Clyde Butcher

Last year I went to Miami with my family and we went on a swamp tour in the Everglades. Normally you aren’t allowed to do this, but every year on labour day weekend Clyde Butcher allows the public to have a swamp tour. Butcher owns a property in the Everglades, which is where his Gallery is. The swamp tour was amazing and I got to see a lot of the everglades no one has ever seen before. After the tour, we went into the gallery which was also a shop and got to see a lot of Clyde Butchers work. Some of his photographs were massive, while other were printed quite small. Clyde Butcher was there himself and signed my book. It was amazing to meet him, he was incredibly kind and had some interesting views on photography (which he also mentions in his book).

The photo to the right is called Tamiami Trail #10 and it’s the first photograph in the book. It reminds me of the heathland stage photographs I have. There is an incredibly far vantage point in the photograph, which shows the massive area Clyde Butcher is taking photographs of. Towards the end of the photograph, you can see the growth of trees, which in my photographs symbolises the next stage of succession. The main difference between this photo and my heathland photos, other than the fact these are black and white, is the height of the horizon. You can see so much of the grassland in this photo, which is why it works. If the horizon was in the centre of the photo, just like in my work, it wouldn’t look as good. The reason, however, why I decided to have the horizon of my photos in the middle is because I’m photographing 4 different stages. If the horizon was at this height for a woodland photo it would look horrible, and you wouldn’t see much of the woodland, just of the ground. 

The photo to the left is called Trout Creek #3. The horizon is a lot more similar to what I have in my photos. Again, it looks quite similar to the heathland stage in my photos. The vantage point is very far away, which is what I want to have in my photographs too. The sky is incredibly dramatic. I have had one shoot where the sky is dramatic, but I wasn’t really the biggest fan of it. For this photo, the dramatic sky works. It looks very menacing, while the landscape is quite simple and beautiful. This could imply that the everglades, or landscapes in general are under a great amount of threat due to human activity as well as natural occurrences (such as succession).