The latest news from MallerstangMagic. Click on the item header for more (including making any links active)

A Classification of Landscapes

A new article has been recently published in On Landscape Issue No. 294 called A Classification of Landscapes. The article takes as its starting point the wonderful (in the old sense of the word) classification of animals in the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge from the short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Analytical…

New books of Landscape Images

Three new books of landscape images have recently been uploaded to the Blurb.co.uk print on demand site. All are of monochrome images. Falling Waters contains images of waterfalls and water flows in 5×4 format, the other two – Landscapes from Black to White and Intimate Landscapes from Black to White are in 6×12 format. These…

New Mallerstang Book

A new book of photos from Mallerstang has been uploaded this week to the Blurb.co.uk print on demand site. This latest book is called The Stones of Mallerstang: From the Carboniferous to the Anthropocene. It takes a journey from the Carboniferous geology of the valley to all the works of man including the walls, the…

A little piece of Eden

A new On Landscape article has appeared with the title of A Littl;e Piece of Eden. It puts together a wide variety of images taken in a small reach of the River Eden upstream of Shoregill Bridge in Mallerstang. It is a little piece of Eden both literally and metaphorically with some commentary both about…

Phenomenological Landscapes

Another article has appeared in On Landscape (issue 285) with the title Phenomenological Landscapes. It starts with discussing how, starting with the Greek alphabet, there has been an increasing alienation from nature. This has only got worse with more and more technological progress. It is something that has been the subject of study by the…

Black in the Landscape

Inspired by seeing the black abstracts of Pierre Soulages in Montpellier last year, and the previous article on landscape photos in infrared, a new article has appeared in On Landscape with the title Black in the Landscape. The article can be found here. A comment from Alexandre Wesche suggests some landscape photographers who have made…

WaterAid benefits from Panta Rhei book

WaterAid has recently been sent £750 from the sales of hard copies and pdfs of the Panta Rhei book and some further sales of pdfs of The Still Dynamic Book. That adds to the £750 already sent from the sales of the hard copies of The Still Dynamic. So a really big thank you to…

Minimalism in Infrared Photography in On Landscape

A new article has appeared in On Landscape Issue 273 with the title Minimalism in Infrared. It describes the origins of Infrared Photography with the experiments of the American physicist and photographer Robert Williams Wood (1868-1965) that were first published in 1910. It then discusses the various means of using Infrared film and digital cameras…

Do you really need a philosophy for your photography?

A new article with this title has just appeared in On Landscape here. It discusses the need for having a philosophy (or two) for your photography – even if most photographers never need to think about it. It is suggested that most of us are pragmatic realists – trying to reflect what we see in…

New exhibition at Vill’Art

Just at the end of the first weekend (of two) of the Vill’Art exhibition for 2022 (the first since the start of the pandemic). Vill’Art is an opportunity for artists living in Villars-sur-Glâne in Switzerland to display some of their work, so it is a joint exhibition for about 30 artists, hosted over three floors…

Panta Rhei – A 2nd Book of Water Images

A 2nd Book of water images called Panta Rhei (or Everything Flows) has been produced by Wells Printing in Bath for the Mallerstang Magic Press. I have just seen the first copy and it is looking good. As with The Still Dynamic last year (now sold out but still available for download as a pdf…

The Intimate Panorama in On Landscape

A new article has appeared in the on-line magazine On Landscape that deals with using panoramic images to explore small scale landscapes. The article is illustrated with images mostly from Mallerstang and Switzerland. The article may be found here

New End Frame in On Landscape

Some while ago I was invited by Charlotte Parkin of On Landscape to write about one of my favourite images for one of their End Frame Articles. I chose Full Moon over Mayo by Paul Kenny (see below), explaining in the article some of the background to the image and why Paul’s work has often…

The Still Dynamic – now as a pdf

All the 100 copies of A Still Dynamic have now been sold and £750 donated to the charity WaterAid. The book is still available for download as a pdf – go to the Shop to order and download. The £10 cost will all be donated to WaterAid.

Interpreting the Found Abstract

Inspired by a couple of articles in On Landscape by Marc Hermans and Joe Cornish and a feature on the Swiss photographer André Piguet, I have written a new article about abstract landscapes with some comments particularly on Alfred Stieglitz, Aaron Siskind, and Graham Cook. The article can be found at https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2021/12/interpreting-the-found-abstract/

The Pleasure of the Search for the Unexpected

Another article has been published in On Landscape Issue No. 240 with the above title. It is about the role of allowing for the uncertain, the unpredicted, the unexpected, the serendipitous in finding images in the landscape. It can be found at https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2021/09/the-pleasure-of-the-search-for-the-unexpected/. The article is illustrated with images from Sweden and Yosemite, including the…

Loss in the Landscape

Another article for On Landscape has appeared in Issue Number 231 with the title Loss in the Landscape on the subject of retreating Swiss glaciers, a retreat that seems to be accelerating. There is a bit of science, including the issues of water resources and hydropower for the Swiss and a bit of the impacts…

The Devil’s Dictionary of Photography

Another article written for On Landscape has just appeared. This takes its inspiration from the Devil’s Dictionary polished (between 1867 and 1911) by the American author Ambrose Bierce, and said to be one of the greatest works of American satire (an example: DISTANCE, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to…

The Still Dynamic: a new book of images

The Still Dynamic is a book of images of water and the marks of past water has been published in 2021.   The images are collected into surface reflections and skypools, surface caustics and caustic sheets, frozen waters, water waves,waterfalls and the marks of past water. The photographer and image maker Paul Kenny has provided a…

Mallerstang in Winter

A new Blurb book of Mallerstang images has been produced with the title Mallerstang in Winter. The images have been taken over the last 20 years or so, with an introductory text referring to the Mallerstang winter of 1963. The book was instigated during a period of snow and ice during lockdown in 2021 and…