Source
Summer 2007

Clive Landen stopped being a ‘socially concerned’ editorial photographer when he moved out of the city and says, ‘I always thought of landscape as a bit easy’. He explains how he discovered this wasn’t the case in describing the challenges of photographing roadkill for his work Familiar British Wildlife and then getting access to the burning and burial sites of the foot and mouth epidemic for his work The Abyss which is featured here.

A stage in the development of Landen’s approach was the idea of photographing vertically downwards with no horizon visible. Eugenie Shinkle describes how this point of view would not be found in contemporary computer game design which, unlike recent photography, is still indebted to a classical tradition of landscape picture making. By comparing landscape photography with the structure of gamescapes she explains the underlying principles of both traditions.

Colin Graham discusses Ciaránóg Arnold’s photographs of men living in and around Ballinasloe, who are ‘down and out’. The work attempts to move outside the conventions of documentary accounts of the dispossessed and Graham finds a hint of the sublime residing in these scenes. He goes onto consider how for Arnold the view ‘from below’ might rekindle a sense of place and bring about a clarity of vision.

Jamie McGillivray’s favourite book as a child was Little Tommy Nobody, a story about a young bird who falls from his nest and lands in the garden below. He then explores this exotic landscape that he has only glimpsed from afar, meeting other birds along the way. His adventure is a quest for his own identity. McGillivray takes this innocent parable as an analogy for his approach to photography as a method for understanding his place in the world.

Source is a quarterly photography magazine, available in print and as a digital edition, published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. They publish emerging photographic work and engage with the latest in contemporary photography through news, thoughtful features and reviews of the latest exhibitions and books from Ireland and the UK. Their website brings together an archive of writing and pictures from the magazine alongside current features.¹