Between memory and light

There are certain bands that become part of your life, and then there are bands that become part of the way you see the world. For David Corfield, the Cocteau Twins belong firmly in the second category.

Cocteau Twins. Even their name makes me sigh inaudibly. Their music has been running alongside my photographic life for decades. It has been there through different cameras, different places, different relationships and evolving versions of myself. Sometimes it has been the soundtrack to making photographs. Sometimes it has been the soundtrack to remembering them. And sometimes, perhaps most importantly, it has changed the way I look at the world before I even pick up a camera.

I find it difficult to explain exactly what the music of the Cocteau Twins does to me. But that is probably part of their magic. Their music does not always feel like something that needs to be understood, it just needs to be experienced.

Elizabeth Fraser’s voice, Robin Guthrie’s guitars and Simon Raymonde’s bass and keyboards create something that seems to exist somewhere between memory, landscape and dream. The words can be elusive, sometimes (actually, pretty much always) impossible to decipher, but that has never mattered to me. The emotion is unmistakable.

And photography, at its best, can work in exactly the same way, because a photograph does not necessarily need to explain itself. It can simply make you feel something.

I think that is one of the reasons the Cocteau Twins have remained so important to me, ever since I first heard them on the late-night John Peel radio show in the early 1980s.

Their music has always seemed to me to have a visual quality. I can hear certain songs and immediately see places, colours, weather and light. Not necessarily specific photographs, but fragments of visual memory. A road disappearing into mist, or the surface of a lake catching the last light of the day – you get the picture.

Perhaps that comes from growing up in Scotland, where the landscape can change in a heartbeat. Photography taught me to notice those moments, the Cocteau Twins taught me to feel them. Scotland can be incredibly beautiful, but it can also be austere, and the fact that the band originated from the desolate wastelands of Grangemouth near the Firth of Forth is not lost on me. The landscape around there can feel enormous, brutal and broken all at the same time. That tension has always appealed.

Over the years I have photographed everything from cars and people to landscapes, events and commercial work. I have worked professionally with some extraordinary photographers and organisations, and photography has taken me into places I could never have imagined when I first picked up a camera.

But underneath all of that professional experience, there is still the person who simply likes looking – and that is perhaps the most important thing. Their music is not really about showing off technical ability, even though there is extraordinary musicianship within it. It is about creating an atmosphere. It’s a feeling. A world that you can enter.

That is what I want my photographs to do. I don’t want someone to look at one of my images and simply think, “That’s a well-exposed photograph.” I want them to feel something.

There are photographs in my archive that I can still remember making because of the music I was listening to around them. The two things become intertwined. Years later, a particular track can suddenly transport me back to a place I haven’t thought about for years. It is one of the extraordinary things about music and photography. They are both forms of memory, but they approach memory from opposite directions.

I have always been drawn towards photographs that have a sense of ambiguity. Images where everything isn’t immediately obvious. A person partly concealed by shadow. A landscape where the light is doing most of the work. A fleeting expression. Movement. Reflections. Something slightly imperfect. Perhaps that is why I have never been particularly interested in photography that simply tells you everything. I like photographs that leave a door open.

The Cocteau Twins do that constantly. Their music gives you enough to enter but leaves enough unexplained for you to bring your own memories and emotions with you. There is also something deeply Scottish about the emotional atmosphere of their music, at least to my ears. Not necessarily in any literal sense, but in the sense of landscape, weather, melancholy and beauty existing together.

Perhaps it explains why I am so attracted to photographing places when the light isn’t perfect. The grey morning. The rain. The last few minutes before darkness. The moment when the sun disappears, and everything becomes blue. Those are often the moments when a landscape feels most alive. And if I had to choose a soundtrack for those moments, there is a good chance it would be the Cocteau Twins.

I can still pick up a camera and go somewhere simply because I want to see what the light is doing. I can still walk into a landscape without knowing exactly what photograph I am looking for. I can still be surprised – and that sense of discovery is what I never want to lose.

I have an old box set of Cocteau Twins CDs which I bought in 1991. It has survived countless changes in my working technology yet none of those changes have changed the fundamental reason I make photographs. I want to capture something that feels real.

Photography has given me a way of preserving moments. Music has given me a way of preserving feelings. And somewhere between the two is where much of my photographic life has existed. And when I look back now, through decades of photographs and memories, I realise that the Cocteau Twins have been there more often than I knew.

Perhaps, on reflection, that is the real measure of a soundtrack to a life; not that you remember putting it on, but that, years later, you hear the first few seconds of a song and suddenly you are somewhere else. A different camera is in your hands and a different landscape is in front of you. The light is different, you are younger, and for a moment, everything comes back.

That is what the Cocteau Twins have always done for me. They don’t just take me back to particular moments – they take me back to the person I was when I first learned to see and feel.

Words and pictures © David Corfield