In memory of Barry Thornton

I wasn't fortunate enough to have met Barry Thornton. He died on 25th October 2003, a year after I first came across his name.

It was in the dining room at the Inversnaid Photography Centre in Scotland (sadly long since gone). I was tucking into one of Linda Goulancourt's superb meals, whilst talking to her husband, André, who ran the photography part of Inversnaid. 1 Opposite me on the wall was a beautifully crafted picture of some silver birch trees 2.

'Who made that picture, André?' I asked. 'Barry Thornton', André replied. 'He comes here quite often to lead workshops and print up his own work. You should read his books'.

And so I bought his two books 'Edge of Darkness' and 'Elements'.

Barry is largely known by film photographers of a certain age for two things: his technical knowledge of film developers and his superb landscape photography.

His development formulas, 'Barry Thornton Two Bath Developer' (BTTB) and 'Dixactol', are still being marketed and indeed I still use BTTB for its compensating development.

But it’s his exploration of the 'fine-grained, sharp, fine-art' expression of landscape photography that had a profound effect on me as a photographer, even though these days I have moved away from his style of photography. It was by reading his books that I acquired a love of medium format photography which persists to this day. His love of his Rollei SL66 camera influenced my move to the Hasselblad and Mamiya MF systems.

As an aside, Barry's daughter contacted me to say that her young son (Barry's grandson) was very interested in photography. What better way to start than to look at his grandfather's pictures? Aspiring photographers, whether film or digital, would do well to study his works.

Notes

1 At the time, Inversnaid was a magnet to fine art photographers - this was the pre-digital era

2 Barry's picture of silver birches taken at Inversnaid is reproduced in 'Elements' (page 72) (and, I think, on the dining room wall at Inversnaid in 2002),