Case Study
Simon Norfolk
Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer whose work probes the meaning of the word ‘battlefield’ in all its forms.
MY RESEARCH IS PRIMARILY INFLUENCED by the conversation the media are having about the issues I’m interested in. I’m talking about photographing warfare and the things that interest me are those things that have been missed from the public narrative of, for instance, how we understand the war in Afghanistan. The first thing is to spot the shortfalls in the media approaches, the lacunae, the things that are not being discussed and the things that are being deliberately missed out.
Secondly, I look closely at what photographers, as one small subset of the media, are doing. Why are they not photographing the real way that modern warfare is being performed? I think that’s because most war photographers are stuck, locked inside a work method that was defined by Robert Capa and which is: 35mm, close in, decisive moments. And what you might call ‘bang-bang’. Quite honestly, the most significant events in the prosecution of war are not available to that mode of representation any more. Modern warfare consists of actions by special forces, actions by drones, satellite warfare and electronic surveillance. You can buy all the Leicas you want but you are not going to be able to photograph electronic surveillance or special forces’ operations. And I defy anybody to photograph a satellite with a Leica. It’s just the wrong approach.
I also look at the institutional pro-war, pro-British soldier bias that runs through everything published in Britain, helped along by the embedding process. Another thing for me is to create an antithesis to that kind of work by, for example, avoiding spending any time with British soldiers.
My interest is in the great waves of empire, of history repeating itself and, in particular, the British involvement with Afghanistan and the fact that the war that ended in 2013 is the fourth Afghan war. So, talking about the idea of empire was what I tried to do, for example, with the Burke project, which was about comparing my photography with the way that photography was used in the second Afghan war.1 It was inextricably woven in with a way of talking about imperialism.
The necessity of working with good alternative partners who will facilitate my approach to the work is a crucial element of my research because I’m not taking the easy way, which is to embed with some British soldiers. It took me a very long time to build up a relationship with people in Afghanistan who I could trust as guides and who trusted me.
It wasn’t till I met people in Afghanistan who I thought could help me and I could live with that I ever wanted to go back. They are my friends in Kabul, local photographers and people who live and work there so when I go there I stay with them. That’s really important because it automatically gives me a completely different perspective on what’s happening. In 2013, TV here was full of the soldiers bringing down the flag and flying home but the Afghans barely noticed what the military were doing because what they are concerned with is rising crime rates, kidnap, embezzlement, bombs going off in the street, the return of the Taliban—none of which appears in the British press—and these are the things that interest me.
Mount Kenya, the glacier line of 1934
© Simon Norfolk
For the work on Mount Kenya’s vanishing glaciers my partner is Project Pressure who came to me with the idea of photographing glacier retreat. I’d never really thought about environmental issues. It was only when I was provoked by Project Pressure into thinking about it that I realised that doing something about glaciers wasn’t a diversion from my usual interest in warfare but was, in fact, taking the core of that work and applying it elsewhere. That core is about time, the strata of time, photography as archaeology and archaeology as photography and all those things which are the most distinct part of what I do. So, Project Pressure was very inspirational.
More specifically Project Pressure was really important in helping me with mapping and the objectivity of it because I wanted the work to be absolutely rooted in facts about where this glacier was and how it had moved. They put me in touch with Rainer Prinz, an academic at the Institute for Meteorology and Geophysics at the University of Innsbruck. The Austrians have done the most analysis of Mount Kenya’s glaciers; they’ve been mapping them since 1934, and, in particular, the Lewis glacier, which is the biggest glacier on Mount Kenya.
Project Pressure helped me get in touch with Prinz, with getting important academic papers and peer-review journals and getting very high-quality, accurate mapping of the glacier’s retreat over the last 80 years onto a GPS. Once I had the GPS, all I had to do was walk across the mountain until the arrow was on the line where the glacier front used to be. When I’d established that I marked it, then I could connect my dots and it gave me an accurate map of where the glacier was in 1963 or 1981 and 2011.
So, one kind of research is about information and partnerships—the other part is about technique and approach. I think that some documentary approaches are now a bit tired. The idea of just taking a picture and writing a caption about what happened there 30 or 40 years ago, using very long captions to carry the weight of the pictures, seems really dull now. I did that 10 years ago and I’m not interested in doing it any more.
