The Final Word: The camera with no film

by Paul Moore

There are quite simply too many pictures in the world. Each of us carries around a vast archive of images which we will probably never look at again, memories of places and events we wanted to keep sacred but which become commonplace as soon as they hit the phone picture storage.

At the last count I had over four thousand images in my phone and I know that is minuscule compared to the archive of many, particularly young people, for whom an event did not happen unless it is saved on the mobile.

The ubiquity of the phone image makes it almost impossible to know what is a good photograph and what is not. Or when a photograph stops being a ‘snap’ and becomes a documentary image or, even more interestingly, a piece of art.

I had a unique insight into that process last week when I was invited to the Seamus Heaney Centre at QUB for the launch of a book of images by the artist Donovan Wylie. Donovan was born in North Belfast and has become recognised as one of the great photographic artists, with his work being on permanent display in places such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London.

He related how when he was 13 years of age he found an old camera in his parents’ house and immediately dismantled it to its every piece to see how it worked.

The next day he sold his bicycle and went to a shop in Belfast and bought a working camera. He told his parents he wanted to be a photographer and they cleverly told him he could do so if he secured a book contract before he had to go to college.

He spent the next two years taking images with one amazing fact overriding it all. He never put film in the camera. He felt that the presence of film would inhibit what he could do with the camera and so he did not allow this to interfere with his passion to see things through the lens. Just before he was due to go to college his parents asked to see his photographs and, of course, he had none. He bought film, put it in the camera and found he could no longer find the correct image as he was constantly aware of trying to ‘take’ a good image.

He suggested that his whole career as an artist has been guided by the search to feel again what he felt when he had a camera with no film.

At seventeen he went to London and trawled the publishers until one, Secker and Warburg not only offered him a contract but lined up major literary figures to write about his images, people such as Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien and John Banville. Someone at the company had great foresight because the book which followed, the 32 Counties, is now acknowledged as one of the great Irish art books with copies making large amounts of money if they ever turn up for sale. He has since gone on to make countless major works, most recently the Lighthouse series. Both 32 Counties and Lighthouse are on exhibition at the Seamus Heaney Centre. Donovan remains a remarkably modest and almost embarrassed man, whose sole focus is the next image, the next subject which will become his obsession.

He told me, for example, that one of the images in the Lighthouse series was so difficult to capture that he had to sleep for nine nights in the car to capture it.

So the next time someone asks what makes a good picture – tell them about Donovan Wylie.