The remarkable aerial photography of John Holloway.

‘Photographing through an open [aeroplane] window in cold weather, while travelling at 80mph, with eyes streaming and fingers so cold it is impossible to feel the shutter release, then trying to compose, taking care to avoid the wing strut, with the land going past at great speed, is not easy.’

So wrote the late John Holloway, describing the process behind the remarkable series of photographs he took from a light aircraft, largely of the Sussex countryside, around the turn of the Millennium. Holloway’s inclusion in last year’s Sussex Landscape show at Pallant House Gallery has heightened interest in this remarkable project, last on public show in its entirety in the Downlandscape exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in 2004.

There was nothing haphazard about the aerial shots Holloway took. A retired art teacher, by then in his seventies, he was also a dedicated naturalist, and his compositions reflect an intimate knowledge of the terrain he photographed, explored in micro-detail before his flights, OS map in hand. Every path he photographed, he had previously trodden, prodded, felt, smelt. Timing was all-important. In order to portray the grain and texture of the hillsides in such detail, he could only shoot during a small window of time, in the weeks around the vernal equinox in March and September, on days when there was no cloud. Only then could he catch the sunlight hitting the north-facing scarp of the Downs at an angle which clearly captured the shadows accentuating the tracks and terracettes of the hillside, carved out over centuries by man and sheep. Such sunlight also highlighted in great detail the geological and archaeological contours of the Downs.

Holloway, who graduated from art school in the 50s, and became a teacher trainer at Brighton School of Art in the 60s, didn’t take up art photography until the late 70s. Beforehand he largely practiced abstract painting, and the knowledge he accrued about form and composition is clearly reflected in his landscape photographs. His influences were absorbed from painters rather than photographers: Ben Nicholson, Richard Smith, Mark Rothko. And Eric Ravilious, of course: he never forgot an exhibition of the great Sussex watercolourist he saw as a teenager, at the Towner in Eastbourne, in the late 40s. ‘I saw the world through his eyes for a while’, he later wrote.

It has been commented that Ravilious’s landscapes are often portrayed from impossibly high viewpoints, as if he were hovering over the terrain he was painting, and Holloway’s earlier landscapes were taken from high vantage points, looking down. He enjoyed solo exhibitions in the late 70s at the Gardner Arts Centre at the University of Sussex, and at Breaky Bottom vineyard. A chance encounter in 1998 gave him the idea of photographing from the air. A pilot named Busty Taylor responded to an advert he took out to sell one of his cameras, but they couldn’t agree a price. Taylor offered an aerial trip as part of the deal, and Holloway agreed.

Generally flying from Shoreham Airport, Holloway’s preferred camera was a medium-format (6x9cm) Fuji, which only allowed eight exposures per film. He also took along a Mamiya (6×4.5cm, 15 shots) and a Canon 35mm camera, which he rarely used, as it was unable to capture the detail he required. The uncomfortable conditions he worked in made changing the film extremely difficult, so he had to be very diligent at shooting, planning each image in great detail before the flight. Generally, he made sure not to include the sky in his pictures, to accentuate the abstract nature of the final images. These were hand-developed in a makeshift darkroom at his eccentric home, ‘Benallen’, in Kingston-near-Lewes, which he shared with his artist wife Denée.

There are interesting parallels with Holloway’s aerial shots and the monochrome landscapes by Maurizio Giacomelli, though Holloway didn’t know about the Italian’s work until such similarities were pointed out to him, after which he became a fan. His choice to work in black and white came early: he found that colour ‘got in the way’ and that working in monochrome accentuated the similarities between photography and etching and drawing. A collection of his aerial series can be found in the 2004 Downlandscape exhibition catalogue.

We were kindly donated a hoard of postcards from the series by Holloway’s eldest daughter, Louise Holloway, and have prepared a selection of them as a gift for annual subscribers: if you are in their number you will have found them within the pages of this magazine. We would be very happy if the rekindling of interest in John Holloway’s unique, visionary and painstakingly created work were to lead to a retrospective exhibition on the walls of an imaginative gallery, in the near future. Anyone out there?

Words by Alex Leith.