All these histories and archaeologies are buried in these landscapes and I want to try and make the landscapes sing—so how do you do this? How do you make landscapes tell their story themselves, expose themselves, disinter themselves? I try to find ways of embedding stories in the photograph—as if the landscapes were spewing up the evidence, as if they were just waiting for a camera to capture their hidden histories.
The fact that Mount Kenya is a long dead mega volcano is important and to reference this I invented the idea of painting with fire using very long exposures. When I did the test exposures in the square outside my house it looked like lava, as if the fiery heart was bursting out of a mountain. There’s a brilliant metaphor there about fire versus ice. I love the idea that you are talking about ice but doing it with fire and that one degree of increased temperature brought about by climate change can be portrayed as flame. I think it is beautiful, one of those ideas that really engage the mind and make it swim.
Then the final idea was a little bit sly because Project Pressure is a non-affiliated, non-political organisation who say only ‘the climate is changing and glaciers are melting’. But I believe that glaciers are retreating because of manmade global warming caused by the burning of hydro carbons so I very much liked the idea of painting my line using petroleum. I could have used wood or olive-oil but I like having petroleum embedded in the pictures, even though you can’t actually tell that I have used petroleum.
On the mountain there were all these climbers who passed by and said they were there for the challenge of climbing Mount Kenya. They’d get there and face east and photograph the sunrise, although behind them was a melting glacier, which none of them knew anything about, nor did they photograph it. So there’s also the whole idea of travel photography and zipping round the world portraying climate collapse using a medium that burns a lot of hydro carbon and leaves it behind in the troposphere. I quite like that kind of conundrum—how do you get to Kenya without flying half way round the world? I suppose I could cycle to Kenya next time.
I made a film to go with the pictures to carry a few of these ideas but also because the pictures look as if I set fire to the mountain, which would be against the rules of the National Park. That could cause a lot of trouble for the guides and mountain porters who took me there and they could all lose their licences. So, the film was made to show that the fire was small, controllable and never dangerous; part of it was to explain the techniques, ideas and inspiration behind the work but part was to head off criticism. The film is a lot more than I expected it to be and a good half of what I did.
As research this was all very new for me—my previous project was about a whole series of Burke’s pictures of Afghanistan and trying to find either the picture itself or a modern equivalent of it. But this project was very much about memorising a whole bunch of maps of a fairly small space. We had to work in a small area simply because we were working at 16,000 feet so the altitude made it completely exhausting—just walking up the slope to the loo left you breathless for 5 minutes—and we were doing very accurate mapping to place these lines on the ground, working at night.
It was very cold. It’s pretty much as high as Everest base camp and a very tough environment to work in. I’d never spent time at that altitude and none of my guides had spent that long at that height. I have to say that, without a shadow of a doubt, this project was the toughest job I have ever done. I never cry but this one made me want to cry. Just for seven pictures, which took nearly three weeks to make. Just getting there was hard, it took four days to walk up the mountain and, of course, the logistical stuff was hard because we had to take everything with us. Then the equipment didn’t work reliably, the batteries didn’t want to work at that altitude or that temperature and there were electrical problems. Odd things happened like computers would switch off with 80 per cent power in them and new batteries would refuse to work. The brand new generator, which we carried up the mountain, worked then didn’t work. Fortunately, one of the guides had the really smart idea of bringing a solar charger and we worked off that in the end.
So, having multiple back-ups is important but it’s also about making sure that your back-ups will work in that environment. There’s no point in having lots of fancy technology because it’ll fall over; you have to have something you can repair with a penknife or with the materials you have around like bits of wire and sticks. We managed to rebuild the generator using a multi-tool. So, being able to think your way through those kinds of problems is crucial; the two mountain guides we had with us, Charles Kamau and Peter Mburu, were very good, really great at that kind of improvisation.
I think I’m good at Third World three-dimensional photographic problem solving now. Every job I do, things fall apart and you have to improvise. Every time, cameras fail, tripods fall apart, hard drives explode and, if you don’t have another idea about how you’re going to do the work, then basically you’re on the plane home. You’ve got to wiggle and twist and find your way out of these problems and that means being very on the ball.
