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Subcribe to comment rss feedJoe Rainbow talks about one of his favourite images
Joe Rainbow
Joe is a Secondary School Art teacher living and working in Cornwall, his home county. He uses both film and digital cameras to capture the less obvious aspects of his local environment. Recently he has been interested in presenting work as hand made books, and offers landscape photography workshops to individuals and small groups. The rich variety of local coastal areas and their unusual geology have provided him with the most inspiration for his work.
All endframe articles start in the same way, well, nearly all. Everyone tends to realise it is a ridiculously hard thing to do, plucking one image from the endless cloud of inspiration. There will be other 'better', 'greater' and more significant photographs produced, but to me this is the one that I can't escape from.
I realised that in choosing one image, it needed to have more than a superficial appeal. It needed to be intellectually as well as visually stimulating. It needed to represent a philosophical standpoint in photography for me. Peter Dombrovskis is a favourite landscape photographer for many people, and I think this is not only due to his photographs. His commitment to his work, and his belief in the value of what he was photographing permeate his images. His photography literally made a difference, and I have a tremendous respect for someone able to change his environment for the better through the medium.
I set about choosing an image by simply closing my eyes and seeing what images came to mind. I immediately thought of this one and another of Peters of the rainforest. Other images came and went, and I realised of all the multitude of pictures I have seen, only a few seems to stick in the mind. I don't know of a photograph quite like it, and that probably made it lodge somewhere in the dark and most would say dim recesses of my mind. I then sat and waded through my expanding library of photography books to see if I could better it. Christopher Burkett, Joe Cornish, Hans Strand, Fay Godwin, Shinzo Maeda, Michael Kenna, John Blakemore, Elliot Porter and many more came and went. I couldn't find an image despite their great appeal that made me feel quite so deeply. It is interesting that images on social media are not nearly so accessible as the ones in books.