For Kim Grant, there’s no place like home. The nurse turned landscape photographer lives in a seaside village on the scenic Moray coast in northeast Scotland.
There is a calming assurance in her voice that is both clear and rhythmical, a reflection, I think, of life’s gentle pace in her home surroundings: she looks and sounds relaxed. “Have you been out this morning?” I ask when we both get our video link up and running. “For a walk, yes, but not with the camera,” she replies. Except for five years in Aberdeenshire, Kim has lived all her life in Moray and recently returned to her home village of Burghead. Her affection for the place runs deep: “It’s a wonderful place to live and to do photography because you’ve got it all here, the seaside and woodlands, farmland and rivers. You’ve got everything really, apart from mountains, but I’m not really into mountain photography.”
And yet, this summer Kim surprised thousands of followers on her YouTube channel by announcing that she had fallen out of love with traditional landscape photography. More than that, she added: “If I’m completely honest, I find it boring now.” However, she continues to see herself as a landscape photographer; the difference is that Kim’s new work is more intricate, less obvious, and triggered by an emotional connection to her subject rather than a snap response to a spectacular view. But to fall out of love with traditional landscape photography means she must have been in love to begin with, so I start by asking her the obvious question…
What was it that made you fall in love with landscape photography in the first place?
When I was a teenager, I used to go down
