Introduction to 'Wicklow Photographs'
by Selina Guinness

The geography of our imaginations is curiously resistant to change. Within the asphalt city, many people dream of an elsewhere which will strip them of their daily lives, and extend to them a landscape where their unencumbered selves can stretch to full capacity in the rarefied air. High above Tintern Abbey, looking down on the 'wild secluded scene', Wordsworth found himself 'well-pleased to recognize / In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts.' Yosemite National Park and the Arizona deserts provided the Californian photographer, Ansel Adams, with the dramas of light and rock he needed to explore how these wildernesses might, in their vastness and pristine nature, come to serve as religious ideas in and of themselves.

As these examples attest, for the natural world to be perceived as landscape it must be framed first in the imagination, where it is shaped by individual memory and desire. This remains the case, even when, as John Moriarty suggests, the observer most wishes his individuality to be annihilated in the majesty of the experience. By choosing lenses that most mimic the range of the human eye, Peter Evers performs the paradox of evaporating into the view through the camera's lens. He calls attention to the quietness of his vantage point and his own 'language of the sense', just as he withdraws from it.

It will surprise some readers of this book to find that Evers has discovered his sublime, not in the mythic 'West' of Ireland, but in the glens of Wicklow on the East coast. His moonlit photographs of 'The Coronation Plantation' at the Sally Gap, achieved with a four minute exposure, suggest a primordial light far removed from the glare of Dublin city, that lies a mere sixteen miles away to the north-east. In the pools of the Cloghoge and Avonmore Rivers, he discovers the swirl of nebulae as water briefly becomes another element entirely, tar perhaps on its way to becoming rock. As deer pick their way across the quartz-covered scree of a deserted miner's village, the migration patterns of vaster herds momentarily come to mind, making Wicklow seem as indomitable a country as any nineteenth-century frontier.

The yellow rushes at Inchavore are divided by a rough path; the Glenealo Falls descend through Coillte plantations towards a distant lake. Gorse and foxgloves colonise the rough ground after conifers have been clear-felled for commercial use. If, in this sense of renewal, nature offers us consolation for our mortality, the twisted and lichen-covered branches in these pictures are not just living sculptures, but memento mori, and the piebald ponies and white muzzled donkeys, clowns in a danse macabre. The mobile homes of an abandoned holiday camp at Bonagrew fit in here as reminders that all memories are fragile, apt to decay into fragments as quickly weathered as the net curtains and aluminium frames flittering in the wind. Technically, this sense of mortality is embodied in Evers' decision to use discontinued film stock for some of these shots (Kodak 160T for 'Fireweed at Rathnew') and in the lith-prints, which demand the photographer wait until he sees the unique image emerge out of its own shadow in the darkroom's trays. This patience is rewarded in the beauty of 'Beneath Sheepbanks towards Lough Tay’ and 'Wild Garlic at Avondale,' where every frond of vegetation seems precisely textured and delineated against the overall composition.

Only when a photographer has sufficiently mastered the techniques of his craft to surrender quietly to the image, can a landscape emerge as gloriously sublime as Wicklow appears here. Any traveller can marvel at this county's great bounty, but only the exceptional can bring its beauty home in their descriptions. Like the playwright J. M. Synge before him, Peter Evers has made these landscapes into the kind of wild and credible elsewhere that might serve as 'the anchor of our purest thoughts', which we might want to take home.

Genre: Landscape Photography
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-9560637-0-0
Page count: 190
Images: 87
Published: October 2008