My Account of the Hajj by Nicholas Hughes
Rare are works that combine personal revelations with explanations of Islam in a manner to which Westerners can easily relate. The beauty of Nicholas' Account of the Hajj (italicise) is that an Australian farm boy with an education imbued in Christian principles, and a lifetime of exposure to religions and cultures in the Arab world and South and South-East Asia, can relate to and convey in a straightforward manner Islamic beliefs and practices that many may consider foreign. Nicholas has done a great service to those interested in religions and spirituality in his descriptions of the rites of the Hajj and explanations of their origins and meaning. As a diary, the work animates the daily life of the pilgrim in an engaging style reminiscent of writings from an earlier period of exploration. Nick expresses a personal revelation, 'the Hajj inspires a deep sense of serenity, humility and affinity with the Almighty'. The Hajj is both a voyage to Mecca as well as a recommitment to a lifelong spiritual journey. He writes, 'If my Account of the Hajj can contribute to inter-cultural and religious understanding, I am happy to have shared it with others'.
Nowhere Far by Nicholas Hughes is a deceptively simple and beautiful object-book which takes you into a dreamland of murmuring colours and hints of being adrift in the vastness of the natural world. His seemingly distant landscape photographs are in fact all created within short distances from where he finds himself: in London, Wales or Cornwall, investigating the human relationship with the environment. This is Hughes' first monograph, representing work created over the past fifteen years across six different series. A cloth-bound hardback cover with shadows of winter trees promises some darkness inside, as do the black endpapers and opening images of inky night-time seas; there is a sense of presage of the end of the world as one opens the book. One might question the choice of a portrait format for this work, given that Hughes almost exclusively produces landscape images, which generally benefit from as large a presentation as possible and are here sometimes too small, and sometimes cut by the gutter. But there is a logic to the large amount of empty page space; each photograph is given a swathe of white in which to breathe. With a foreword by Brett Rogers of The Photographers' Gallery and essays by Jay Griffiths and Martin Barnes, the reader of Nowhere Far is invited to consider a critical look at Hughes' oeuvre in both an historical and contemporary context. To call Hughes' work Turner-esque is clichü¾Ž–”¼d, but the term does convey the subtlety of tones and the watercolour-like clouds and waves of colour washing across the pages. He presents a somewhat synaesthesic approach in his work, interpreting the landscape with a Romantic eye to both the vast and the tiny, citing the strong influence of music of different kinds. The ethereal, the reflected, the not-quite-perceived. Perhaps he is photographing the music of the spheres? He often suggests rather than declares; has us glance towards the infinite while showing us dust particles. Nowhere Far takes us on an observer's journey through the elements, but the views on that journey are as if seen through obscured windows, or a kaleidoscope or Victorian binoculars. Fire, earth, air, water and life (in the form of trees, mostly, no human figures are ever seen) are never entirely clear - although we understand, sometimes only on an instinctive level, or one of memory, what it is we are looking at. One tends to initially respond to Hughes' images on an emotional level, and over time and repeated looking, perceive the deeper metaphorical story in the collected work. Some would criticize a photographer-as-artist aspiring to the abstraction of say, a Rothko, in that painting is a skill and an art from first principles, and as such more suited to creating images that seek a route to the sublime, while photography, by definition and necessity records the actual, the physically present in time and space; how can it speak in metaphor and intuition? How can it allude when it is necessarily descriptive? This book demonstrates that photography is indeed able to provide a glimpse of the incomprehensible and its shadows. As Griffiths observes, Hughes' work speaks simply of a possible and ascetic truth, that this will all remain when there is no human eye to view it. And that is both a terrible and glorious thing.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781466932296 |
| ISBN 10 | 1466932295 |
| Title | My Account of the Hajj |
| Author | Nicholas Hughes |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Trafford Publishing |
| Year published | 2013-02-07 |
| Number of pages | 102 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |