Malta Without the People

The View From Above

There is an altitude at which Malta improves dramatically. I have found it. It is also, rather conveniently, the altitude at which nobody can ask me for directions, tell me where I should park, or stand directly in front of the thing I am trying to photograph.

This is not why I bought a drone, obviously. I bought it for photography. The fact that it also provides several hundred metres of separation between me and the rest of humanity is merely an unexpectedly excellent feature.

From the ground, Malta is a small island attempting to contain an astonishing amount of stuff. Roads, limestone, balconies, scaffolding, buses, delivery vans, building sites, tourists, locals and motor vehicles all occupy the same limited piece of geography with the confidence of people who have never been told there is a capacity limit.

There is always something moving. There is always something making a noise. And there is nearly always a car parked in precisely the place where you need to be, because its driver has apparently reached the conclusion that stopping in the middle of the road is not an obstruction but a perfectly legitimate form of personal administration.

You wait. They wait. Nobody knows what they are waiting for. Malta continues.

“The human machinery begins to vanish.”

Then I send the drone upwards. The camera points down, the gimbal settles, and something rather remarkable happens. The human machinery begins to vanish. Traffic becomes a few tiny moving marks. Houses lose their domestic clutter. Roads become lines. Walls become borders. Fields become blocks of colour. Salt pans turn into geometry.

The island stops behaving like a collection of places people have names for and starts behaving like a composition. It is almost suspiciously well designed.

That is what I love about photographing Malta from above. The drone does not make the island beautiful. It removes some of the visual information that normally prevents me from noticing that it already is.

A salt pan ceases to be an industrial installation and becomes an extraordinary diagram. A dry stone wall no longer has the tedious responsibility of keeping anything in or out. It becomes a line. And once something becomes a line, I start having opinions about it.

This is where my fascination with Art Deco comes in, because I did not have to invent most of the geometry. Malta has been quietly producing it for centuries.

Stone and earth divide themselves with remarkable confidence. Then there is the colour: pale limestone, dry ochre, rust, blue water, green vegetation. It is a palette that looks as though somebody spent weeks selecting it, although in reality somebody has mostly been trying to grow potatoes in it.

From the ground, you are too close to understand the arrangement. From above, suddenly the whole thing makes sense.

When the Horizon Disappears

The disappearance of the horizon is particularly useful. Our brains are rather fond of perspective, scale and context. Remove them and the familiar becomes unreliable.

A road can look like a graphic stroke. A cluster of fields can resemble architecture. A circular agricultural structure can become a diagram. A patch of cultivated earth can acquire the authority of an abstract painting while remaining, rather inconveniently, a patch of cultivated earth.

“I want the viewer to recognise the place and then briefly lose confidence in what they are recognising.”

That ambiguity is the interesting part. I want the viewer to recognise the place and then briefly lose confidence in what they are recognising. It is Malta, obviously. It just happens to be behaving like something else.

The photograph itself is therefore only the beginning. I am looking for rhythm, repetition, negative space, contrast, surface and those strange relationships between forms that become visible once the human scale has been removed.

I am not trying to make the landscape artificial. I am trying to expose the fact that visually it was already behaving like constructed design.

There is, unfortunately, a technical component. Photography remains annoyingly resistant to the simple principle that the photographer should merely point at something interesting and have the machine produce a masterpiece.

I have to deal with exposure, shutter speed and ISO. I have to keep the gimbal stable, position the aircraft accurately, watch the changing light and preserve enough tonal information in the RAW file to give me something to work with later.

Shadows should contain detail. Highlights should contain information. This seems reasonable, yet the universe continues to produce images in which the brightest part of the frame is essentially a small declaration of defeat.

Then there is wind. The atmosphere, for reasons I find personally offensive, continues to move even when I have found a perfect composition.

There is something wonderfully modern about standing in a field while controlling a machine hundreds of metres away, staring at a screen and making decisions about line, colour and texture while pretending that the little battery symbol in the corner is not becoming the most important piece of information in your entire existence.

Shadows lengthen. Limestone gains depth. Furrows become visible. Water begins reflecting with real intensity. Colours separate into those extraordinary Maltese combinations of stone, ochre, rust, blue and green.

At the right moment the surface becomes almost tactile. You look at the photograph and have the peculiar sensation that you could run your fingers across it.

This matters to me because geometry on its own can become sterile, and Malta is many things, but sterile is not one of them.

Stone has scars.Earth has furrows.Salt leaves deposits.Walls carry weather.

Vegetation interrupts whatever geometry I thought I had found. Water refuses to remain obedient. Those surfaces contain time. I want to keep that time in the image, even when I later begin pulling the photograph apart and rebuilding it.

Pulling the Photograph Apart

That rebuilding happens in Photoshop, where the original photograph is subjected to a level of scrutiny normally reserved for tax returns and people suspected of having lied about something.

I use selections, masks, layers, tonal adjustments, colour relationships, compositing and drawn elements. I bring in textures from photographs I have made and collected over the years.

I may isolate part of a landscape, reshape it, repeat it, blend it with another section, strengthen one colour, suppress another, or redraw a line until the image develops a new internal logic.

This can take hours. It can also take considerably longer when I discover that the thing I have just spent an hour improving was better before I touched it.

“There is a difference between making a decision and selecting one from a menu.”

I work with a graphic tablet because I want the image to retain a physical relationship with my hand. There is a difference between making a decision and selecting one from a menu, and I am interested in the first.

Presets have their uses. I am not against automation. I simply do not trust a preset to look at a Maltese field in late afternoon and decide, with the necessary conviction, that the texture in the lower left corner needs to be slightly more magnificent.

That decision remains mine, unfortunately.

The Art Deco transpositions grew naturally from this process. The drone photograph provides the architecture. The digital work exaggerates the qualities that made me stop in the first place.

Natural colours are pushed into stronger relationships. The image moves somewhere between poster, painting, architectural ornament and an extremely ambitious floor tile. I like that territory.

What interests me most is the point at which an image stops being merely photographic without stopping being real. The original place is still there. Stone remains stone. A field remains a field. Water remains water.

But the relationships have been altered enough that the viewer has to pause. That pause is valuable. Recognition and uncertainty can occupy the same frame quite comfortably. They may even get on with each other better than most people do.

The hours spent working on an image are useful for another reason. Time exposes weaknesses.

Something I thought was brilliant at midnight looks like a minor industrial accident in the morning. So I remove it.

This is called editing.

After the fourth revision, it begins to feel more like a personal disagreement with a rectangle.