I was surprised to find that we hadn’t featured Graham Cook in our magazine before now as he’s consistently surprised me at the way he can manage to photograph his environment and produce images of astonishing beauty and abstraction. The work isn’t essentially landscape photography (although much of it has been photographed in the landscape) but in my personal lexicon, the representation of decay and by product of the human world still has some relevance; after all if Burtynsky’s and Minor White’s abstractions are still referenced as landscape, why shouldn’t Graham’s abstraction of a washing up bowl be any less blessed?

The representation of the abandoned parts of the human world have always attracted landscape photographers. Who hasn’t been enamoured of a dilapidated old croft house or a lichen covered stone wall? And in many ways, especially in Britain, the supposedly wild landscape itself has been so influenced by the hand of man that if we were to limit landscape photography to truly wild places, the majority of our iconic landscape photographs would have to be rejected.

A colleague was asking on Facebook recently about whether they were limiting themselves by only photographing the landscape. The general consensus from some very erudite respondents (there are a few on Facebook) was that there is no need to use the definition of landscape as a constraint, merely use it as a very loose description of a part of what we do. The only real uses for a word such as “landscape” is when defining competitions or magazines. i.e. it’s descriptive not restrictive. Leave arguments about what is and isn’t landscape to magazine editors ;-)

Click here to download issue 177 (high quality, 140Mb)

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