This photograph will always have a significance for me that has very little to do with the photograph itself.
It was the first photograph I took as a resident of the Scottish Highlands.
I had photographed the Highlands many times before, but this was different. I wasn’t visiting anymore. I wasn’t passing through before eventually heading home.
This was home.
Perhaps that’s why I have such an attachment to what is, on the surface, a fairly straightforward scene.
An old wooden boat sits tethered to the bank, surrounded by reeds and autumn grasses. Its weathered timber provides the strongest colour in the frame, while above it hangs a huge mass of dark, threatening cloud. The little flash of blue rope seems almost incidental, yet somehow becomes one of those tiny details my eye always finds.
There are undoubtedly photographs I’ve taken since that are stronger. There are certainly more spectacular landscapes and more dramatic moments in my collection.
But photography doesn’t work purely on those terms.
A photograph can acquire importance because of what was happening in our lives when we took it.
Whenever I look at this one, I don’t see an old boat beneath a threatening sky. I see the beginning of something.
I see the point at which years of travelling to the Highlands became living here. A landscape I had spent so long visiting, exploring and photographing had finally become part of my everyday life.
That’s why this photograph could never be judged by me purely as an image.
It marks a dividing line — before I lived here, and after.
Thousands of photographs have followed it.
But there could only ever be one first photograph.
And this is mine.