Richard Higginbottom - Room One
WORDS BY CHLOË TIBBATTS
Room One, a book by Huddersfield based photographer Richard Higginbottom, was created for the Index Visual Arts Festival in response to Yorkshire Sculptural International. Where primary observations of sculptural works informed the photographic methodology.
Turning through the pages of Higginbottom’s photobook Room One, we are welcomed into an imagined gallery space featuring sculptural forms of everyday objects and the commonplace. Our eyes move from image to image, observing and inspecting the forms of his subject as you might a sculpture in the round. In his research, Higginbottom visited galleries and observed the ways that people interacted with sculptural work, because he was, “interested in how they tuned in to different sections or looked from different angles when navigating the work”. This experience of viewing work is something he recreates within the book through careful curation. The cover is a fold out poster showing the same moment from different perspectives and as it is unfolded, the viewer plays with revealing small sections. As the viewer uncovers the subject, the paper becomes a sculptural form in their hands. The accompanying description explains that Room One, “constitutes a visual interrogation of everyday objects, an investigation of their forms through space and time”.
Higginbottom explains that this project “denies the authority of a unilateral viewpoint” and challenges the notion that photography can only reveal a fixed perspective of its subject matter. The images range from what appear to be elements of a building site; to foliage; to a white cotton shirt skirting a girl’s shoulders. Viewpoints change and shift throughout the project, encouraging the viewer to take a second to rethink the effect of the new angle, while the use of negative white space on the pages carefully directs the viewers eye to subvert the initial interpretation. A soft abstract image appears to have no clear subject matter, beyond a curve and three triangles of shadow breaking through on the righthand side, until the eye is drawn to the smaller image on the left that reveals it to be the light and shadow from set glasses on a tablecloth.
At first the project seems to focus on inanimate objects, and it is only on closer inspection that we become aware of the people and animals present. A hand pressed awkwardly into her side, a woman stands facing away from the camera nonchalantly, indifferent to its presence. This most likely subconscious hand movement is then frozen in time, removed from its context, and we are left free to speculate and scrutinise it. In another image, a dog on a chain is looked down on as it gazes away at something in the distance, its spine curved slightly to form a reversed ‘S’ shape. The image is quiet, and the dog seems unaware of the photographer’s presence - as are we. In the next image the dog is turned towards the camera. The foliage in the lower part of the image is no longer creating a barrier to hide behind. Does this change how we view the dog? This is the only image in the series where the subject is looking back at the photographer and the viewer. When asked about the dog Higginbottom recalls that he, “wasn’t conscious of the dog looking directly down the lens when shooting this subject. Through the process of editing the work down from hundreds of images I became more and more drawn to this set of photos. They became a part of the final body of images because I could imagine looking at something sculptural in this manner - directly at it, studying it with intrigue”. Adding, “Whether viewing sculptures, photographs or making photographs, we are given the opportunity to look intensively and study with meticulousness.”
Many of the images feature a dominant line that seems to speak out above the rest. The line from a chain, which appears to fence off a courtyard, cuts through the image and seems to connect to the dominant line in the next image - a washing line with a towel drying. Higginbottom likens his work to cubism, a movement which reduced everything to geometric outlines and aimed to show different viewpoints within the same space to suggest the subject’s three-dimensional form. This also happened to emphasise the two-dimensional flatness of canvas. Like painting, photography is two-dimensional, or arguably even amorphous as a photograph at its core is recorded light. Higginbottom’s images certainly reduce his subject matter to geometric shapes but, rather than layering the viewpoints, he suggests the form through the connecting lines in his images that tie them together.