Nowhere Far, the first monograph by Nicholas Hughes (b. 1963), covers a 15-year period and spans six separate series of abstract and ethereal landscapes. Hughes’s work is concerned with people’s current relationship to the landscape and the environment; his images examine the space between the world humans inhabit and that which nature claims as its own.
Hughes’s photographic series focus on the changing patterns of nature, observed over several years in multiple locations. His working practice has evolved so he only makes photographs within walking distance of his homes – “In Darkness Visible” was produced in London’s public parks and “Field” in Cornwall. Each image, despite the self-imposed geographical restriction, “is meant to represent nature worldwide and not the specific location of creation,” states the publisher, GOST Books, in a press release.
The photographs are made using a large-format film camera and are printed by hand in a color darkroom.
Many of the titles Hughes has given the images “allude to musical analogies, while visually embracing the modernist formal language of minimalism and abstraction” explains the press release.
An essay by writer Jay Griffiths is included in the book. In it, she describes her experience of viewing Hughes’s images:
I can hear these photographs. Utterly non-human. Non-orchestral. Gasps and summingness, the sound of space breathing, the music of all that is. Water is given voice; clouds are portrayed speaking unearthly for themselves; trees sound wholly telluric and leaf-stems speak like consonants in the vowels of the air.
Nowhere Far
by Nicholas Hughes
GOST Books
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