Rooks
Crows have been part of the landscape from my earliest memories. Wheeling, stumbling, soaring, or just unmistakable silhouettes glimpsed through tangles of branch and leaf. Corvids have been there, a brazen, unallied fellow traveler with man from the earliest of days. Smarter than the wolf, preferring a more profitable and one sided arrangement than their earth bound counterpart.
I put off photographing them. There was always another book, another exhibition, other photographs that seemed to do what I wanted to say. This work is no longer made in the naïve belief of originality, but with a clear acknowledgement to one of those works: a homage to Fukase’s Ravens, with a passing nod to Graeme Hare and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
These Rook images (communal rather than solitary birds…) were shot on fast 35mm film stock from 2011 to 2016, in and around Swanage, North Dorset and Dartmoor, usually as dusk brought them to their roosts. Negatives were scanned and tiny detail enlarged to present the obvious grain structure as a deliberate component of the image.