I love watching old black and white films. The other day we watched Whistle Down the Wind, with its simplicity of landscape and freedom to run around in open fields under big skies. The farm is on Pendle Hill, adding an essential mystery to the experience of travelling back in time to when technology, if it existed, was largely hidden. The fields and hills were free of chattering signals and the warm and cosy farmhouses free of distracting devices. When the wind moaned in the lum, you looked at the window to see the moon disappear into black storm clouds and you were glad you tethered the old gate, as the rain began to spatter the glass. Of course, the Pendle women were persecuted for being different. That landscape was never really like that as long as there were people in it. Those who could see it for what it was, a wild and beautiful place to wander, experience the weather and find cures in nature were disposed of in the name of religion.

That connection with nature is almost gone from photography these days. In the photograph itself, I used to pore over it for hours, looking at the light, where to lead the eye, where to distract it, where to correct the colour. For that is what is involved in creating a fine art photograph. It’s not a documentary image for a blog or a newspaper article. It’s a statement of how I see the world. What I see in the landscape. What I see may not be visible to others so I work on the image for days afterwards sometimes, bringing out the words with the light, to tell the story of how I see the world of nature. It seemed tedious at the time but looking back, it meant I had an intimate understanding of the landscape in the image as I looked at it closer and closer for days at a time. Noticing.

Dragging down graduated filters from the sky taught me how to see the real world better. Light doesn’t move like that in the real world. There are no hard edges except at either end of the sun’s daily journey. In between, the fading between the sky and the ridges is very difficult to replicate with software graduated filters. I could never get to grips with actual filters in the field as it meant having to stop, set up the tripod, adjust, maneouvre, tilt this way, then that way and then the light would be gone. Better to make skilfull use of spot metering, point, frame, press the shutter and continue on the walk, higher and higher into the quiet and contemplative heights.

All that minutiae of careful post processing observation for editing the visual story seems to be gone now. AI lets you select the sky almost precisely. Then you invert the mask and work on the foreground. Is this good? I suppose I can say it is as I have used the old method for so long that I have that understanding of how the landscape fits together. How clear winter light spills over summits and faintly glows in the shaded corries, caressing the tops of huge boulders as if a glass bead has shattered on the ridge and shed its sparkling shards down the mountainside.

That is all detail though. It’s like opening up a watch to see what’s inside, what makes it literally, tick. The watch itself, for me, is when I sit in the mountains and just look. Just listen. To the breeze in the grass, the distant sound of water, the call of a ring ouzel, the cronk of a raven high above the summit, black feathers glistening with a sheen of colours. None of them need to be named. They are of the world. They are of the wild. They have lives we know barely nothing of. When we name them, we give them lives that are meaningful to us. They don’t need those names. They live their lives without needing us to give them names. The names which are chosen, decide whether men persecute or favour them. Men have no words to describe nature except in terms of subservience or utility when in reality all life on this planet is equal.

So everything in a photograph should be equal, unnamed, part of the whole. The story comes in the play of light among them, the cast of shadows from a stormy sky. The photograph should evoke a feeling, not a recognition of familiar, named things. The photograph should deal in mystery, not reality. Reality is the everyday. The real world is full of mystery that enriches our lives, if only we stop naming and just look and experience. That mystery should be the subject of a photograph.

At the summit I think on these ideas of nameless things that exist in their own worlds yet are essential parts of the entire world. They make me think of the Pendle women and how language distorts, twists and destroys life itself. Language should never fill in for ignorance. Language should be used as a photograph for the mind, so all can see the story. All can see, how you see the world. That type of language is called poetry. A photograph should be a visual poem of unnamed things.