Nicola Taylor
Tales from The Moors Country
I have always loved being told a story and my series “Tales from the Moors Country” takes inspiration from tales and folklore of the North Yorkshire Moors, told to me as a child.
Those stories of witches and ghosts, spirits and fairies, lost loves and obscure protagonists are part of a rich tradition of exploring our relationship to place through the stories we tell, a tradition that informs my work.
My images use the environment and the character to suggest a narrative but they are deliberately ambiguous because I want the viewer to explore their own relationship to stories. I want them to notice the stories they create within their imagination.
Bio
Nicola Taylor is a photographic artist from rural North Yorkshire.
Her career began at the age of 33 when she took a course at the London College of Communication, after leaving her job as a stockbroker. She uses herself as a model and captures her images with a remote control.
Nicola has received international recognition and her work has been sold in Europe and the USA. She appeared in Series Two of the BBC2 television programme, “Show Me the Monet” and is featured in a short film on creativity in the UK, shot by BAFTA award winning filmmaker Martin Smith for Stolichnaya Vodka.
Evocative set. Number 5 is the most arresting to my eyes. Well done.
3, 5 and 9 are excellent. The others less so.
Numbers 2, 4, and 9 do it for me, especially number 2 – I love the North York Moors particularly when the heather is out in force as in this image.
I like the beginning and ending images very much. Numbers 6, 7, and 8 however seem out of place and weaken the gothic moodiness of the the others as a set. Number 6 looks like some recent wedding and/or graduation portrait photography, and numbers 7 and 8 seem to me straight out of a fashion magazine shoot. Aside from these lapses, the mood is well sustained, though my favorites are Nos. 2 and 10.
I’d love to see Nicola adopt this basic thematic approach to a totally different mood and setting.
I was disappointed in this because I have such romantic visions of the Moors leftover from childhood reading and these images show us next to nothing of them. Isn’t it a place of sweeping landscapes, rolling hills, fog, and dreary bogs? I wish the photographer would have stepped back and made the models part of the Moors rather than focusing almost entirely on the women and for-the-most-part effectively hiding the landscape. Without the title and text, I would have never guessed it was the Moors or anywhere similar.
MW – Sweeping landscapes, check. Rolling hills, check. Fog, depends when you go. Dreary bogs, nothing dreary about the moors – even in the rain.
#2 is great!
keep it up.
Congrats!
Thank you all for taking the time to look and comment. For a relatively new photographer like me, discussion is always helpful.
Hi Nicola!
First of all, congratulations on being published in BURN! :))
My first vision of the moors, as with MW, was through the family Bronte and all their ghost stories ;) and through other books…and then i spend a week rambling about there with my Aunt when I was 14. Funny, because at that time the sun was strong and every moor or hill or lake or wood or village i visited was all lit up by the achy and brilliant sun. then i thought, damn, what was it with the Bronte’s or the BBC with foggy, dodgy, ghost-ridden Moors ;)))…anyway….
What I do like about your approach is that you have personalized your own personal and romantic (Romantic in the sense of Romanticism, gothic, etc) relationship to your experience of the moors, which does seem literary. I am ALWAYS all for personal vision and personal expression and for sure re-creation. Camera is not just an eye, but can also be a brush, a scalpel, a chisel, a gun. For me, the images that work the strongest are those where the Moors, or rather, the Land is the real subject and the model (you?) is an extension of that, rather than those with a woman as the center….like ALOT #3 (maybe my favorite), 4, 6 :)))…those images, for me, go beyond just pictorial representation of an idea, but become cinematic and lyrical expressions of that lovely twining of body and land…in a world: real mystery….
anyway, i’m sure Jane Eyre Catherine or the French Lieutenant’s Woman would be pleased with their portrait as 5 as well :))
thanks again for sharing, and best of luck as you pursue your work :))
cheers
bob
This is interesting. Looks like high end advertising photography, and I say that in a good way.
Oh Nicola, how I envy your imagination and how you translate it into a reality (of sorts). I love the mystery, beauty and spirit of this work. All I ask is that you keep going on and on and on…
Nicola, congratulations. Lovely stuff. I like where you are going with this.
Patricia, lovely to see you comment here, miss your presence. Hope all is well.
You do have a great imagination and ability to translate it into beautiful photographically-based images. As to the idea of just letting the images tell whatever stories they will into the mind of the viewer, this might work better for me if I were sitting home with a well-printed book on a completely lazy day.
I can easily see this as illustrations in a children’s book, accompanied by well-written, simple words. Then I think it capture me.
Fortunately, I am in a spot with very weak wifi and so the pictures take a long time to change and I wind up looking at them a bit longer than I normally would online.
PS: You are a beautiful, mysterious, lady.