Guest Blogger Reflects on Value of the Familiar

Oak and beech forest in the Morvan, France Niall’s comment: My lifetime’s ambition to live in a forested landscape was realized when we came to France. Sometimes the woods here feel sinister, sometimes protective but their very presence enriches our lives here.

The COVID-19 lockdown gave Niall Benvie, wildlife and landscape photographer and photo tour leader, an unexpected opportunity to spend time in his local woods before migrating to France. Here he reflects on the value of the familiar, wherever it’s to be found.

by Niall Benvie, guest blogger

From February until June, Charlotte and I are normally working flat-out organising and hosting our Retreats in Scotland and mainland Europe. But this year, as for everyone else in this sector, business came to grinding halt within weeks of our first Retreat on Harris. What before had been very tight schedule – because we were also moving to live in France – suddenly slackened into weeks emptied of work commitments. We just needed to make sure we were packed. Not withstanding the terrifying loss of income, the time felt like a rare gift and the luxury of being at home in spring was something we hadn’t experienced in years.

Niall’s comment: This composite image of plants found in the same riverside location I visited over several weeks is an illustration of the biodiversity rather than a documentary image. I think there is a place for both, so long a it’s clear to the viewer which is which.

Revisiting Home

We were fortunate that there are some little-visited woods close to home in eastern Scotland and I took to visiting them in the early morning for several weeks. Something like a routine emerged – another ritual forgotten in the whirl of our work life. I was spending time in places I had first visited in the late ‘70s, seeing plants still growing on the same patch they had all that time ago and discovering new ones that, by the agency of bird or water, had found their way into the community in the meantime. It felt like following a thread back to my youth. And soon, I would leave all this behind for the narrow lanes and squat hedges, crisp, thyme-seasoned summer meadows and sombre, sweating woods of the Morvan.

View from Les Rochers du Carnaval , France Niall’s comment: The southern Norvan is certainly not wilderness but nevertheless, in this cultural landscape, there is a lot of space for wild nature in the forest and hedges, meadows and ponds.

Nothing to Regret

Yet there was nothing to regret. The community I’ve known since my youth is the same one I find along our lane in France, albeit enlivened by lime in the soil and a more benevolent climate. I know the names of our neighbours, know their stories and their relationships. The fact they are in France rather than Scotland is just a geographical detail. I’ve never lived before in a neighbourhood occupied by the classy set we now mix with in summer – golden orioles, nightingales, woodlarks, hoopoes and bee eaters – but we feel like we know even them through long acquaintance in heavily-thumbed, closely-read bird books.

Niall comment: Turtle Dove. Many species of birds that have become rare or extinct in Britain remain common in our part of France, in part because of the lack of intensive agriculture. This is one of the turtle doves that visit our garden each day in the summer.

Profound Sense of Dislocation

A profound sense of dislocation can come about when we go somewhere we don’t know our neighbours, where we might struggle even to recognise the family, let alone know their names.The new faces can feel exciting at first as we get to know who they are. There are lots of new things to photograph. But too often, after a while, that excitement fades into a dull sense of disconnection: after all, there is no shared history; no engrained familiarity. That comes only with time. I’ve sometimes thought how exciting it would be to photograph insects and plants in the tropics where there is an abundance of diversity the likes of which I’ve never seen before. But I know already I’d produce a pretty superficial treatment showing, to those who know that community, scant understanding of what I looking at. It would be akin to blundering along in the Carnaval do Brasil wearing a tatty old kilt, clutching a can of Irn Bru. I’m a Boreal Bloke, through and through, whether I like it or not. I know my place.

Does this preciousness about the familiar make me – or anyone else who thinks this way – parochial? Am I too wedded to “the parish”? Maybe I am, but having been given the chance to be in one place for so long, to have its soundscapes echo in my head and browse its thick catalogue of textures with my fingers year after year, how can I deny it? Few of us are afforded this privilege. I’m just grateful.

Niall’s comment: I am always keen to explore new ways of presenting my subjects, in this case, describing the key colors of the subject in a series of “watchercolour” swatches sampled from the plant.

Lessons of the Pandemic

One of the lessons of the pandemic has been that we can live well with fewer choices. If the press is to be believed, all we really need from supermarkets is pasta, loo roll, flour and booze. And has anything happened to all those millions of people who were unable to fly during the lockdowns? Far from enriching our lives, an excess of choice is disorientating as we are called upon to make endless decisions about how to optimise our “happiness”. If the world is your oyster, you’d better hope it’s not a bad one. When choices are circumscribed we can live out to the edges of that space and fill it until contentment overflows. A space of infinity possibilities that rolls away to the horizon and beyond never has any prospect of being filled.

Niall’s comment: Buzzard Feather. The opportunity to revisit the same few places day after day was something that, in our normal work life, was impossible. I think that many photographers got the opportunity to reconnect with their local area during the pandemic.

Finding Contentment

I know that during this time, other photographers have also found contentment in their “parish”, in accepting the limits imposed by the lockdown and converting those to a virtue by reconnecting with their local community, watching it change day by day as the glorious spring of 2020 unfurled itself. For others, though, it has heightened awareness of how diminished their natural neighbourhoods have become and that when we turn to them for solace in the time of pandemic, they have little left to offer. Once this is all over, I hope that greater priority is given to restoring them than to getting 50 types of crisps back on the supermarket shelves.

Niall Benvie has worked as a photographer, writer, designer and guide for the past 27 years and has gained a reputation for innovation in during that time. He and his wife, Charlotte, moved from their native Scotland to France in 2020 and together they run Food and Photography Retreats Ltd.<