About


Contre Dour was born out of a reaction against the growing trend amongst the enthusiast photographic community to produce a Utopian recording of a scene. Either they will only shoot in the ‘golden hour’, the short period of time around dawn and dusk when the quality of light is generally considered best for photography, or they want to erase all trace of the here and now, any item of street furniture, infrastructure or heaven forbid, people.

 

 Cloning out pylons from landscapes might make the image look better now, but how will it look in ten, fifty or one hundred years time? Will our descendants wonder whether pylons had cloaking devices? How the sun was never more than an hour from either dawn or dusk? Looking at photographs from the 20th century, the shots I get the most value from are the ones that evoke the particular era in which they were taken. People often use the term ‘timeless’ as a compliment,  but I’m looking for shots that are the antithesis of this, photographs that could only have been taken at a certain time.

 

 So why Contre Dour? It’s a play on the photographic term Contre Jour, meaning ‘against the day’ referring to shooting into the light. Instead, I’m shooting into the dull and the ordinary because in years to come it might just be as different and interesting as the past is to us today. Whether they will be of interest on anyone in years to come is debatable but if they’re not taken at all, no-one will ever know.