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Mark Littlejohn
Mark Littlejohn is an outdoor photographer who lives on the edge of a beach in the desolate wastelands of the Highlands of Scotland. He takes photographs of anything unlucky enough to pass in front of his camera.
I remember back in 2019, talking to someone about the last few years that I’d spent working on the Ullswater Steamers. They asked me what I thought of it after spending so many years as a Detective. I replied that “After 30 years in the police, 26 years of which was as a detective and the last ten years of those tracking down paedophiles, I didn’t dislike people so much until I started working in tourism”, which might have been stretching the truth slightly, but only slightly.
Why is that? It's not that I’ve mellowed. Because I don’t think I have. Is it because landscape photographers tend to be cut from the same cloth? I have fond memories of the On Landscape “Meeting of Minds” conferences at Rheged. Swathes of like like-minded people who got on with each other. Smiling and laughing at the same things. We mostly had the same politics as well. If I’m allowed to mention politics here. So what quality is it that we share, apart from our good looks and lovely personalities. Empathy for the world around us would be my guess. I’ve always thought that if you feel no emotion for your subject, then no one looking at your images is going to feel any emotion.
The landscape that we love to photograph is a living thing. But in order to fully see its beauty we have to empathise with it. To care about it and all its little foibles. I started into landscape photography because of a new found love of the landscape. The photography was secondary. I just wanted to capture all that beauty that previously only existed in my head.
It matters not a jot if your photography is representational or more creative, whether you take big pictures or little pictures. It doesn’t matter how we capture that love. The equipment we use is superfluous. It's what’s inside us that counts.That care we feel for whatever it is that’s in front of the camera and how our individuality interprets it. Which in turn leads to the variety of images you see out on a daily basis via social media, websites, magazines etc.
But I’m not going to guess who will make the best photograph. I’ve been out with carpenters and merchant bankers. And they’ve all shared that same love, that shared empathy, for each other and for their surroundings. Exactly the sort of people to restore your faith in humanity after several years of going in the opposite direction.
