@davidyarrow

The New Testament This photograph in the London Times yesterday was taken 5 days ago in South Sudan. My photograph Mankind, taken in the same country in 2014, was a stepping stone for me. It was authentic, it had a biblical scale to it and it could be looked at for a long time. Haunting and hellish one minute and serene and ethereal the next. I knew it would be a mistake to go back and try to copy what I did 8 years ago - it would hint of a lack of creative progression and courage. I needed to do better and offer a new story - to go backwards would be damaging from many a level. My premise was to play on scale and my leaning was always to go bigger not smaller. The Dinka tribe are the world’s tallest people, their cattle camps are the biggest of their kind and the cattle horns are Jurassic. This is a place to play on the word “big”. My sense was that there needed to be even more of a visual overload in the frame and I found it difficult in my preconceptions to escape from the word “panoramic”. The local chief and the head of police knew where to take me and knew how to keep me safe. I would go into largely unchartered land where there the Dinka had established a camp of over 10,000 cattle. We knew to bring cow medicine to win the crowd and we came with a load from the capital Juba. The discomfort of staying in a room costing $5 a night and eating a meal for $2 whilst security costs $1000 a day, is compensated by the comfort of knowing that there is a chance of authenticity. For an artist that is pure gold. I question whether anything is truly novel these days - all creation is influenced by what we have seen elsewhere. There is about a 40-minute window for this kind of image; basically the time between the cows returning to camp in late afternoon and half an hour before sunset. The hope, of course, is that there is direct sunlight. On a dull day with full cloud cover, the light can’t bounce off the smoke quite like it does here. Meanwhile , there was some maths involved in determining the best height for the ladder that travelled 500 miles with us; too low and there would not be enough depth and too high and we would lose immersion.