Richard & Janet Bourdon: Striving to make nothing look interesting (A journey into minimalism)

Richard and Janet describe their photographic journey as follows; ‘Like many people we’ve always had cameras and recorded holidays and life events, but we didn’t start to take our photography seriously until the early 90’s.

Then in 1991 we went on the holiday of a lifetime to Africa and came back with 10 reels of utter rubbish!…

So we decided to do something about it and joined Kirkbymoorside camera club and the rest as they say is history.

As our photography progressed through the early noughties, we started to take an interest in monochrome photography and we both developed a liking for stark, graphic, minimal images that interest has stayed with us until this day. We’re simple souls and our true passion in photography is for these really simple, pared down minimal images that we shoot in the local dales and moors.

“Striving To Make Nothing Look Interesting”.

This is a relatively new talk and the product of a great deal of procrastination over a long period of time. We knew we needed to come up with a talk about our mono work and we had the images, but we lacked a theme to give the talk a direction. In our opinion a talk can’t just be a collection of images, it has to have a direction and a story. Fortunately, one of the few good things to come out of the covid pandemic, was that we got to see a lot of good speakers and listening to them gave me some ideas for a theme for our talk. Once we got started on the talk it came together quite quickly, so we hope you find it interesting.

The talk covers our 20+ year journey into minimal mono and gives you some insight into how this process evolved and try to explain how and why we produce these stark, high key images.’