Photographs From the End of the Road
There’s a growing tendency for landscape photographers to gravitate to the same handful of iconic locations and views. Whilst there’s good reason for this, there is an alternative that offers a different perspective, a chance for exploration and discovery, and to take the path less trodden.
On a recent trip to Scotland’s West Coast we fell into our normal habit of exploring off-beat, dead-end roads, roads ended by sea or loch, by estuary or glen, or simply ended. When roadway turned to track, or path, or waterway, we continued until time, or weather, or the call for the ferry, or reaching an edge, turned us back.
These places, on the fringes and margins, have their own magic. Half the pleasure is the uncertainty of what you’ll find: an abandoned croft, a farmhouse, a small settlement, an old phone box, a deserted beach, a forgotten slipway, or perhaps simply nothing. What you’re unlikely to find are crowds, influencers and selfie sticks.
On our travels over the years we’ve naturally gravitated more and more to these places, until it’s become our default mode. Studying the map for roads that lead nowhere; making a turn when we see a sign to a place we don’t know; chancing a path until it fades to nothing.
… and when we return from our journeys it’s the photographs of these places that resonate, rather than of the iconic scenes that might be just around the corner.
What you find and record might not win you Landscape Photographer of the Year, or even you local camera club competition, and they may lack the visual impact of the images that typically adorn the front covers of photography magazines …
… but what they lack in drama and intensity they gain by seeming more real, more original and more representative. They convey a greater sense of place and capturing a sense of place is, for me at least, the essence of landscape photography.
