Words by Dan Warden
Landscape photography, according to Chris Tuff, can convey an incredible range, depth and subtlety of emotion, feeling and meaning.
Chris Tuff
For Chris Tuff, award-winning freelance photographer, writer and director based in Cornwall: “Landscape photography is about revealing, evoking the spirit, or capturing the evanescent mood and moment of a place – its power, drama, beauty or serenity, whatever I happen to feel about it at that instant. My images are a visceral reaction to the landscape, the result of sensory immersion in the interaction of the elements of sea, sky and shore.”
Despite devoting most of his career to film, Chris’ roots have always been in photography. In fact, he tells us how by the age of nine “I was taking my own photographs, with an ancient Kodak folding camera that belonged to my grandfather”, processing the film himself and making prints in his father’s darkroom.
Winter is just around the corner, and Chris is ready for it. “During the winter months the primeval, Cornish coastal landscape is subjugated to the raw, elemental power of nature and the capricious character of the ever-changing light.”
Whatever the season, the conditions influence how Chris treats images, “whether traditional black and white or more meditative colour images that reduce the seascape to its basic elements”, as seen over the following pages.
Chris grew up the son of a photography lecturer and landscape photographer and so was accustomed to spending hours, days, sometimes weeks on photographic expeditions. “I think this is where my love and appreciation of landscape and nature came from, and my intuitive feeling for when everything is right. To be a landscape photographer requires patience and the instinct to be in the right place, at the right time.”
‘Sun. Sea, Sky’
Left: ‘Gravity’ | Right: ‘Last Light’
‘Ophelia’
Left: ‘Linear Light' | Right: ‘Symphonic Sky’
‘Cerulean Sea’
‘Lonely’
Left: ‘Ghosts' | Right: ‘Shorelines’