End Frame – “Poverty Flats” by David Ward

Paul Arthur

Paul is a commercial architectural photographer in Birmingham and sometimes dabbles in a little landscape photography when he is allowed out!

Like anyone asked to pick an End Frame, I feel a little intimidated by the prospect. How do you pick your favourite ever image? I don’t know that I could do that. The problem is that if I chose a favourite image now, it may well not be my favourite tomorrow, and almost certainly wouldn’t be my favourite in a year.

What is more interesting is to find the image that has taught me the most over my photographic career. As my day job is as an architectural photographer, I had a list of architectural images that I considered, such as one of the images of the TWA Terminal at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) by Ezra Stoller, something contemporary like this by Iwan Baan, or frankly any number of masterpieces by Julius Schulman. But although these images have taught me crucial things about composition and exposure in architectural photography, the images themselves are essentially all about the subject. The success of an image is almost entirely dependent on the building, and although if you are able to analyse it critically, you can learn specific lessons in problem-solving related to architectural photography, I haven’t come across an architectural image that has actually changed the way I see the world.

Given that you are reading this in a magazine specifically orientated towards landscape photography, you will probably breathe a sigh of relief when I say that the image that I feel has made me really see things differently is a landscape one.

As a regular contributor to On Landscape, it’s possible that David Ward may read this article, and so I hope he forgives me for talking about one of his images, and I want to assure you that I have chosen it for good reasons, and not because I am a sycophant.