I am a physicist. I work on the design of scientific instruments, creating optical systems for charged particle beams used in mass spectrometry and ion mobility. After taking a degree in Physics at the University of York (UK) and completing a PhD working at the Atomic Energy Authority Harwell Laboratory in Oxfordshire, I joined a group of companies which designed and built mass spectrometers in Cheshire, England. I now work from my home in the Peak District, as part of a team which has other members in Germany.

I live in a National Park in central England. Most of my photographs have been made within the British Isles, with particular emphasis on the immediate surroundings near my home in the limestone hills and moorlands of Derbyshire and Cheshire, and in contrast to this, the East Anglian coast, where I grew up. Whilst there are some expansive landscapes in the galleries, I mostly find subjects in smaller scenes - aspects of the structure of the landscape and forms of objects within it which I find interesting or which invoke in me some kind of emotional response. 

The galleries are a work-in-progress and will be added to over time. I hope you find in them images of interest.

Philip Marriott.

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Essays

PHILIP MARRIOTT : A PAINTER’S LENS

Philip Marriott paints with his camera. He is one of those photographers who denies his medium its indexical role, tasking it instead with the job of suggestion. The placeness of places, even the most manmade, dissolves into atmosphere, or never gels in the first place, Marriott having shied away from simply recording things. It’s not a matter of abstracting from the real world; it’s a matter of Marriott regarding the world as already abstract and documenting its elaborate play of forms as is. 

Marriott is a landscape artist of the first degree, coaxing as much poetry out of ground and sky -- and, notably, everything our species has erected between -- as he can. His debt to Constable and Turner, Impressionism and Tonalism, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, among others, is unhidden. But in following in these footsteps, Marriott wears his own shoes. His insistence on making the camera an instrument of painterly evocation, his allegiance to the abject and the poignant, his refusal to do more than hint at narrative -- and equal refusal to suppress those hints -- define his vision. Marriott’s act of seeing is more than an act of acknowledging, it is an act of sensing. 

Humans are missing from Philip Marriott’s images for a reason: the world he photographs exists only in memory. It has been abandoned to our dreams.

Peter Frank. 
Art critic, curator, and poet who lives and works in Los Angeles.

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One thing I find perturbing yet strangely engaging about these images is that they defy narration. They resist being put into words. This is not because the images are abstract; mostly they are not. But neither are they simply realist, and they resist the too-neat categorisation of 'impressionist' also. In comparison with oil painting we are somewhere between James McNeill Whistler and Edward Hopper, with occasional hints of Jackson Pollock and David Hockney. Marriott is interested in offering us the chance simply to look and to see more fully whatever is there. He invites us to see each scene in its own right, not as a metaphor for something else, and not as an object of quick aesthetic appraisal either.

Marriott's medium is not spoken and temporal, it is visual and without time. Each image on its own is not putting an argument or telling a story, but is simply offering a chance for us to be more fully present ourselves as we pay attention to what is there. What is there to be seen. And yet the collection as a whole tells the story of this attention, and the connectivity that can result.

The collection returns to some thoughts that are not quite themes but perhaps recollections or resonances. One is the movement from solid forms to flowing forms, displayed for example in trees recovering from winter snow, or hay bales almost flowing into one another after the effects of water damage, or the long grass laid low by rain, stationary yet swirling, and contrasting with the upright stalks that remain. Another is the natural world haggard but recovering after the punishment of the elements. A third is the natural world achieving a variety of artistic effects without our aid. And a running theme is that our situation in the landscape is to venture through a world which is not easy or comfortable but which rewards our gaze. 

Marriott shows us a landscape unpopulated, but if there were a figure in the landscape, it would perhaps be the poet R. S. Thomas's lone Welsh farmer, ``Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud". Thomas was another who sought out that degree of isolation that permitted him to pay attention. He too returned to familiar landscapes and seascapes "Daily over a period of years". And his conclusion invokes that same sense of rewarded patience that Philip Marriott is sharing with us. "Ah, but a rare bird is rare."

Andrew Steane.

Professor of Physics. Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford University. Author of Science and Humanity.

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Equipment

Cameras used (for the most part):
Hasselblad X1D-II-50C; Leica M10 & M10-R; Leica M [type 240].

Lenses :
Hasselblad: XCD 3.5/45mm; XCD 1.9/80 mm; XCD 3.5/30mm; XCD 45P.

Leica: Summicron-M 50mm APO; Summicron-M 28mm; Summicron-M 90mm APO; Super-Elmar-M 21mm; Summarit-M 75mm; Summaron-M 28mm; Thambar-M 90mm.

Voigtlander: Nokton 40mm f/1.2; Nokton 50mm f/1.2