I’m back on the coach, and for this edition of the blog I’m going to take inspiration from one of the (few) blogs that I’ve visited and revisited over the course of at least a decade.
Kirk Tuck is a commercial photographer working out of Austin, Texas, but also a father, swimmer, coffee drinker, budding novelist and urban explorer. I first came across his blog when I was intrigued by the launch of the first full blown generation of mirrorless cameras back in the late noughties. Kirk had been a photographer (mainly in the portraiture space) since the film era, and I liked his approach to camera reviews and his insights into working in commercial photography, his candour about running his own business and his openness about his life and that of his family. All of this might seem a bit quaint to say now in the era of oversharing and ubiquity in social media, but at the time it was an engaging window into somebody else’s life, that seemed fresh (and, especially through the lens of the years that have passed, refreshingly unvarnished).
[Between writing this, and publishing it, Kirk has now retired the blog and taken it all offline, for fear, in part, of the content being scraped. Such a shame. But there’s an archive of the early years still available on the wayback machine:
The Visual Science Lab https://share.google/jqmQpCgPLZZPyDw06
And his new images can still be found on his Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/kirktuck/ )
He’s something of a tech and gadget enthusiast and appears to have constantly been popping into his local camera store to try out new kit, buy it, use it, blog about it, then part exchange it for the next brand and system. It helps that he’s a talented man, and so whatever kit he was using, the work was engaging. I loved looking at the medium format film portraits that he’d scan in from his earlier days and his street photography around his home city was a window into a completely different (much sunnier and much drier) world than here in South Wales.
One of the boons of blogging in a photography space, is that periodically (and regularly) he would generate posts that were primarily pictures.
That was my plan for this edition of the blog, giving you all a selection of my journeying snaps and keying it into some coaching discussion around the angle of focusing on the journey, not the destination… But wordy as I am, I’ve already half filled the page.
With a son in Sheffield, parents in Norfolk and in-laws in Kent, I’ve grown accustomed to long drives. For reasons these last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some treks back and forward to London via the coach, which has proved somewhat refreshing as it has given me the chance to catch up with some reading, some podcasts and some blogging and also to test out some of the mindfulness and “being in nature” practices that cropped up in the Happiness podcast.
When you’re driving you don’t have much scope to actually look at the environment and take it in as you’re passing through it. As a passenger that can also be the case (if you’re doomscrolling). But, inspired by Kirk, I kept a weather eye out for interesting snippets of things to see and notice on my journey. I caught some street art, a self-driving car (if it wasn’t just stuck in traffic… even AI and automation can manage being stationary). The metalwork of the Severn Bridge. I didn’t manage to catch a photo of all the tourists in central London risking life and limb to take a photo of something (which turned out, bafflingly, to me at least, to be Harrods…).
From photography portraiture with Kirk, to revisiting the painting (portraiture) of Flo Lee and Lucy Pass, I also had the pleasure of going to see their works at the Jamaica Street Studio in Bristol last night. In the same fashion that I’m drawn to coaching, because of the people, I find myself really drawn to portraiture in art.
Flo and Lucy stand out, to me, because of the focus that they place on expression. I can think of few areas of life which expend more time and energy in scrutinising in minute detail a person’s expression and from that parsing, and conveying that to others, than portraiture in all its forms. Flo’s bright colours place the expressions in sharp relief, but her willingness to paint people ‘pulling faces’ and genuinely emoting sets her apart from a lot of work which seems to overly value people looking gloomy, contemplative or bereft (I’m looking at you Taylor-Wessing prize).
Lucy’s work is more fractured, and glitchy, pulling fragments of people’s faces and sometimes abstracting the rest (a technique flo also uses, but more sparingly, which also reminds me somewhat of poetry in how it allows the reader to fill in the gaps and render the work personal to themselves). The effect Lucy achieves with this is again to pull our focus to the detail, the subtlety of a glint in the eye, the corner of the mouth and place it in a space which also broadly contextualises without explaining. If you get a chance to see any of their work ‘in the flesh’ you really should, as they’re both doing some really nifty stuff texturally, these days, which is much harder to convey via instagram.
So, how does all this relate to coaching? I think the coach journeying has given me the chance to practice what I was preaching about living in the present (when I wasn’t writing this… naturally) and the portraiture of Flo and Lucy and Kirk highlight some of the points I was talking about in terms of examining body language and expression during coaching sessions, it’s all the unspoken data that will really enrich your practice if you can dial into it.
I guess finally it gives me the chance to thank Kirk for a bit of a blueprint on how to blog honestly and candidly about work that you’re passionate about and the coincidental nature of how this can key into all aspects of your life, and whatever you do can enrich all facets (if shepherded and done with care).
I’ll probably pick up the journey, not destination angle in a future blog, when the muse dictates.
