Hamish Fulton
British, born 1946
Hamish Fulton’s Looking at Tomorrow (Scottish North West Highlands) documents the artist’s five-day walk across a mountainous region in Scotland. On each day of his journey, Fulton summited a different mountain, documenting the completion of the day’s walk by photographing the hill he was to climb on the following day. The captions included with each image offer a textual record of the artist’s itinerary, naming both the mountain from which the photograph is taken and the one captured by his camera. Fulton’s images convey the harsh beauty of the Highlands, but without the formal precision of photographers like Ansel Adams or Edward Weston. In many ways, Looking at Tomorrow is a renewed take on the British tradition of landscape painting, specifically the visions of a bucolic British countryside painted by artists like John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. While the style of Fulton’s photographs is far less Romantic, the artist shares the earlier generation’s impulse to document the natural world and untouched landscapes before they are transformed by industrialization.
Label from Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from The Panza Collection, 1967–1990, October 24, 2015–February 7, 2016