Sunset Clouds, Gwaenysgor Viewpoint, Flintshire: photo © Jean Williamson

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) must have been one of the first to make intentionally abstract photographs. After 40 years experience of photography, he set out to produce images in which the subject matter was set free from external, recognizable reality and the confines of literal interpretation. He sought to demonstrate that the making of successful photographs did not depend on the hypnotic power of the photographer, or the depiction of charismatic individuals and special subjects, but on the ability to see and think photographically. He took hundreds of negatives of clouds, and arranged the 5”x4” contact prints in sets and series with other expressive and evocative subjects. Stieglitz called these photographs ‘equivalents’ because he found them to be the counterparts of his thoughts and emotions. He named some of the cloud sets ‘Songs of the Sky’.

Moon and Clouds, Penisarwaun, Gwynedd: © Mick Sharp

In the catalogue to his 1920 exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in New York, Stieglitz declared: ‘I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.’ Two years later he began to photograph clouds, to ‘put down’ his ‘philosophy of life’. Discussing the startling strength and beauty of Stieglitz’s ‘photographic abstractions’, Beaumont Newhall, in his ‘The History of Photography’, says: ‘For this is the power of the camera: it can seize upon the familiar and endow it with new meanings, with special significance, with the imprint of personality.’

Burnt Pine Log, Frensham, Surrey: photo © Jean Williamson

Putting a frame around something - almost anything - automatically creates an impression of ‘significance’, so a genuine connection with the subject - a penetrating, sensitized and selective vision - is required to raise an image above the superficial. It is part of a photographer’s art to be acutely aware of the ‘real world’, to recognize beauty in the commonplace and to use shape, form, texture, scale and tone or colour to show an other reality beyond the world of appearances. The simultaneous recognition by a viewer of what an abstract is, and all the things it might be, allows non-representational pictures to be amongst the most expressive and meaningful. This burnt log has a vast landscape woven into the fissures and flows of its reptilian skin. It also has the air of an ancient, recumbent tree-spirit beginning to regenerate through the patches of moss on its calcined hide.

Burnt Pine Log, Frensham, Surrey: photo © Jean Williamson

Scale, pattern, lighting and composition create a landscape from the saw cut and felling hinge of a mature pine. While at art college, we organized an exhibition, in the Cathedral Gallery in Derby, called ‘Ideas in Landscape’. Its theme was that landscape could be a state of mind, or an approach to photography, rather than just a strictly defined subject matter.

Bosullow, West Penwith, Cornwall: photo © Jean Williamson

This granite stone-scape shimmers with light and texture. Patterns of life swirl and and form, particles join and break away again as they do in the cycles of creation and decay, on a range of scales from the microscopic through to the cosmic.

Pistyll Pond, Lleyn Peninsula, Gwynedd: photo © Jean Williamson

Many of the photographs on this website are arranged to work in pairs or longer sequences, so ideas and feelings jump between them. Alfred Stieglitz met and influenced many great American photographers through his advocacy of ‘straight’ photography - large-format cameras, small apertures for maximum depth of field, slow film, long exposure times - and his use of equivalence and sequencing: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Minor White immediately spring to mind. Minor White used sequences to make single photographs interact and sustain what he called the ‘feeling-states’. The ‘time and space’ between images is filled by the viewer’s imagination, experiences and associations promoted by the photographer’s treatment of the subjects and any inherent symbolism. Meaning forms in the spaces, and grows from echoes of form and movement, the building of a theme through different examples. White said ‘I habitually play photographs against each other, or words against images.....’ which creates a third medium.

Living Mural, Glenelg, Highland: photo © Jean Williamson

Minor White knew the recording and transforming powers of the camera: he photographed ‘things for what they Are’ and ‘things for what Else they are’, or, as Beaumont Newhall put it: ‘things as they are and as they are not.’ Where mere ‘decoration’ ends and ‘art’ begins is probably best discussed over a glass of wine or an orange juice on an exhibition opening night.

Moel Findeg Nature Reserve, Maeshafn (Denbighshire County Council): photo © Jean Williamson

New life teems amongst the old after a heathland fire: bilberry and blackberry, heather and gorse, rosebay willowherb and ragwort, birch and rowan. A world within a world, a hieroglyph of loss being overwhelmed by the vigour of regeneration.

Ash Trunk, Penisarwaun, Gwynedd: photo © Jean Williamson

Not a sign, not a symbol, not a metaphor. Archetypal forms, growth patterns repeating themselves: circles, rays and vortices. A limpet shell on the beach, a jellyfish rising, a parasol mushroom in the heart of an ash.

Water Tank, Elstead, Surrey: photo © Jean Williamson

Increasingly, abstracts of skies, blurred trees, running water and the like are being used as subjects for hospice cards and framed prints on the walls of bereavement rooms. Such images provide a focus for contemplation and meditation, a connection with the natural world for those no longer able to experience it directly, and comfort and reassurance for those suffering distress in the often austere and functional surroundings afforded by hospital architecture. These kinds of ‘art therapy’ works are often made in conjunction with patients and their families. Although some are undeniably powerful, the process of creation, and their successful function within a specific context, is often more important than their strength as individual images.

Thrift and Lichens, Bardsey Island, Gwynedd (Bardsey Island Trust): photo © Mick Sharp

Shadowy cracks make a grid within the frame and provide a sense of purpose. The strong diagonal does not divide the surface equally, the plant is not placed centrally. The flowers grow upwards towards the sun, but cast dark shadows which are echoed by depressions in the rock. A smaller thrift is growing in the crack above the main plant. The form and colour of the flowers stand out strongly from the stone and lichens whose cracks and swirls express linear and circular movements and approaches. Within a straightforward-looking image, asymmetries, conflicting forms and contrasting colours struggle for harmony; a stillness within disorder, poise within restlessness.

Porth Saint, Rhoscolyn, Anglesey: photo © Jean Williamson

Wind and tide drive the sea into the bay and up against the cliffs. Anything from grains of sand through to large boulders are picked up and used to scour and undercut the 500-million-year-old Cambrian rocks. Boulders are rolled in and rolled out again, to hide and reveal the geological hieroglyphs on the walls of the sea-formed rock shelters. This freshly exposed mural seems to mimic the action of the waves and the flowing fronds of the kelp. Like Edward Weston, and many other photographers, Minor White was fascinated by the signs and portents he saw in the rocks of Point Lobos, at Carmel Bay on the Californian coast. His subject was not geology, his rocks and photographs ‘only objects on which significance has been spread like sheets on the ground to dry.’ His sequences of flowing forms raise a mood in the ‘beholder’ who brings his own ‘river of associations’. White’s approach to sequences, abstracts and equivalents can be seen in his inspirational book (published by Aperture, Inc. in 1969): ‘mirrors messages manifestations’.