Caught by the River

Field Notes

26th July 2020

Excellent independent publishers of photographic matter Another Place Press have just announced the latest three titles in their ‘Field Notes’ series of limited edition zines.

In FIELD NOTES 010 – Far From the Centre of Things, Paul Walsh documents a solo trip to Whalsay in the Shetland Islands, inspired by the writing of Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Staying alone in a small isolated cabin, he then visited MacDiarmid’s cottage, and subsequently took a circular walk around the island, making photographs in response to the isolation he felt amidst the vast Shetland landscapes.

In FIELD NOTES 011 – An Oxbow Lake, Joseph Horton examines the countryside as ‘a constant unchanging space that is worked and shaped by agricultural hands over time, so slowly that it is hard to see that anything is changing – just hedgerows, fields, scattered houses and meandering rivers.’ In the introduction to the zine, the photographer reflects: ‘Travelling through [this landscape] is repetitive and banal but within it stands our legacy with the environment and our relationship with the landscapes around us. As a child your relationship with the landscape feels strong and present, you do not question the varying ways in which space and time overlap, twist, interlink and expand through your interaction with them. But as an adult this sense of place becomes distant and time feels much more of an enemy than an ally, your relationship with it frays as you fear to be sidelined as a spectator outside of it. It’s a burden you then bring to the landscape and one that you carry with you.’ He concludes: ‘Through all of this comes the ability to navigate this panorama with a fluidity that can only be seen when watching the river.’

And in FIELD NOTES 012 – Garden Stories, Amanda Harman presents a series of ‘accidental’ still lives made around the glasshouses and outbuildings of a country garden, seeking to make visible the unseen and often unsung work of the gardeners by revealing small signs of the day-to-day; the tending of plants, their protection from insects, disease and weather, the nurturing of seedlings and tender plants in the glasshouses, the harvesting, drying and storing of crops and the gathering of flowers to be arranged and placed in the house.

All three zines are 32 pp, 190 x 230mm, staple bound, printed on Fedrigoni paper, and are a first edition of 100. Priced £8.00, they are available to pre-order now for release in late August.