Hugo loves landscapes (From York Press)

Hugo Platt loves landscapes

9:51am Wednesday 11th January 2012 in Features

Hugo Platt went from being a dyslexic who failed at school to a printer for some of London’s top photographers. He is also an outstanding photographer in his own right. STEPHEN LEWIS reports on his new exhibition opening on Friday in York

HUGO Platt has a thing about lines. You can see them cutting across the centre of many of his landscape photographs. They draw the eye to a distant horizon, or to an intersection of land and water.

There are a couple of lines in a photograph taken somewhere in the western highlands of Scotland that he entitled simply The White House. The first, imperfectly straight, follows the contours of a loch shore where the steep flank of a mountain cuts down to the water.

It directs the eye to the tiny white house perched in the centre of the photo. The second, some distance below, follows the shadow cast by the mountain. It seems to underline the first, and add depth to the photograph.

There are more lines in another photograph, of Ballachulish in Scotland. One, almost perfectly straight, runs through the centre of the photograph, again where land meets water. Above and below, almost paralleling each other, are two more, imperfect this time: one tracing the nearer bank of the loch, the other the rising bulk of distant mountains. Above those mountains, clouds flare upwards in a brooding welter of light and shade.

The Acomb photographer likes clouds, too. He likes to just look at them, he says. Look long enough, at the right kind of clouds, he says, and “after a while, you can see the plateau that the clouds are sitting on”.

There are plenty of clouds, and moody, brooding lakes and mountains, in the series of Hugo’s photographs that will be going on display at York’s Bar Lane Studios later this week.

Inspired by the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Hugo has been photographing landscapes for years, travelling extensively around the world to do so. Everywhere he goes, he is looking for that special image.

“When I’m travelling, I’m constantly scanning the landscape 50 times a second, looking” he says. “It’s got to have that something extra.”

It isn’t only the compositions that make Hugo’s photographs stand out, however: it is the clarity and detail, too. You need to see them up close and large fully to appreciate this. But the detail in The White House, his best-selling print, is astonishing. Every bit of the photograph, from the white house in the centre, to the tiny boat in the foreground, to the ridges and folds of the green mountains rising behind – where you seem able almost to see individual blades of grass – is presented with crystal clarity.

It is partly because Hugo uses film rather than a digital camera. Photographs taken on film – especially the old-format, large-gauge 10x8 inch film, such as was once used on plate cameras he often likes to use – have a depth of quality that it is not possible to achieve with digital. He has nothing against the newer technology. “It is sharper. But film has more depth.”

Part of the extraordinary quality of Hugo’s photographs is down to his skill as a dark room printer. He learned from the best and prints all his own work.

In the 1980s, he spent ten years working in London at the studios of Robin Bell, one of the greatest photographic printers of his time, who worked with top photographers such as Terence Donovan, Clive Arrowsmith, David Bailey and Eve Arnold, who died last week.

The young Hugo – who is the son of local artist Russell Platt – had gone to London at the age of 25 with his brother and a friend. “I hitch-hiked to London,” he says. “A bit like Dick Whittington.”

Up until then, he had tried his hand at a few things. Dyslexia had stopped him from doing well at school in York. When he left, with almost no qualifications, his father told him he didn’t need to decide what he wanted to do until he was 25. So he worked for a while as a labourer, helping to build the York outer ring road.

“You know where the A64 goes over the river south of York? There’s a bit of a dip: that’s my fault,” he says. He then worked at Rowntree for five years. Having failed at school, he went to night school to study photography, first to O-level, then A-level. He did work as a photographer for the York Advertiser, which was edited by a friend.

Then he hit 25 and decided it was time he made something of himself. In London, he started trawling photographic and darkroom studios, looking for work. “I just walked into studios and said ‘got any work?’” he says. “I believe in DIN: do it now.”

One of the studios he turned up at was Robin Bell’s. The great photographic printer interviewed him in the dark room while doing some prints for the photographer Clive Arrowsmith.

There was one particular print he produced while they were chatting which the young Hugo thought was brilliant. But it wasn’t good enough for Bell. He threw it away, and did another from the same negative as he was standing there interviewing Hugo.

As he exposed the film, he used his arm to shield the light, to get just the right amount of exposure, all the while chatting away: a kind of unconscious artistic dance with light there in the darkroom. Hugo could only watch in awe. He came out of that interview thinking, “I’ve got to learn to do this!”

He offered to work for Bell for nothing; and within a few days had been taken on as a junior assistant. Over the next six years, he rose to become Bell’s most trusted printer, running the studio for his boss when he was away and meeting and working with many of the top photographers of the day. He continued working with them after setting up his own print studio in 1990.

His home in Acomb is filled with prints of classic photos he collected during those years: the model Jean Shrimpton; the actor Terence Stamp as a young man; Brooke Shields; Paul McCartney as photographed by his wife Linda. Those were exciting years, when he frequently found himself brushing shoulders with the rich and famous.

Koo Stark became a friend. “Everything was pink in her flat!” he recalls. He met Christopher Lee and Simon and Yasmin Le Bon, and went to the pub with Bob Geldof – Geldof’s manager was the girlfriend of a friend.

By 2000, printing was a dying art because of the rise of digital photography. Hugo had also had enough of the big city, and being in the dark room.

He had never given up being a photographer, even though his main line of business was printing other photographers’ work. He came back to York, set up as a photographer in his own right; and has been here ever since.

This week, an exhibition of some of his best photographs from the past 25 years goes on display at the Bar Lane Studios.

Sponsored by Hotel du Vin and the Kuja Lounge, it is entitled ‘Landscapes and Nudes’: and as the title suggests, it features nudes as well as landscapes.

There is nothing pornographic about them, Hugo stresses. In many ways, they are just as much about line and light and composition as his landscapes.

And what is it about the human form that, as an artist, he finds so pleasing?

“Most of the time it’s not pleasing at all,” he deadpans back.

The human forms he has photographed certainly are: but maybe that’s all in the way he photographed them.

• Hugo once printed a series of photographs for Eve Arnold, who died last week at the age of 99, as a birthday present for the film director John Huston.

Arnold was one of the modern greats and the first woman to join the legendary Magnum photographic agency. She specialised in portraits of the rich and famous – but also in hard-hitting reportage depicting the lives of the poor, old and dispossessed. Arnold’s work, the photographer Robert Capa once said, “falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich’s legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers”.

She was on the set of Huston’s 1961 film The Misfits, starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Scott – and took a series of images showing Monroe and Gable relaxing between takes. It was these that she asked Hugo to print for her as a birthday gift to Huston.

“She gave me a stack of negatives that she hadn’t looked at, probably since she took them,” he says. “There were shots of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe between takes: some different shots of John Huston, and some of him and Marilyn Monroe playing the roulette tables, as well as Clark Gable wrestling with a horse.”

Hugo took the prints round to Arnold’s flat in Mayfair. “We had a few gins together and talked about photography,” he says. “She was a really nice woman, and a fantastic photographer. I was really sorry to hear about her passing.”

• Landscapes and Nudes, an exhibition of photographs by Hugo Platt, runs at the Bar Lane Studios, Micklegate from Friday until February 4.