On “On Landscape”
A Photographic Profile
June 22, 1996, Wembley Stadium. England are hosting Spain in a Euro semi-final match. Tim Parkin, not a big “footy” fan, has friends by who want to watch the match. His satellite dish is not cooperating. Tim, yielding to the moment, decides to see to it that his rooftop connection to Wembley is restored. Things do not go well. As Tim later described, “I’m not quite sure what happened, but I was standing at about the height of the [second] floor when I felt myself falling backwards. I landed on the grass, but the impact was pretty severe.” Tim has broken his back. As one may well imagine, it is an injury that will change Tim’s life and in some ways that would come to surprise many, including Tim. It is an injury that directly leads Tim, partnering with Joe Cornish, nearly 15 years later to co-found one of the most respected online landscape photography magazines. That magazine, On Landscape, now in its 15th year, has come into its own—a fully evolved, innovative enterprise and key component in the growth and development of countless artists and an outlet—a voice—for many others.
As Joe would later write, On Landscape, since its inception, has “covered a huge range of topics from philosophy to psychology, the history of art to a personal take on our own practice, from filter tests to geology and from optical design to conceptual art. Most of all though, we're dedicated to the life of a landscape photographer in all its forms.” He added, with the caveat that On Landscape often does talk gear and editing, that “we pride ourselves on creating an alternative view on landscape photography through writing about all of the things that surround our experiences rather than concentrating on the equipment and post-processing.” This “alternative view” as well as vast library of writing, videos and even audio on gear, technique and editing, is on full display in On Landscape’s impressive back catalogue of over 300 issues.
Some years later, the Spanish team having left Wembley hard done by after losing a penalty shoot-out to Three Lions on that fateful day, Tim has nearly fully recovered. Tim’s doctor recommends that he take up exercise and suggests walking is a great place to start. Tim, who later confesses that he was not the outdoorsy type—he was working on his PhD in computational engineering at the time after all—knows he needs a distraction while on these therapeutic walks. And so, he buys a digital camera to help pass the time as he traipses the English countryside. Childhood neighbors, who were local camera club members, had introduced Tim to photography when he was growing up but when computers came about the cultural landscape, Tim became enamored with the burgeoning digital world and left film and focal lengths behind. Perhaps during these recuperative walks Tim is reconnecting to his youth, and also finding a toehold to his future, in the small digital box he carries. He later professes that “when I picked up a camera again, it just felt right and every time I went out I was taking dozens and dozens of images. I guess it became a bit of an obsession.” That obsession would lead Tim to leave his eclectic professional life behind (having completed his PhD, Tim spent time developing heads up displays for fighter jets, was a web developer and worked on web strategy for the Daily Mirror, Sporting Life, British Airways, Amazon, etc., and even was an “A&R guy” for U2’s record label after running a small music magazine in Aberdeen) in order to found On Landscape in 2010.
A key step in the journey to editor/publisher of a premium landscape photography journal took place in 2006 when Tim was gifted a trip to the Orkney Isles for a photography workshop. Tim showed up with his handheld digital camera only to be confronted with “guys using cameras which looked like they’d come straight out of a museum.” Tim later found out that those guys—David Ward and Richard Childs—were among the world’s renowned and most skilled practitioners of large format landscape photography. But it wasn’t their skill that initially got Tim motivated to transition from an obsessive digital enthusiast to an obsessive large format film devotee. “It was fascinating,” Tim later said, to see Ward and Childs work with these museum pieces. But, he went on, it was “when I heard the sound they made when they took each picture I was hooked.”
That deep set hook flowered into a devotional passion for all things photography for Tim, who would later write that “[a] lot of my enjoyment of photography comes from learning.” Tim found that such learning “is typically done through talking with others, reading books, magazine articles, blogs, etc.” However, his deep dive into learning also led to disappointment for Tim, who soon found the photography magazines, journals and other outlets to be lacking in anything really meaningful for the landscape photography enthusiast. Tim surmised that the commercial nature of such “photographic press” as he called it, led to it catering only to new photographers or those that were looking to upgrade their equipment, that is, those that were in the mood to spend. Tim concluded that this led to a pattern of these magazines recycling content on what he determined to be a two-year cycle. Tim ranted to David Ward about this phenomena and decided to do something about it. “The answer was to plan something myself, something that uses the advantages that the web has to offer (and that I have enough knowledge to make the most of),” Tim concluded. But complexities of life had hindered that effort. That is until he struck up a friendship with Joe Cornish, a master of the craft and, to be frank, a photographic idol of mine and many, many others.
