 | Iain Mitchell - see all images
It was never going to be an easy route into photography. I realised that at the age of 6 when my pictures of the reindeer at London Zoo came back all blurry. So traumatic was that experience that I didn't really think about photography again until I was 22 and about to go on a round the world trip. I was given a camera just before I left on my travels to Africa, Australia and the South Pacific. It seemed that in sixteen years my hands had got steadier and amidst all the photos of other drunken backpackers there were even a few that made me think that I might be ok at the photography thing.
I soon found out how addictive photography is. I began seeing photographs everywhere. It quickly became very frustrating for me to go for a walk without my camera. And very frustrating for anyone going for a walk with me when I had my camera.
After coming back from my trip I was immediately looking for ways to get abroad again. The quickest, but perhaps not the wisest, way of doing this was to become an English language teacher. While not being the greatest career choice, this allowed me access to many countries including Thailand, Turkey, Austria and Japan. The teaching was kind of a way of paying my photographic dues, of suffering for my art. For every opportunity to catch a glimpse of geisha, there was an hour spent fending off five year old Japanese students trying to practice their karate on my nether regions. Back in those days a career in photography would not only have been a dream come true but also an escape from being put in confined spaces with mildly psychotic toddlers.
I'd often call myself a landscape photographer but that's probably just because I spend a lot of time in landscapes. I feel there are good photos to be taken anywhere. Most days will offer moments when you glimpse something that will look great through a camera lens. I find these are often transitory moments - to have the luck to be passing and to see a moment that wasn't there two minutes before and won't be there two minutes after. While I stick to the belief that great images can be found anywhere, I remain the only person who finds my picture of Torness Nuclear power station beautiful. Being abroad, I think, raises awareness of your surroundings. So it's perhaps no surprise that those moments of beauty worth photographing seem to occur more often.
I feel very fortunate to have lived, not just travelled in many countries. It's perhaps allowed me photo opportunities not readily available to travellers. But it's also allowed my pre-conceptions to be broken down. I have come back from travel able to look more objectively at not just other countries but also my own. Especially these days, when we're being asked to believe so much that is untrue about other countries and about our own, this has been so important.
For me, it's made a world of difference.
(Iain is currently on a 6 month trip to South America, so we look forward to displaying some new images of Andean Glaciers, Peruvian natives, Amazonian Rain Forest and much more in the near future). |
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