A Stranger Comes To Town

Mike Chisholm

Mike was born in 1954 in Stevenage, a New Town 30 miles north of London. For thirty years he worked in the higher education sector as a librarian (Bristol and Southampton universities) but now concentrates on photographic and writing projects. In recent years he has exhibited his photographs and book works internationally in several solo and group shows. England and Nowhere book.

mike-chisholm-photo.squarespace.com

Postcard from Powys: Llynheilyn Lake, March 2016

Someone, it may have been Tolstoy, once claimed that there are really only two stories: "A Person Goes On A Journey", and "A Stranger Comes To Town". This was obviously intended to be provocative, but there is a debatable truth in there, and it strikes me that a similarly reductive provocation might be applied to landscape photography.

A couple of years ago I had an exhibition in Innsbruck, Austria, and on the back of it was invited to do a ten-day residency in the city. I was hardly going to say no, but I did have some serious misgivings. I had last visited Innsbruck as a teenager, hitchhiking in Europe in summer 1972. Forty-two years is a long time between visits, and although mountains are not much subject to change, cities and their inhabitants most certainly are. Not to worry, my host said, we want to see what we look like through your eyes. A stranger comes to town...