Tone Paintings

Photographers

The Art of Adventure - Bruce Percy

I was looking at these images recently and received the comment that they are ‘tone paintings’. It got me thinking about whether they are. I know for sure that I am more interested in tone and gradation rather than subject matter. For instance, I prefer to work with weather conditions which give atmosphere to the imagery. When you use rain to obliterate backgrounds, things become less literal, and more subjective. It seems that I am seldom drawn to a scene these days as a ‘subject’, but more for it’s hue / colour and luminosity properties.

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When I enquired and looked back at some of my other portfolios I became aware that this form of photography - of creating ‘tone paintings’ is something that I have gravitated towards over some years now. I am less and less inclined to be drawn to a place because it is a strong literal subject, but more because of the hue / colour and luminosity properties.

If I reach further back, it seems that I have always been interested in this the most, but I had tried to think of hue / colour and luminosity as properties of the subjects I was shooting, and not perhaps the main point of the reason why I made the photos.

Lençóis Maranhenses below is a good example of that. I do not think these images are of sand dunes (well, they are), but that is not the purpose for shooting them. I use dunes (as most of us do) to convey tonal gradation, colour gradation, and perhaps as a relief to study these properties alone, rather than get confused by trying to attach them to a particular subject. In a way, the hues, luminosities are the subjects of these images.

So I suppose what I am really trying to say is that although we are often looking for good subjects to photograph, we wrongly make the assumption that the light is what helps make the image more interesting. When in fact I would say that it is the other way round: we use subjects to support the qualities of light we find. We are mostly light seekers, and subject seekers only to support the light that we have found.

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