum, if that does not sound too pretentious; a punctuation mark, which was there only momentarily and hopefully jolts the spectator in some small way. I think nature/rural photographs need something like that to save them from being scenery.

I hope this might be true about the above photograph, too.; there was just a moment when the hare paused. It felt like a lucky, brief submersion into fairy tale, into mythology, this one-to-one encounter. And the colours and the shape of the road were a happy accident too.

PE:  Your series on cowspines has so much variety and quality, even though the basic subject is the same. Can you pass on tips on how to keep images fresh when shooting the same subject?

KK: Most of the cowspines were taken in the few fields on this farm, and the variation comes from the time of the day, the ever-changing weather, the different tones and characters of the cows of course, and also the way the landscape enfolds this place, becomes a backdrop to it. I’ve spent a lot of time amongst the cows and things shift all the time if you stop to watch. I learnt a sort of patience; never to stop looking. I think that’s important. And to keep snapping, even when a moment seems over.

PE:  How do keen amateurs develop their talent, if they don’t have editors or clients giving them dispassionate feedback on their work? Is that necessary to improve over time? Or is there more creative power in the freedom that comes from having photography chiefly as a hobby?

KK: I really believe it is a process of self-education. One cannot look at the photographs of acclaimed photographers too often, one can never take too many photographs. Who said that, Cartier Bresson perhaps? That you can only really start taking photographs once you have taken 10,000. Ha, I am notching them up slowly! I am not sure whether the constraints of a brief or the freedom of photographing as a hobby are most conducive to development because I’ve never done the former. Learning to make the most of a given situation when the work is commissioned must be a good discipline worth having.

PE:  Has photography changed the way you view the world? Has it changed you?

KK: Oh absolutely. For one thing I feel bedded in the world now, that I have a rapport with the tiny parts of it that pass me by in my daily life. It has taken a long time to feel a sense of belonging in an environment where the local culture is exclusive, private. I feel immensely excited by the possibilities which photography has opened up for me. Having a camera in my hand gives me a reason for being somewhere, and it allows me to be a witness rather than an actor. The possibilities also extend to a strong desire to one day go back into the world and do some good with my camera. In an odd way I would rather enjoy having a career the reverse of Don McCullin, who spent all those years as a photojournalist but in later life now photographs nature. In that field  Susan Meiselas  and others like her are inspirational.