When I started this website a few months back, I promised a friend that I would be able to write a blog explaining why the Derbyshire Peaks was like Hong Kong. Obviously this prompted leg pulling and photos of Derbyshire fields tagged as somewhere in Kowloon. But I now have the time to fulfil my promise! They’re equivalent because they are two of three locations that consistently inspire me (the other being North Norfolk). However, that just throws up a really interesting question for this blog about the nature of inspiration - so a ‘modest’ challenge!
I can have a habit of being critical of myself as a photographer if I go somewhere and just don’t feel like taking a photo. I say to myself ‘true photographers probably just have to touch a camera to come over all Cartier-Bresson. They could be out with a camera in a local recycling centre and get a Sony Photographer of the Year award-winning image. Why can’t I? I must be a fraud.’ But, actually, I’m pretty sure these days I’m not a fraud, and have come to realise the importance of inspiration as an ingredient for moving beyond competent images (of recycling centres) so as to produce ‘mic drop’ photos.
So what is inspiration? Well, the word ‘inspire’ comes from the Latin word inspirare, which means to blow into, and then later from the Middle English enspiren meaning to fill the mind or heart. So to be inspired comes from something outside of us opening up and accessing our heart, mind and soul. We are then drawn into doing something because of a feeling from within us. We are pulled towards acting with feeling, rather than being pushed towards acting by an external power that is ambivalent about (and possibly against) our wishes. The latter is more about a motivation rather than inspiration.
Inspiration is, therefore, something very personal to each of us. Which means a location (or something/someone) that can open a door, so as to blow upon our heart and emotions, can only do so because it resonates with the unique life lived by us. And Hong Kong is one of my inspirations.
Given this understanding of inspiration, it’s obvious why. Hong Kong is a city that I lived in for 6 months in the late 1990s. I was 25, and right in the middle of those years where you are learning and nailing down ‘you’ as a fully-fledged adult. I was free from the isolation and grind of London, in an exciting city where refreshing spontaneity filled my evenings. It was warm, everything was unusual and fascinated me. I had money, I had fun friends, and there was love (and loss). I was somewhere else, able to be someone else. Is it any wonder that when I now walk around Hong Kong it inspires? Is it really a surprise that the city blows into me when the familiar evening heat cloaks me, I hear the trams, smell the harbour from the Star Ferry, or just stand on a street corner? That inspiration transfers into a sensitivity for what I see and a depth in what I photograph. A love for the city that formed me so much. There’s a reflection in my efforts and photography of me feeling old emotions once again. Of me today taking time to be with that 25 year old and saying ‘I hear you again, but look, this life is beautiful’. You can’t tell me that isn’t a far more compelling and richer state of mind in which to seek, compose and take photographs.
And what of Derbyshire? Or, indeed, the coast of Norfolk? Well that’s inspirational as well for a different side to me. As a social species we spend much of our time in very complex situations sensitive to and tuned into other people’s needs, particularly in my line of work. Making time to tune in to ourselves is not something that gets as much attention, and certainly not if you’re me! And yet I love and need the moments when I can be detached in a very physical way from all of those other people. Walking a footpath where there are expanses of land, some of which towers around me, and where I can be more alone with myself, or just with my wife and son, very literally does this. The Dark Peak area of Derbyshire is perfect for helping me feel this way – so around Kinder Scout, Edale, or over towards Buxton. And that sense of me pushing back to give me space can also be under the vast curving sky of the North Norfolk coast, where the sea visually seems to offer a space in which humankind is absent, and I can just be mindful of myself. These places inspire me and the feelings come through in the photographs. So looking at my photographs in these landscapes, they’re not the usual daybreak or golden hour sunsets (because I’m pretty crap at getting up that early and I have to get home in time to help the family). But what is there in them, nonetheless, is a sense of personal withdrawal into a space where there is solitude and simplicity.
Just occasionally that moment of peaceful solitude and reflection presents itself in the otherwise claustrophobic din of Hong Kong. And that is a very very special inspiring moment. It once looked like this…
