How Ian Howorth Photographs a Feeling

You've seen this before, a photo of a car, a chair, even a dead fox. And somehow it just feels special. When we take photos, we usually don't just want to capture what's in front of us, but also what it felt like when we took the picture. This, of course, is very hard since it's really not something visible, but something we can only experience. We can feel when we look at the picture. Photographer Ian Howard is able to capture just that. and is able to somehow transport you back to that original location and make you relive that experience he had when he pushed the shutter. We will look at how he's able to connect visible with invisible. We will explore how he photographs people without people and how he turns these ugly subjects in a nice light into emotionally resonant photos. A lot of the things that I've been shooting over the last seven years or so, they're they're I I call them they're ugly things in nice light, you know? That's kind of how I I like to describe my a lot of my images, you know. They're not necessarily attractive things or pretty things. They're just very average things, but they might they might be bathed under, you know, extraordinary light, you know, and and and I like that ambiguity of those two things. It's this ambiguity that you can find everywhere in Ian's amazing work. We can see it in Arcadia, but especially in his second book. Ian Howorth is a photographer based in the UK, born in Peru, raised in the US, and later settling in England. His life was shaped by movement, and that sense of displacement runs through his work. So when you're that young, all that contrast causes you to ask a lot of questions as to, you know, why are things different? >> Ian's latest work is a series of places and subjects like these called the country kind of silence created over the last four years which hits the viewer with a pure emotion straight away from the design of the cover to the sequencing of the images. sequencing that takes you on a journey through places. Places that have different concept of how time passes like everything just seems to slow down. A country kind of silence for me is more about about Brit about England specifically about its own sense of identity. >> These aren't dramatic scenes. They don't demand attention but that's exactly why they are powerful. They don't show you the story. They leave space for you to feel it. It is the art of photographing people without people. A lot of the images say more than they seem through color, light, or what's missing. Not every picture needs to be poignant. Some are just there to keep you moving through the book, through the landscape, through that strange silence. Because sometimes meaning doesn't arrive all at once. It lingers. Some might see Ian's work as pure nostalgia. Old signs, quiet streets, places fading into the past, but that's not why he photographs them. He's simply documenting what surprises him. As he puts it, because it looks like this. No agenda, no embellishment, just the strangest of things as they are. You're not always sure what you're looking at or why it feels the way it does. That's the power of ambiguity, of photographing a feeling. There's a quiet tension in his images, between beauty and decay, between presence and absence, between the past and something harder to name. And that contrast, that ambiguity is what Ian captures so brilliantly. That's what makes the photos feel so special. It's about reacting honestly to what's in front of the lens and to what's inside yourself. That's where you find the story. >> I think with photography, I think it's important to look at yourself and and and how you react to something, you know. I think I think sometimes I think sometimes with not just photography I guess I think it happens with with any form of art when when you're doing something that you've always done. I think it's very easy to forget that you have to look at yourself and how you feel about something because you are just a representation of of of of who you're hoping is going to react. And you know, I'm a human being, you know, and I've got a brain and I've got emotions and I've got a certain understanding of culture and and all of these things. So, I'm just a representation of of my my target, should we call my target audience, you know? So, by looking at yourself and how you react, it tells you a hell of a lot as to whether or not you're on the right path, you know. Um, you don't you're not necessarily here, I don't think, to to to please everybody, you know. You're here to really just please yourself. I am I'm I'm trying to please myself, you know. I I want I want to make the work that I want to make. And, you know, if that means that five people like it because I'm too niche, then that's fine. Um, if I'm lucky enough that my tastes mean that 10 million people might like my work, even better, you know. But the point is is that you're looking at yourself, looking at how you react at something, and then that becomes your starting your starting point. I think for me, photography is about being exploratory, not just with with images, but with yourself and understanding yourself and how it is that you think about how you make a project. So, next time you see a photo of something ordinary, a chair, a car, a dead fox, ask yourself not what it shows, but what it feels like. And that's what I've learned from Ian Howard's work, that silence can speak volumes if you let it.