Introduction and Sample Images from The Scottish Mountains
Anyone can take photographs; millions do and prove it by enthusiastically boring family and friends with their efforts. The digital revolution is both bane and blessing. In any school playground you will see children using their mobile phones to take shots of their posturing pals. Would-over, a TV camera has people fighting to be captured by the lens. How every different is the world portrayed in this book.
There are not many people 'strutting their stuff' on high hills but then Alan is apt to be busy alone; with camera and tripod weighing in at five kilos, hurrying is hardly possible, never mind the time needed to actually take the shots or the greater time, effort, dedication and imagination to be in the right place at the the right time. These are not lay-by pictures. They are a unique collection of mountain images, from among the hills themselves, from high on the hills, a world which is wonderfully captured for us.
Early efforts at colour photography were hardly remarkable, were often stereotyped and garish, working treadmill traditions rather than seeking new challenges. So I well remember the shock following the Scottish Mountaineering Clubs The Munros and, in some ways more so, The Corbetts book. 'You'll never get any decent pictures' I was often told as an editor but how wrong that proved. Certainly no Gael Charn can match a Torridonian giant but that just offers a greater challenge for the photographer.
A'Mharconaich
Stob Dearg
Looking across Glen Shiel to Sgurr an Doire Leathain and Sgurr an Lochain
The Old Man of Storr
The Cuillin Hills
Today we expect pictures to capture the magic. Postcards were, are, a good yardstick. Any display today is attractive and Colin Baxter more than anyone else revolutionised the genre, half a lifetime ago now it feels. Mountain landscapes suddenly became inspiration through the eyes of photographers like Colin Baxter and Colin Prior. But could today's world of camera and technicalities even be imagined a decade ago? Nevertheless great photography still means being out there, up there, the eye of the camera only the servant of imagination's eye. Alan Gordon stands in a long line of highly-regarded names (like Banquo's progeny seen by the witches), as far from Poucher as Poucher is from George Washington Wilson.
When I recently read the twenty seven books (and much else) of Seton Gordon for an anthology I was struck by the hard graft of all he undertook. He could spend season after season on some subject. He no doubt received the same questioning as Alan, 'How do you always have such superb conditions for your pictures?' and no doubt gave a wry reply. What you don't see are the hours when the shutter never clicks; shivering in a winter bivouac waiting for a sunrise that does not materialise, seeing a view suddenly disappear in claustrophobic cloud, distressingly dealing with what the BBC forecaster once called 'showers of a continuous nature', constantly climbing thousands of feet to return with nothing. However, this is balanced by the thrilling moments when the magic works and the seeing eye creates the rather wonderful thing that is the photograph....
Hamish Brown
Extract from The Scottish Mountains by kind permission of Colin Baxter Photography. Text © Hamish Brown, images © Alan Gordon.
- The Scottish Mountains
Scotland's mountain landscapes are among the most striking and fragile in northern Europe. This collection of panoramic photography captures the physical power of Scotland's mountains, and their ever-changing beauty.