YORKSHIRE, UK.
“I love to find serenity in chaos, to reveal life and spontaneity amongst apparent mundanity.”
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I work in the space between moments.
Where nothing dramatic happens
but everything changes.
The sea. The gentle sound of the waves.
I spent much of my life in the seaside towns of the Yorkshire coast and the beach is a place I’ve always been able to find peace. And so for an hour or so I found myself standing there, hearing the waves and breathing at last.
My biggest chance to shoot has been when my nephew (for whom we’re a support bubble) has come to stay for a few days. Eager for any opportunity to go out and shoot and with my newly purchased X-E4 to try out he has been my little muse for these government-enforced dry spells. And, whilst my ever-patient nephew has generally accepted my photographing pretty much his every movement with a winning-smile (or at worst, a disdained stare), there is just one caveat on which he insists … “PESE CAN WE GO TO THE PAAAARK DADA?”
If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s how easy it is to take things for granted.
Sometimes to move forward we must briefly retreat.
Sometimes we need our happy place.
Time stops. Beauty surrounds. The world is quiet.
All are welcome here.
In the 13 years I have shot weddings and indeed the 20 years I have studied photography I have never used the square ratio on my digital camera. I may, from time to time have cropped an image after the event but have never seen the world in a square at the time of shooting - aside of course from my old medium format cameras!
As a reportage photographer rapidly developing stories, unpredictable action and consequently fast shutter speeds tend to be my primary domain. But within those .somethings of a second that I ultimately capture I always seek to find a truth - to reveal something, some essence, big or small of the subjects and scenes in front of me that I can give back to the viewer to help them understand not just what was happening but who the people in these photographs really are.
“It’s got to be warm and fuzzy, something like ‘Love Day’ but not so lame!”
- Trash of the Titans, The Simpsons, April 26, 1998
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the rising move towards instancy in everything we do. From Twitter to Netflix to reducing the thirst for knowledge to scanning the top line of a smartphone google search we live in a society where time and space is seldom afforded. We want instant access, instant gratification, instant response and decisions. But sometimes time is the essential ingredient in allowing us reflect on where we’ve been, what we’ve done and what was really important all along.
This place is familiar but the faces are not. The corners I knew are eroding and changing. These are not my grandparents, this is no longer my town, it belongs to others now.
There’s more than a little irony at play when speaking and attempting to inspire at a photography conference hampers your capacity to actually take many photographs but that, dear reader, is the paradox I find myself in this week, having just returned from Northern Ireland late last night.
Photo by Robert Catto, on Thursday 4 October, 2018. Please credit & tag the photographer when images are used - @robertcatto on Instagram & Twitter, @robertcattophotographer on Facebook.
I’m always seeing photographs but I don’t always take them. Most of them I just register in my mind and enjoy without the need to press the shutter. Since moving to a new town earlier this year though I seem to find that internal trigger going off more and more often…
Photo by Robert Catto, on Thursday 4 October, 2018. Please credit & tag the photographer when images are used - @robertcatto on Instagram & Twitter, @robertcattophotographer on Facebook.
It’s fair to say that in the summer months every space is filled, every arcade becomes a cacophony of jangling coins clattering through the penny slots and the sands and promenade are brimming with visitors munching on ice cream and fish & chips as they walk with opportunistic seagulls circling overhead well into the evening.
But it’s no longer summer in Scarborough.
Photo by Robert Catto, on Thursday 4 October, 2018. Please credit & tag the photographer when images are used - @robertcatto on Instagram & Twitter, @robertcattophotographer on Facebook.
PORTFOLIO
One story told not by how much she changed
but by how clearly she began to show who she already was.