…the moment there is something to say, there becomes a way to say it.

Ralph Gibson

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A very warm welcome to Faite De Tons, the site for selected images from my personal photographic portfolio. I have been a serious and serial photographer since I was lucky enough to be given a Canon AE1 for my eighteenth birthday. Now, more than thirty years on I am still taking photographs whenever I can find the time. Most of the images you will see here have been taken within the last five years or so. They represent some emerging interests alongside long-term themes such as my particular approach to landscape photography. My photographic work both informs and enhances my work life as I manage a busy university department that has amongst its courses degrees in Photography and in Graphics. Spin-offs from this career have included the opportunity to illustrate numerous books and magazine articles, curate photographic exhibitions and give talks on photography to national and international audiences. As a complement to these activities I am an Associate and active member of the Royal Photographic Society and a member of their Documentary and Visual Journalism group…

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In my portfolio you will find a wide and sometimes contrasting range of images. What links many of them is the approach to tonality and focus as a way of achieving emphasis in the images that I produce. I have never been much of a believer in the idea of the photographic image as a mirror to reality. Instead I am happy to crop my images, to reduce them to black and white and to tone them in order to help transmit the meaning and the value I find in them. Furthermore, I use soft focus in many of my images as a means of introducing an element of the dreamlike, even the Uncanny in the Freudian sense. Other than the personal sense of enjoyment that I get from taking these images, a sense that I hope to pass on to others who view them, I have a wish that my photography will make the viewer look twice, helping them think anew about the world around them…

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Please do take some time to look around my site. You will find links here for my other sites, the Faite de Tons blog and Focalpoint Daily, the busy and successful links site for photographers that I have run since 2009 as well as opportunities to purchase limited edition prints of selected images.

Many thanks!

Graham McLaren.

The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in finding new eyes

Marcel Proust

Sticks and Stones

I try to use photography to draw attention to the aesthetic interest and significance that can be found in the marks we leave upon the landscape. I am fascinated by the small, seemingly banal elements of these interactions. Images are taken during long walks in the British countryside, the concern with detail meaning that they rarely contain sweeping vistas or large expanses of sky. The objects of my interest are removed from the realm of the ordinary and the everyday, and the viewer is asked to look at them anew, by the use of careful composition and soft-focus in black and white prints. The dreamlike, even eerie quality that results is intended to signal their importance to me, and to act as an invitation to others to share the beauty I’ve found within them.

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

Albert Schweitzer

Arbres

I enjoy taking images of trees, not because they are beautiful or easy to take but because they are beautiful and hard to take. Trees hide immensely complex detail within deceptively simple forms. They are all the more difficult and all the more alluring for the constant changes that they undergo due to their growing cycle and their responses to environmental change. One of the biggest challenges of all is that they tend to like to live in groups. The character and beauty of the individual can therefore all too easily be lost in the homogeneity of the many. The trials and triumphs of overcoming these obstacles whilst avoiding what Mitch Epstein has described as ‘the pitfalls of the picturesque’ is documented in this series.

The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street

Robert Doisneau

On the Street

I find that photographing the people and things that I see on the street excites, fascinates and challenges me in almost equal measure. It is an area of photography that I would like to get much more involved in whilst feeling that I still have much to learn. Although photographing the things on the street (including birds and animals) that catch the eye seems simple enough, it is the approach to capturing images of people that is most tricky for me. Like many I suppose, I am caught between a natural wariness of approaching too close, of being ‘in their face’ to an offensive degree. Staying back and using a telephoto lens doesn’t seem too much of an answer either. This only results, I think, in a rather divorced quality to the photos as well as leaving me with the guilty feeling of having ‘Papped’ someone without their knowledge. I remain in awe of those who manage this tricky balance sufficiently to capture images that, more than almost any other category of photography, have the ability to linger on in our memories.

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk. He trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes

William Shakespeare

Badders

This series is from a day trip to Badminton Horse Trials in April 2011. ‘Badders’, as it is affectionately known amongst aficinionados, takes place each year a few miles from where I live. From my brief experience of it I’d say that it is something of a photographer’s paradise, as apart from the promise of capturing the power, beauty and grandeur of the horses themselves there are plenty of opportunities to photograph the bit-part players. These include everybody from the fee-paying public and their various animal friends, a huge number of traders of all types to the small army of volunteers, mounted and unmounted needed to run the thing. Badminton can thus allow you to test yourself at action, animal, portrait and candid photography. It is also a very colourful event, but in this series I have chosen to present the images as a delicately tinted black and white series. This is used as a means of isolating the key themes within the prints and (I hope) helping to bring forth some of the urgency, action and even danger latent within the day’s sporting action.

The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how-to-do’. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.

Edward Weston

Work in Progress

This is the area where I’d like to signal some of the approaches that I am taking to new photographic ideas, subjects and materials. Whilst these are not quite ‘ready’ to be regarded as being a coherent body of work yet, they are examples of where my future interests and ambitions in photography lie. Some of these images will feature in my forthcoming book Sticks and Stones, whilst others reflect a wish to expand my work into the photography of people and to be more active and adventurous with still life subject matter. I also want to re-visit some of my analogue travel photography in digital form in the future. Finally, hinted at here is some experimental work in HDR photography, a form that I hitherto have been ambivalent about to say the least. Watch this space!

Print Sales

Many of the images that you see on my website can be purchased as fine art prints. Below, you will find examples of limited edition prints from the ‘Sticks and Stones’ series for sale. Please feel free to use the Contact form to enquire with regard to the availability of prints from any of the other gallery series on the site, or for the availability of images in formats other than the ones stated below. Alternatively, you can email me at admin@faitedetons.co.uk.

All of my prints are produced on Innova FibaPrint archival quality papers using Epson UltraChrome K3 pigment ink technology. Together these ensure that your print will have a lifespan of well over a century.

My limited edition prints are supplied mounted in acid-free mounts. They are signed and numbered on the mount and verso. Indicated prices include postage and packing to the United Kingdom and EU (please enquire via contacts page for further afield).

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New Dry Stone Wall in the Forest of Dean, April 2006. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Sticks and Stones, Lake District 2008. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Found in a Norfolk Field, 2009. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


An Exmoor Valley, 2010. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Empty Goal, Forest of Dean 2009. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Sun and Clouds in Somerset, 2007. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Muddy Field, Dorset 2006. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Tree Protection, Forest of Dean 2009. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00

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Sawn Logs in the Mendips, 2010. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Dartmoor Gate, 2010. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00

Fallen Barrier Net, Bradford-on-Avon 2008. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00

Discarded Hose, Oxford 2008. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00


Ground Mat, Cornwall 2008. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00

A Gloucestershire Horse Trough, 2010. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00

Coil of Wire, Lake District 2008. Strictly limited edition of fifteen 20cm x 30cm prints, supplied in 40 x 50cm archival quality ivory mounts: £175.00

I am always delighted to hear from you with your thoughts, opinions and comments. Please do use the form below to send questions about any aspect of the site, or the availability of prints of my work.

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Copyright: Graham M McLaren 2012