The deeper look
- Martin Holman
- Apr 7
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 11
Photographer William Arnold turns his experimental photography on the ancient and modern aspects of our landscape. Words By Martin Holman
Atmosphere is part of everyday life. That proposition applies to both meanings of the word. The first describes the gravitational pressures that wrap around the Earth and influence the weather. The second identifies the mood or tone we perceive in a place or a situation, or in an artwork like a song, book or painting. William Arnold’s photographs of country locations in Cornwall, which he made between 2013 and 2021, resonate with atmosphere in both senses – but most of all with the second.
Arnold knows the landscape of these images well. He has walked and travelled through the county where he has lived for all but a handful of his 42 years. Although born in Manchester, he was a small child when his family moved to Cornwall. He teaches photography at Falmouth University and West Penwith provides a regular setting for his research into our surroundings and the nature of his art form.
He has selected 19 images to show at Hweg in Penzance. They are part of a larger project called ‘Sunspots’ that extends its scope to comparable landscapes on the Hebridean islands of Harris and Lewis. What draws these places together is their long association with esoteric religion and sets of beliefs originating in prehistory.
This heritage has left its mark on the territory in the form of menhirs, or standing stones, and other interventions on the land that may have had roles in the rituals of ancient communities. Found over considerable distances in both Celtic regions, their similar shapes and sizes suggest that these blocks were identifiable ‘types’ that these communities understood as having a specific purpose.
That repetition over place and time fascinates Arnold. He photographed the stone relics when he saw them. Some monuments appear singly and others in simple arrangements, like circles. That prompted him to make some images where several pictures are gathered into grid-like formations. They resemble a composite portrait of the characterful objects or a kind of catalogue recording their physical properties in a detached manner.
Later generations adopted routes across Cornwall that became pilgrim ways punctuated by stopping places, often signposted with markers. Such sites coincide with an older tradition that links water springs with pagan spirits that aid the living. The medieval Church recruited that belief to its purposes, rebranding these spots as Holy Wells.
Sites like the Well at Madron appear in Arnold’s choice of images. People still tie strips of cloth, or ‘clouties’, to branches of surrounding trees and bushes. They act as mementoes and also physical prayers for good fortune, so the ancient trust in metaphysics survives across time.
TOP: Hawthorn Lanyon, from Sunspots, silver gelatin print, 10 x 8 in
ABOVE: Carn Brea, from Sunspots, 2020, silver gelatin print, 10 x 8 in
Arnold uses his camera to imply different ways of looking at our surroundings and at the art form of photography. We think of a photograph as the speedy capture of an image. Arnold’s approach contradicts that sense of rapidity. Time is a feature in his work – as time drawn out, as in the patient duration of natural growth, and as sluggish time, an unhurried longeur that seems to envelope these scenes. A wayside cross at Lelant, an upright granite shaft probably intended as a route marker in the Middle Ages, has been joined by more recent route signifiers in one photograph: a modern council road sign and an estate agents’ property sale board, a token of the modern faith in consumption.
Arnold is interested in landscape history. Every part of the land is saturated with information about how it acquired the shape we experience today. Indeed, the role of humans in its physical evolution has been remodelled over millennia by settlement and cycles of cultivation. In another photograph, a piece of agricultural machinery that Arnold saw abandoned in a field near the “dancing” Merry Maidens stone circle. The recent interloper has a sculptural shape, a long, upraised arm that looks balletic. The tangled shrubs of the screening hedgerow behind perhaps dates back centuries.
This artist has an eye for quirky instances of the human impact on the landscape. One print depicts the tracery of power cables stretched across the featureless sky, a newer generation of man-made landmarks that reshape the land. Will they last for centuries? In the distance is a constellation of streetlamps pierce the distant shadows, competing with light from ageless stars.
To make these monochrome photographs, Arnold worked at a time of day that offered stable light conditions. The overriding impression is that he came upon his subjects at dusk or in the later part of the year when days are shortest. There are no dramatic contrasts of light, a feature that imbues each view with a density that is rich and almost palpable. Our experiences of darkened places attune us culturally and emotionally to the possibilities of what might be there beyond our senses, lying on the cusp of our knowing.
Although he does work in colour and use digital cameras on other projects, these images were made in monochrome with traditional analogue camera and film, Then printed by hand as silver-gelatin prints, no computer software was involved. The human eye was the most sophisticated equipment employed. The appeal of this method, which dates to the invention of photography, is obvious in resulting image: it is sharply defined and highly detailed, suspended in a gelatin emulsion that rests on the paper.
The process is ideal for black-and-white photography. It draws out that second definition of atmosphere, the figurative one where a pervading tone or mood characterises a particular setting. We connect with the abundance of shades of grey: they pull the eye into the image and ignite the imagination.
The close inspection of the prints seems permissible in the gallery because they are not portraits of people. In fact, there are no people in these pictures. That is significant. The viewer, who is not even in the same time or space as the events being looked at (some occurred as long ago as 2013), is not self-conscious about peering in. In itself, that generates another kind of atmosphere, of concentrated looking.
When that happens, images become a kind of evidence to be inspected. The contents appear objectified in Arnold’s descriptive approach. His process omits the sentimental attachment with the humanly recognisable. An urban comparison comes to mind from more than a century ago: Eugène Atget photographed the deserted streets and parks in Paris as if they were arrangements of still-life elements.
