Photographic strategies for visualising the landscape and natural history of Northern England: the ordinary and the extraordinary.

This critical commentary reviews and contextualises existing research on Photographic strategies for visualising the landscape and natural history of Northern England: the ordinary and the extraordinary. The commentary examines three major bodies of photographic work that have each been publicly disseminated as major exhibitions, Sharpe’s Wood (2007) nominated for the Prix Pictet (Earth) Photography Award (2009), Chasing the Gloaming (2011) nominated for the Deutsche Börse and Re: Collections (2013). Each case study has been subject to critical peer and public review and this is evaluated in the commentary and a comprehensive box of evidential research material is presented to support the practice-led research submission. The commentary positions the practice-led enquiry against the overall research aims and objectives. The research focus has made a significant contribution to landscape photographic discourse, through experimental and transformational analogue and digital photographic methodologies (camera and non-camera) in the visualisation of the hidden and unseen aspects of the landscape and natural history of the north of England. The commentary frames and highlights the wide-ranging historical collections based research across photographic, artistic and science disciplines, and it tracks their impact on the research trajectory and on my contemporary photographic practice. Photographic critical thinking (Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes) supported the theoretical research aims; their ideas provided critical filters for practice-led experiments with camera and non-camera seeing and the aim of visualising the hidden through experimental photographic methodologies. Historical and contemporary nature writing also informed the photographic research trajectory, specifically with ideas around the locale within a wider cultural context and ideas around the (lost) meaning of landscape. The resulting research outputs have culminated in an examination of the wider cultural value of the ordinary and the local landscape visualised photographically