Roy has been making photographs since the early 1960s and has never stopped. What do you do with 60 years worth of pictures? His answer is to select images he could return to and still enjoy and make photo books, Traces, which is monochrome and Colour Traces, which is what it says. Traces presents around 240 photographs grouped under Flowers and Forms, Land and Sea, Ancient Places, Architectural and Sculptural and Radom and Oddities. Colour Traces is a slightly slimmer volume of some 150 photographs without and specified grouping.
Writing in the introduction to Traces, Roy quotes a seminal figure: ‘The photographer Gary Winogrand once said: “I photograph to see what the world looks like photographed.” That’s pretty much why I take pictures.’
He goes on: ‘I have rarely photographed with a ‘project’ or preconceived idea in mind. I react to whatever I find; the pictures I make are what drew my eye at that moment, it’s only later that I become aware of possible themes and parallels.’ He explains that, though he the rarely photographed people, his pictures reveal traces of the presence of humankind.
The photographs show that Roy has an extremely perceptive eye for the critical components of black and white photography, form, texture and tone, whether in fading flowers, landscape, buildings or ancient stones. He has an eye too for the often unconsidered detail and the quirky juxtaposition. That Roy is so often able to achieve in print what he sees is a tribute to his exceptional technical command of the medium. He also brings to his work an in-depth knowledge of the history of photography and its diverse practices, this in itself honed during his years as a driving force behind the Cambridge Darkroom.
The latter aspects of Roy’s practice are reflected in the captions to the pictures, which give some technical details and pay tribute to sources of inspiration, such as Paul Hill, Raymond Moore, Edwin Smith and the New Topographics movement.
Roy refers to Colour Traces as ‘a supplement’ to the black and white work. He says that his ‘photographic upbringing meant I always tend to “see” images in black and white,’ … [but] everything changed when digital photography arrived on the scene.’ He illuminates the way he compiled the book: ‘In selecting the pictures to use, I first asked myself “does this need colour, or would it work just as well – or better – in black and white?”’ He concludes: ‘Most of the time I still see colour photographs as “just pretty pictures, so that’s what you’ll (hopefully) find here.’
I think Roy is being unduly modest here. The images, in terms of subjects, are as well seen as his monochrome ones; and he has a good colour sense and how it plays out to create a different type of image. The monochrome pictures are bold in the use of form; these are bold in the use of colour, they are images where only colour will do. Viewed as a whole they differ from the monochrome work by being more anecdotal and like a visual note book, rather than coming together in broad themes or informal projects.
Both books show the care with which they have been put together. Roy quotes Robert Adams: ‘As all photographers know, put one good picture next to another good picture and you have a third something. It may be better, it may be worse, but putting pictures next to each other inevitably influences the nature of both pictures.’ Careful sequencing has resulted making the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
The strength of the work in reflected on the overall quality of the finished books printed and bound by Mixam. The reproduction is good and the paper and the binding are substantial – all this at what I understand is a very reasonable cost.
I like to think that Traces and Colour Traces are retrospectives and not a combined swan song. Roy continues to take photographs, and I suspect that there is fine work in his files of thousands of negatives still to be revealed. I hope he makes the time to make Traces Two.