I don’t go anywhere until the research is finished and unless it all really stacks up. It has to be photographically interesting, something no one else is talking about and fit in with the rest of my work. Even financially, I’ve got to find a magazine or somebody to pay for it or commission it. I’ve got to make sure I don’t come up with an idea that costs £3 million to do. All the ducks have got to be in a row before I even get the camera out. I’m a busy photographer but I must admit I don’t take pictures more than about three times a year. Months can go by between my taking pictures, unless everything is really lined up I don’t bother.
It’s not worth my spending a lot of money going to shoot something that doesn’t work so I don’t commit to anything till I’m convinced it can work. For example, I couldn’t risk going to Kenya and discovering that the flame was tiny because there’s no air or petroleum doesn’t burn very well at that height or something like that. So I went up Mount Teide, the big volcano in Tenerife, and experimented with setting fire to carpet there to see if it would burn. I also experimented with different kinds of fuel and wick to see how they would work and if they made the right colour and size of flame and would be slow burning enough for a two-hour exposure.
I think my training as a photojournalist has really helped because when I started out you’d get an appointment with a picture editor and you’d be expected to pitch five stories at him. And if he was not interested in one you’d have to come up with others.
The actual research doesn’t develop further once I’ve started the project. What does develop when I’m in situ is the dreaming. I find that the only way to think about work is by being there and doing it, which is why I’m a big fan of getting out of the door and getting on with it. I read a lot about glaciers but it wasn’t till I stood in front of one and touched it that I felt their magnificence and power. That response can’t be got from reading or from a GPS; the real emotional drive and passion for the project develops when I’m there. I find that this, rather than just wanting to make new work, is the thing that really drives me. Particularly with the Mount Kenya project where, after three or four days up the mountain, I was so unhappy because of the physical strain I was under I just wanted to leave, but that grab-you-by-the-heart thing is what pulls me in and makes me want to stay.
I found the same was true of Afghanistan. I think the feeling gives the pictures a three-dimensionality and a passionate bite that otherwise they wouldn’t have and that without it they’d just be a recording. I have this argument with people all the time who think I research stuff so much that it doesn’t allow for any serendipity. But if you don’t do the research and the planning beforehand then there’s no time for serendipity. You can’t just go there with a knapsack like Coleridge or somebody.
Some things were driven by the look of the glacier. A lot of glaciers in Alaska and elsewhere are in valley bottoms and they freeze a lot of crap off the side of the mountain and carry a lot of rocks, rubble and sand on the surface and push a snout of rubble in front of them. So the problem with photographing them is that they don’t look like glaciers; they look like big, dirty blocks of ice with lots of rocks on top. What this project needed was a glacier that really looked like a glacier—clean, white, crisp, and with a nice sharp front without a big mound of rubble in front of it. So, I was looking for glaciers on mountain peaks rather than in the valleys.
We originally thought about Mount Kilimanjaro but Project Pressure already had a project there. Then we talked about a place in Switzerland, which would have been quite nice because it had a cable car; I could have eaten fondue every night and slept in a nice hotel. But then we moved it to Mount Kenya because I liked the idea of working in a Third World country that has barely contributed to global warming but that will suffer first and most radically from its effects.
The biggest glacier on Mount Kenya is the Lewis glacier and it is doomed. It will have gone in about 10 years. A glacier is a moving, dynamic mechanism; it is fed by snow at the top, which pushes it down the hill. Last winter the Lewis split in two and now it’s bisected by a kind of rocky headland, which means that the lower part will probably disappear very quickly.
So, there is that slightly tragic urgency about Mount Kenya.
There’s one other thing about selecting Mount Kenya, which was that I had to have some transparency in the skies. It was important to me that the stars would move in the course of the exposure to indicate the passing of great geological time. One of the things I could guarantee about Mount Kenya was that it has a very regular weather regime—every morning is clear, every afternoon cloudy and the nights are clear. I couldn’t guarantee that in Switzerland, for example, and there’s no point in being at altitude if you can’t see anything because of the cloud cover. So that’s another thing in that list of everything that has got to be there. If any one thing in the chain is missing then don’t even step out the door, instead get your head down, do more research and find a place where the ducks do all line up.
