Writing about David Yarrow’s photography is a bit like texting about a sunset. You’ll never be able to do it justice, and most of the time you’d rather just get on and take in its beauty.
Writing about David Yarrow’s photography is a bit like texting about a sunset. You’ll never be able to do it justice, and most of the time you’d rather just get on and take in its beauty. But it’s worth a go, perhaps — not least because Yarrow has produced some of the most remarkable images of the modern era, which often spark as many questions as they answer. The photographer’s work and mindset are characterised by mind-boggling ambition. Nothing is too big, or powerful, or carnivorous to capture in his lens. There are the striking black-and-white images of wild beasts of the plain, so intimate and close that you can almost feel the snarling lion’s breath; but also the rich, finely poised curations of unlikely scenes — a wolf in a frontier saloon bar, stealing the show from Cindy Crawford — which read like short films. Uniting them all, perhaps, is a sense of drama and cinema — even the wild, giant elephants, strutting before towering mountain peaks and the setting sun, seem to pose like models, somehow.
Some of Yarrow’s more recent images from the American West, meanwhile — like the shot of a herd of bison barrelling through the Montana snow — are some of his purest and most striking yet. They seem so natural, so effortless — and so it’s always interesting to hear Yarrow talk about the graft and guile that goes into just a single frame, which is often the culmination of weeks of work and not a little luck. I think this speaks to the humility of the man — always open, always affable, always candid (traits, perhaps, that trickle somehow into his images.) But it reminds us also that the process, in anything we do, is just as important as the final image; that it is the creating, not just the creation, that counts. Of his recent The American West collection, for example, the photographer says: “we chose to tell stories [of] the America that so many know and love, with its long roads running to the horizon. No other country in the world offers locations as visually rewarding as America, and they are integral to the fabric of the American dream.” Yarrow’s unique genius, as ever, is that he has captured that very America beautifully — and yet created an entirely new one, too.
JOSEPH BULLMORE
