Photography - Annabelle Nicoll

“There’s quite an eerie and bleak element to your photography,” I say to Annabelle Nicoll, who’s got an exhibition of her landscapes up at Pelham House until the 17th of January. “Is that something you were looking for?” The photographs, she’s told me, were taken in the middle of Finland last winter. They all show rather desolate spaces, with no seeming sign of mankind in them at all. There is usually snow, and trees, and skies melting, colour-wise, into the ground. “That’s a funny thing,” she says. “I’ve written in the exhibition notes ‘we do not see things as they are, but as we are.’ What I mean by that is that your perception of the pictures is to do with your own state of mind, not mine. I took them on a 12-day period I spent in complete solitude. I was in a very peaceful state of mind. But bleakness? Eeriness? Not for me there wasn’t.”

I’m speaking to Annabelle on the telephone. I’m in Lewes, she’s in Tenerife, and we’re talking about a bunch of pictures taken in Finland. I tell her I’ve noticed there’s no sign of humans in them. “I was looking for that,” she says. “When there are man-made structures in a picture, it already sets up a set of presuppositions in the viewer, and points them to how they ought to view the picture. When there is no sign of man, then the picture is a blank canvas for them to make of it what they will.” I tell her about my feelings for the leafless saplings, sticking out of the snowy ground, struggling to survive the winter (see right). “They weren’t actually trees,” she says. “Those pictures were taken in the middle of a frozen lake. Fishermen leave the twigs in the ice to let people know where they have dug their ice holes.”