Fragile nature
A strong project is often what defines us as photographers. It drives us to research new subjects and push the boundaries of what creativity means, as well as giving us purpose. The same is true for professionals and amateurs alike. The satisfaction of seeing a longterm body of work in its completed form – if ever it can be ‘complete’, of course – is immense.
Scottish landscape photographer Colin Prior has understood the value of the long-term project throughout his 40-year career. The country of his birth has provided him with material for books such as Scotland’s Finest Landscapes (2014) and Scotland: The Wild Places (2001), not to mention the panoramic images that form the bedrock of so many of his hugely popular annual calendars. February 2021 will see the publication of The Karakoram: Ice Mountains of Pakistan, which is the culmination of a passion project that dates back to the mid 1990s, when Colin first visited the region – the most glaciated on the planet outside of Antarctica and the Arctic.
He’s someone who clearly knows how to play the waitingtakes him slightly off-piste, and he first had the idea for it some ten years ago. With not a panoramic to be seen, the book instead artfully juxtaposes still-life images of bird eggs with the habitats in which those birds can be found. It’s a simple approach, but a highly effective one. So where did the idea arise? ‘When was published,’ he explains, ‘it gave me some closure. I had said what I wanted to with the panorama, and I wanted another way of looking at the landscape. I wanted it to be meaningful and underpinned with a story, rather than disparate images of different parts of the country.’
