Charlie Waite
I hated school. I was the boy looking out of the window, a dreamer. It’s the only time in my life people have been horrible to me. I wasn’t a team player. I was a weakling and a complete thicko. At around 16, I quit and left with just one O-level in English literature.
I started acting in 1968 and did it for around ten years. I loved it. I toured throughout Britain and spent some time with a theatre company in Nairobi, but in my mid-20s, I began to question whether I could bear the precarious nature of the profession.
Around then, I was photographed by a guy who photographed actors for a living and I thought, ‘This is fun.’ He said I could work for him four days a week, so I did. Then my father bought me a camera, and when I went back into repertory theatre, I started photographing the actors.
I understood how invasive photography was to actors. I knew everyone retreated when they had this thing pointed at them. They hate it; no role, no props, no costume, no stage, no play, no dialogue – they’re naked. You have to instil a sense of self-worth. I’d talk for two hours and photograph for 20 minutes. It’s all psychological.
Going back to college made me a hugely better photographer. Knowing what goes on under the bonnet doesn’t necessarily make you a better driver, but I felt I needed to know about the technical side. I didn’t want to be hit and miss, trial and error. That’s very unscientific, and I don’t think it’s really the right way to approach photography.
I began taking landscape photographs when I went to watch my wife acting in a film in Devon. While she was filming, I wandered off with my camera. I just found myself responding to a path, a wall, a valley or a cow. I thought it was nice, but I never thought of it as a career.
But when we were looking for a house, one of the sellers was the director of the illustrated books department of the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson. As we were leaving, he asked me what I did, and I said landscape photographer. It was completely untrue. I should have said, ‘I’m a hopeless out-of-work actor muddling through life,’ but I knew this was an amazing opportunity.
The first book paid very badly, but the second one was better, and when I had finished, they said, ‘What do you want to do next?’ It was crazy. I could just say to a publisher, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing a book on Italy,’ and they would say, ‘Fine.’ I don’t know that the books made much money for the publisher, and they certainly didn’t make much for me, but it allowed me to travel.
After acting, I found photography desperately lonely but hugely enriching. You can wait days for good light conditions and get very melancholic. It seems so indulgent, and you wonder if you should go home and do something worthwhile, such as working for the Samaritans. Then, suddenly, the light and everything comes together and you transcend into another dimension of joy and beauty. It’s just fantastic.
Landscape photography is about transcribing your emotional – and sometimes spiritual – experience onto a piece of paper. It’s about detecting, recognising and pre-visualising an image, and then manifesting it and making sure it remains intact from when you first saw it to the finished print. The little shutter release is actually the most modest element of that process.
Being a landscape photographer isn’t like being a vulture. You never really arrive and think, ‘Ah, great, there are all the ingredients, I’ll have that.’ It’s more of a construction process, and the more you put in, and the more you see, the more you get out.
I set up Landscape Photographer of the Year because I thought it would be brilliant to get the whole of this country celebrated. We’ve been driven mad by politics recently, and people are full of frustration about the state of British society, but we’re never really angry with our landscapes.
I hope the competition goes on and on. If it’s the one thing I leave behind after I die I’ll be really happy with that, because it’s encouraging people to go and stand in the middle of a field in the rain and wait for some magical moment to take place.
Curriculum vitae
1949 Born in Paddington, London
1960–64 Attended Lord Wandsworth College, Hampshire
1976–77 Studied photography at Salisbury College of Art
1982 The National Trust Book of Long Walks is published, the first of 28 books for which Waite took the photographs
2000 Awarded honorary fellowship of the British Institute of Professional Photography
2005 Completed filming of Seeing Scotland, a BAFTA-award-winning series made in collaboration with his daughter, filmmaker Ella Waite
2007 Set up Landscape Photographer of the Year Award
To find out more about the Landscape Photographer of the Year Award, visit www.take-a-view.co.uk.
I started acting in 1968 and did it for around ten years. I loved it. I toured throughout Britain and spent some time with a theatre company in Nairobi, but in my mid-20s, I began to question whether I could bear the precarious nature of the profession.
Around then, I was photographed by a guy who photographed actors for a living and I thought, ‘This is fun.’ He said I could work for him four days a week, so I did. Then my father bought me a camera, and when I went back into repertory theatre, I started photographing the actors.
I understood how invasive photography was to actors. I knew everyone retreated when they had this thing pointed at them. They hate it; no role, no props, no costume, no stage, no play, no dialogue – they’re naked. You have to instil a sense of self-worth. I’d talk for two hours and photograph for 20 minutes. It’s all psychological.
Going back to college made me a hugely better photographer. Knowing what goes on under the bonnet doesn’t necessarily make you a better driver, but I felt I needed to know about the technical side. I didn’t want to be hit and miss, trial and error. That’s very unscientific, and I don’t think it’s really the right way to approach photography.
I began taking landscape photographs when I went to watch my wife acting in a film in Devon. While she was filming, I wandered off with my camera. I just found myself responding to a path, a wall, a valley or a cow. I thought it was nice, but I never thought of it as a career.
But when we were looking for a house, one of the sellers was the director of the illustrated books department of the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson. As we were leaving, he asked me what I did, and I said landscape photographer. It was completely untrue. I should have said, ‘I’m a hopeless out-of-work actor muddling through life,’ but I knew this was an amazing opportunity.
The first book paid very badly, but the second one was better, and when I had finished, they said, ‘What do you want to do next?’ It was crazy. I could just say to a publisher, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing a book on Italy,’ and they would say, ‘Fine.’ I don’t know that the books made much money for the publisher, and they certainly didn’t make much for me, but it allowed me to travel.
After acting, I found photography desperately lonely but hugely enriching. You can wait days for good light conditions and get very melancholic. It seems so indulgent, and you wonder if you should go home and do something worthwhile, such as working for the Samaritans. Then, suddenly, the light and everything comes together and you transcend into another dimension of joy and beauty. It’s just fantastic.
Landscape photography is about transcribing your emotional – and sometimes spiritual – experience onto a piece of paper. It’s about detecting, recognising and pre-visualising an image, and then manifesting it and making sure it remains intact from when you first saw it to the finished print. The little shutter release is actually the most modest element of that process.
Being a landscape photographer isn’t like being a vulture. You never really arrive and think, ‘Ah, great, there are all the ingredients, I’ll have that.’ It’s more of a construction process, and the more you put in, and the more you see, the more you get out.
I set up Landscape Photographer of the Year because I thought it would be brilliant to get the whole of this country celebrated. We’ve been driven mad by politics recently, and people are full of frustration about the state of British society, but we’re never really angry with our landscapes.
I hope the competition goes on and on. If it’s the one thing I leave behind after I die I’ll be really happy with that, because it’s encouraging people to go and stand in the middle of a field in the rain and wait for some magical moment to take place.
Curriculum vitae
1949 Born in Paddington, London
1960–64 Attended Lord Wandsworth College, Hampshire
1976–77 Studied photography at Salisbury College of Art
1982 The National Trust Book of Long Walks is published, the first of 28 books for which Waite took the photographs
2000 Awarded honorary fellowship of the British Institute of Professional Photography
2005 Completed filming of Seeing Scotland, a BAFTA-award-winning series made in collaboration with his daughter, filmmaker Ella Waite
2007 Set up Landscape Photographer of the Year Award
To find out more about the Landscape Photographer of the Year Award, visit www.take-a-view.co.uk.
