The Thinking Photographer's Podcast

A few years ago, I thought i’d had my Dragon’s Den moment. I would dazzle the sceptical venture capitalists, save lives and win acclaim. You see, in places with high populations of moose, or elk as we call them in Europe, places such as Newfoundland and Sweden, people die every year in collisions with these tall, lanky animals. When a car strikes one, the elk doesn’t go underneath- it comes through the windscreen, sometimes with fatal consequences for the driver as well. So, my idea was to fit external airbags so that when a strike occurred, the bag would deploy and deflect the animal away from the car. Genius, I thought…until I went to check if anyone else had thought of this…and found that Volvo had, with bags designed to reduce injuries to pedestrians. There went my fortune. Yet this is just one example of the parallel genesis of ideas, And I think I might know what’s going on.
























Context and the origin of ideas

Niall Benvie














Volvo’s external airbags. Grrrr.
Vincent and Michel Munier’s Au Fil des Songes
Wild Wonders of Europe
Meet Your Neighbours
The Jumping Squirrel cliché
The Diving Kingfisher cliché
Laurie Campbell

It’s funny, isn’t it, how there is a world of difference being in a rut and being in the groove? In one, your life is going nowhere. In the other you’ve struck some sort of creative vein, and mining it is pure joy. Well, normally. But in the case of my project, Dispatches from the Collapse, the ideas and images that came together in 2019, were anything but joyful. I found myself as midwife to a pretty ugly litter. What’s worse, though, is that I’ve revisited and re-tested the assumptions I made when I delivered them and, each one seem, well, depressingly hale and hearty.
Here’s the project’s description:
“When I made the images in this series, hope was far from my mind. Rather, I imagined the pictures as relics found in a drawer in an abandoned house, decades from now. The imagery and messages attached to them are from an earlier period, just as an unspecified collapse was getting under way. The words are rueful, sometimes even bitter, often with an unspoken “I told you so”. In them I draw attention to a wide range of post- collapse scenarios with a view, in part, to highlight our current naivety and abject lack of preparedness for what is to come.”
Don’ let that put you off listening, please! You can always challenge my ideas…
























Dispatches from the Collapse

Niall Benvie














The images from Dispatches from the Collapse
The spread of misinformation on social media
Risks of hyper-connectivity
Reasons for rising sea levels
Growth in size of cars
Decline of flying insects in Germany
Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the Machine
Derrick Jensen on psychopathy
Greta Thunberg activism
Populist isolationism
Environmentally-induced migration
Derrick Jensen and hope

If you think that composition is only about creating balance between the elements of a photograph, I’ve got news for you: it can be about an awful lot more. And today, I’m going to make make the case for placing the subject in the part of the frame that is appropriate- rather than correct.
























On composition

Niall Benvie














Bob Holmes, veteran travel photographer
Joe Cornish, photographer
Clive Bell’s theory of Significant Form

Over the last 30 years or so, I’ve visited and revisited an idea I stumbled upon at the very start of my career. You might even call it an insight - it certainly helped me to understand what I was doing. It’s an idea I’ve revisited, many times over the years to see if it still holds water. And you know what? I think it does! I’m talking about the concept of edges and how we, as people, as well as photographers, naturally gravitate towards them. Those can be edges in space - where the land meets the see and the sky meets the land, for example; in time - the transitions between the season or dawn and dusk; or in being - very old and very young subjects. In respect of expressive pictures, at least. Perhaps because the idea has stood the test of time remarkably might just mean that there’s something fundamental in our creative work that the concept of edges helps up to understand.
As always, I’d love it if you’d share your ideas on this topic, on the Show webpage. Oh and, please, help us along the way , would you, with a review and a rating, ideally a 5 star one. It all helps other folks to discover our place down by the stream.
























Images from the edge

Niall Benvie














Jim Brandenburg’s Buster on the ice flow
Peter Matthiesen’s The Snow Leopard
On losing our connection with nature
Photographer Patrik Larsson
Photographer Eliot Porter
An explanation of abstract art

What a lovely day it is here; it’s the toadflax end of summer now. The bee eaters and hoopoes have flown south but the sun is beating down and the sky’s the colour of a cornflower. Just perfect. It’s not the sort of day you’d want to spend inside a gallery but galleries do crop up in today’s chat. And that’s kind of inevitable whenever you discuss art. Especially art with a capItal A. Ever happy to put my head above the parapets, I’m going to layout ideas on how we might critique nature photography, why it’s not taken seriously by the galleries and why some, at least, I think should be.
As always, I’d love it if you’d share your ideas on this topic, on the Show webpage. Oh and, please, help us along the way , would you, with a review and a rating, ideally a 5 star one. It all helps other folks to discover our place down by the stream.