As viewers, we cannot cut ourselves off from the associations we carry in our heads that we invest in the landscape. We have absorbed them from past personal experience or from other people’s sources, such as depictions on screen, in painting or literature. In a sense, that helps us to determine an atmosphere we can occupy. Cornwall’s Celtic history in particular has been profusely mythologised so that stones and memorials have acquired a profound symbolism. Arnold quotes a passage written by Ithell Colquhoun, the painter, occultist and theorist who settled in West Penwith in the middle of last century.
TOP: Coronation Farm, from Sunspots, 2017, silver gelatin print, 10 x 8 in
ABOVE: Wayside cross, Lelant, 2013, from The Last Hundred (Guillemot Press), silver gelatin print
Compiling her book, The Living Stones: Cornwall, published in 1955, Colquhoun observed: “How much primeval gloom can still lurk almost within earshot of a busy road!”
Colquhoun’s viewpoint was informed by her spiritual journey: it shaped her work into astonishing navigations between the esoteric and surreal. Arnold perceives that contrast, too, but we acknowledge that he is not completely taken in by it. So, he balances it with the raw facts of everyday reality. They inject a banality that grounds free-floating contemplation of the location’s meanings.
His route is more practical, even scientific. He has described his use of photography as a process of “looking deeper into” a subject. Photography provides a document, a form of witness to what has stayed the same and what has changed. Working in series, as Arnold usually does, images examine our surroundings to illuminate systems of growth, usage and occupancy, and how man and nature have complemented and conflicted with one other across time.
He likes to classify, as in his montage of menhirs and medieval markers. The ordinary can look remarkable when a photographer decides to click the shutter on them and memorialise its enduring presence in that moment. Or the ordinary can open the mind to the unanticipated or unknown.
That was the case with his series called “Cauliflower Fields (Forever)” from 2018. On Armistice Day that year, the centenary of the end of WW1, he gathered cauliflowers grown to maturity in Nancekuke near the Remote Radar Head at Portreath. The location amplifies our interpretation of these portrayals of dumb vegetables. From the early 1950s and for the next 20 years, the former RAF station had been an outpost of Porton Down, the state’s technology lab for developing chemical weapons, a purpose kept secret at the time.
Arnold’s moments stand out for their transfixing ordinariness – the horse and feeder in the field; the dark and swampy copse where a tyre hangs from a branch as a swing to play on; the solid hawthorn tree on an exposed plain bent by the force of the wind. They still have the ability to astonish, to stop us in our tracks.
While the “Sunspots” photographs are more varied in subject and poetical in tone than his many other projects, Arnold is not a photographer who “points and shoots”. His projects emerge from a rigorous programme that involves planning, action, technical process and then documentation in the form of labelling. Themes of light, place and composition are found in them all. He feels an affinity with artists from the radical 1960s, such as the German duo, Bernd and Hilla Becher, who challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine-art photography.
That shared interest in types underpins his series called “Suburban Herbarium” (2015-19). He had a plan: to pick examples of the vascular plants that grew in a defined area around his studio. That ground was made up of industrial wasteland, marshes and back paths, areas that people disregard as uninteresting.
Taking a single specimen of each plant, he made photographs in the studio. Projecting light through them onto a plain background, he photographed the enlargement. The technique is fuelled with investigative rigour and not far removed from the cyanotypes made by early Victorian pioneer of nature photography, Anna Atkins, and represents an heir’s inventive homage.
The results are spellbinding. They reveal with x-ray-like insight the structure and unsuspected beauty of ragwort, hairy bittercress and other unexalted species frequently derided as weeds. “I was struck by the haphazard mix of native plants living alongside agricultural escapees and invasive garden species,” he remarked at the time. The atmosphere surrounding them becomes intense, highly attentive of details that reveal these “throwaway” plants’ complex identities. The viewer might feel transported to a lab and participating in experiments. In a way, that is true. Our expectations of our environment are refreshed, even altered. Our notion of ephemerality is challenged.
Arnold engages with the land in other ways. In March to September 2022, he made his own temporary landmark in the garden at Kestle Barton near the Helford River. He planted sunflower seeds bought in packets from discount hardware stores into a floral recreation of the area’s prehistoric circular monuments that, in all likelihood, venerated the sun. His intervention was methodical and long-term rather than an immediate spectacle. Harnessing the forces in nature rather than humans, the transformation of the ground emerged over spring and summer months. And solar light was used to record the plants’ growth – and its devastation by birds – by means of a pinhole camera dependent on the sun.
The background is always time, the property from which that intimate form of atmosphere arises. Arnold gives it materiality in the deep blacks of photographs, in the gradual emergence of what an image represents in its broadest interpretation. At the same time he is an artist of the moment, alert to the environment, its overlooked wonders and evident vulnerability.
Like seeds in nature, his images are disseminated through his publications. They, too, take different forms and are well worth gathering. His first monograph Suburban Herbarium was published by Uniformbooks (2020) and reprinted (2022). His latest book, Sunspots (2023) was released by his own imprint, Bare Pipes Press, and is held in the collection of the National Art Library, at the V & A in London.
William Arnold: Sunspots, The Last Hundred continues at Hweg, 34 Causewayhead, Penzance, until 12th April 2025. All images © William Arnold