Working digitally means I can do some things that are more ambitious because I can see on screen whether or not I’ve managed to pull it off. These current projects are only visible by a camera sensor or a film sheet and not having digital would make them very tedious to do. I am not going to walk four days down a mountain to process a sheet of film. Also, all my work is abroad nowadays and carrying film abroad is just becoming impossible.
I don’t write anything down. I don’t keep logs. I don’t do diary stuff. The truth is, once I’ve taken the pictures I’m really bored with them. But the experience does stay with me. It’s all in those things that make me—Rwanda, Afghanistan, problem solving and adventures and crazy techniques and mad professor stuff and even the frozen beard stuff.
I’ve always wanted to expunge myself from the work and for it to talk by itself. The issues I make work about are more important than me and my being cold or scared or missing my wife. Most of the places I go to are new to me and often quite fraught or tough so I never really get a chance to relax. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I’m so bored with the photographs after taking the picture. Once it’s in the can I can relax but until it’s in the can I can’t.
I do test technical things like lighting techniques. Fashion and portrait photographers do it a lot but I don’t think landscape photographers do. I do a lot of night stuff down here on the south coast where I have a favourite test place. It’s on the beach, it’s very dark and no one is bothered by my experiments.
The idea of audience means a great deal to me. It would be unconscionable to go to these places and use people’s time and memories for vanity or just to win a prize or make money. So, if I am going to go to Afghanistan or Mount Kenya I should have something to say, and if I have something to say I have to have an audience to say it to. Getting it out there and getting it heard is crucial so that’s why I’ve always run my work in a kind of hierarchy where it exists as a set of only seven prints in a gallery but also as a book, a website—which gets thousands of hits—and in a magazine that gets seen by 1.7 million people. I always want to make sure I’ve got that breadth.
There’s got to be something about my work that lifts it above the everyday; it’s got to punch its weight. Is an audience going to look at it and think ‘oooh’? If I were just going to photograph a glacier I could do a pretty good job—it’d be a beautiful picture of a glacier but a million photographers can do that. My work lives on an international stage and that is quite important. I can’t just be a successful local photographer.
I don’t believe that chance plays a part in my work. It’s only by planning something really ruthlessly that I feel I can have validity when I’m in a place. So, I can be accused of over-planning and being over-methodical, but I think that’s the only way to attain any kind of freedom. You can just get on a plane somewhere and take pictures if you are going to repeat the same motif time and time again.
What I like to see in the work of any photographer who has been around for more than a few years is some kind of connecting line through it. When I’m researching I’m still looking back 14 years and thinking about the line that runs
through and joins my work up. I wouldn’t want to do a handbrake turn and go off and photograph something completely new. This is a really horrible word but I think a photographer is a brand and when somebody has spent £8,000 buying a print of mine I think they’ve made an investment and I have a duty to uphold the value of that. One of the dangers of shooting something else is that I could be devaluing that print and not upholding my part in a gentleman’s agreement.
I think the thing that has helped me a great deal recently has been to autopsy old work that was successful and look for what was in the heart of it that really made it beat. The shell of the work in Afghanistan was the destruction of war and all those romantic paintings I was talking about but the heart of it was about time and time’s directionality, time’s thickness. So, the new work will look radically different, it’s not about destruction, it’s not even about warfare but it’s still got that thread. That interests me and it makes me realise that everything I’ve done is a kind of chapter in a bigger project.
I think you need to keep yourself in a position that’s quite uncomfortable and keep yourself out there. I made a conscious attempt in 2010 to decide which direction to go in, I could have put my foot on the brake or dived in again. And the hardest thing is to dive in again but I went back to Afghanistan and it was good. While I can still get out there and do it I should do it because there are still things that make me angry when I watch the news on telly.
Interview by Shirley Read
Notes
1 Burke + Norfolk (Queens Palace, Baghe Babur Gardens, Kabul, March 2011 and Tate Modern, London, 6 May—10 July 2011) was a collaboration over time between Simon Norfolk and nineteenth-century photographer John Burke. Norfolk’s photographs reimagined or responded to Burke’s scenes from the second Afghan War in the context of the contemporary conflict.