Tim, not surprisingly, met Joe at a workshop. However, it was not until Joe asked Tim to develop a website that they started to talk about the general dissatisfaction with landscape photography journalism. Tim shared his idea for On Landscape with Joe and “was pleasantly surprised to find out that Joe saw the potential in the project too.” Tim and Joe “bashed heads and put together a plan . . . and the company Landscape Media Ltd was registered and the ‘Great British Landscapes’ magazine was conceived.” And on October 18, 2010, at midday, Issue One of On Landscape arrived.
A lot has changed in the 320 plus issues of On Landscape that have come out since that first one. The magazine has taken on a decidedly global approach, featuring profiles of and articles and essays from a wide panoply of photographers from all over the world—well beyond its admittedly “British oriented” slant at the start. And while it is a subscriber based and supported journal, largely deriving its content from those who subscribe, those subscribers include some of the world luminaries of the art and craft of landscape photography, along with enthusiasts like me included in its pages. Joe himself has well over 150 bylines listed on his On Landscape Author Archive, including essays, articles, screencasts and other videos, as well as book reviews and reminisces.
And while much of the success of On Landscape surely lies at the feet of Tim and Joe, Charlotte Parkin, Tim’s wife, is undoubtedly the third leg of the stool that holds the whole thing up. Not only does Charlotte have over 75 bylines set out in her Archive on On Landscape, she acts as the magazines Sub editor and its Head of Marketing. Under her guiding hand, On Landscape has transformed from a professional passion project aimed at filling a void in the landscape of, well, landscape photography journalism into a relative online juggernaut with over 20,000 unique site visits per month. These three, Tim, Charlotte and Joe, have accomplished all of this all while pursuing (and juggling) other professional obligations: Tim and Charlotte while running a top-notch drum scanning business with a global reach; Tim while inventing and marketing Midge Specs, when he became “fed up not being able to see through the viewfinder of his camera and also not being able to see the small hand and foot holds while in the hills” due to the ubiquitous midges found in the Scottish Highlands; Charlotte while, as an entrepreneur helping businesses with improving their online presence; and Joe while holding the mantle as an elder statesman of British if not global landscape photography, completing high profile commissions, continuing to lead, teach and mentor other photographers and maintaining a career as a professional landscape photographer.
One is taught in writing not to bury the lede so as to avoid, if possible, failing to capture the reader’s attention. My apologies to Tim, Charlotte and Joe if I’ve lost readers along the way. In part, I wanted this inaugural Monologue with Photography post to be focused on, well, photography and not my experiences with or through it. But as I researched and wrote this piece, Tim’s journey struck a chord. Tim going from a hospital bed watching soccer on a borrowed portable television “thinking ‘I don’t even really like football and look where it’s got me,’” to publishing, editing and regularly contributing to a world class landscape photography magazine and becoming an acknowledged authority on the subject, co-founding and guiding the Natural Landscape Photography Awards to acclaim, seemed to parallel my journey (at the very least, aspirationally) from lens to a pen. I, too, became obsessed with photography, in small part because of, like Tim with large format, the sheer gadgetry involved. But something much more. Something that Tim stated well when he said,
I . . .take photographs because I’ve realized that it’s the best way to see the world. The practice of photography forces you to really look at things and to engage with the wind, clouds, tide, sun, season, and to begin to understand them – if only in a transitory way. The results contain more than you could absorb at the time and to journey around a landscape afresh each time you look closely at a photograph is a pleasure.
And like Tim I, too, became a rabid consumer of all things I could lay my eyes and ears on regarding the art and craft. And I, too, followed that obsession, like Tim, back to writing, culminating in Lens and a Pen. And make no mistake, what Tim, Charlotte and Joe have accomplished inspires me in my work as a writer and photographer, never mind the 320 plus archived issues just sitting there like a treasure trove the only map needed to find being a web browser and a subscription.
More than any of this, more than my fanboy feelings for Tim and Charlotte and Joe for all they have accomplished with and beyond On Landscape—the images and innovations, the engagement and entrepreneurialism, the writing and the righting of the ship of landscape photography journalism—more than all of this, I chose the story of On Landscape to christen Monologue because of a shared sentiment about more than photography, but about life and living it on terms that engender being better people, better to ourselves, each other and the world. Tim aptly summed up that sentiment when, in his old blog about his adventures in large format photography cleverly named “Tim Parkin: Still Developing”, he wrote:
A lot of my enjoyment of photography comes from learning. This is typically done through talking with others, reading books, magazine articles, blogs, etc. Part of the balance of having so much good information available (especially the writings that people make available for free online) is to contribute back by writing anything that I learn or experience. If you get something out of this great. If you care to comment to correct my many mistakes, I would greatly appreciate it. Landscape photography can be a lonely occupation but the conversations we have more than make up for that.