Nicholas Holt in Conversation with Yasmin Chopin, PhD (Copy)
I recently sat down with Yasmin Chopin, who holds a PhD in place writing, to discuss my writing. Here is our conversation:
Where in the world do you spend most of your time?
In the Dark Peak, England, where I live.
You said travel "enables" your writing about place — what does a specific location need to give you before you feel you can actually write about it?
I’m drawn to regions that have a distinctive geography and a strong backdrop of history, culture, art or literature. I favour places that have ‘old world’ echoes and cultures that I can learn and unlearn from. Often there is something that has been flickering in my imagination for years. Like the absolute silence of the Sahara Desert, Greenland's glittering icecap or the end-of-the-world feeling of Tierra del Fuego. I'm attracted to places that have remained out of step with the modern world, such as Tibet or Lewis and Harris in Scotland. I’m interested in how landscapes shape human imagination and behaviour, and also how they might shape me.
I need to stay long enough so that a place stops being a destination and the clichés have faded. Then there will be a moment — a conversation, a feeling during a walk, a detail, the weather — that offers me a 'way in' and makes me want to reach for my physical notebook.
What other writers have inspired you to write about nature, home, or place?
I started with 20th-century writers like Paul Bowles, Wilfred Thesiger, and Bruce Chatwin. I lacked a strong male role model in my youth and searched for it in books.
I return to Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines often. I love how it has the ambition to be more than a travelogue. It lays out Chatwin's ideas on nomadism and describes the Aboriginals' deep and complex relationship with the land. I read it before the internet was invented and it made me curious to go deeper into Aboriginal art and literature. It also made me realise that a book can be flawed and still pull me into its world.
Barry Lopez is a big inspiration. I love his enigmatic, spacious style where "all the right things are unsaid," and how he used metaphor over the literal to evoke the mystery and transcendence of a landscape. How he intentionally acknowledged his ignorance of a place and learned from local guides and Indigenous elders. There is a story called 'The Stone Horse' which I keep returning to.
I'm always dipping into writing looking for nuggets of gold: The dazzling description of a landscape on the first page of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. Gary Snyder for his zen-like clarity in The Great Clod. Annie Dillard's brilliant and uncategorisable For The Time Being. Kapka Kassabova's poetic writing in praise of the pastoral in Anima. Nan Shepherd dissolving her ego in The Living Mountain. Werner Herzog's cinematic eye in book form in Of Walking in Ice. Paul Kingsnorth and Wendell Berry for their writings against 'the machine'. Joanna Pocock exploring the American West through memoir and environmental reportage in Surrender. Michael Ondaatje's poems that read like stories of long-lost civilisations in Handwriting.
Your MA research covered photography, place, and psychology — where and when did you study for your MA? What did you enjoy / not enjoy about this experience? What key aspects of your academic research shape your writing today?
I have an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from LCC in London. I started the course during lockdown in 2020, which was made possible by remote video tutorials and lectures. I had just returned from crossing the Bayuda Desert in The Sudan, and was creating pure travel stories at the time. I felt that I wanted to expand my photography practice.
The course was inspiring and free from dogma dictating what a 'documentary image' might be. My first year was frustrating due to strict ‘lockdown’ rules in the UK. When the restrictions eased the tutors gave us a module called ‘rethink’ which encouraged us to try something new.
I drove up to Cape Wrath, the farthest place I could get to on the British mainland. I researched the history, camped by the lighthouse, and made photographs of everything and anything. But under the critical eye of my tutor Leonie Hampton, the centre did not hold. The project looked too disparate and Leonie told me that I should ‘say more with less’, and, hilariously, sent me back with instructions to ‘pack some sardines in your rucksack'. On that second visit I started to introduce a psychological element to my work, reacting to the land and introducing my zen walking meditation practice while making photographs. I got back with a series of more immersive images different from anything I’d made before. I've continued making images in the same way ever since.
During the MA course, writing came into sharp focus, as any visual project needs words to steer how a project is perceived. 'Saying more with less' has become a mantra in my writing too, which has become important to me in the years following my MA. Perhaps this is because in my professional life as an advertising art director, I worked closely with both words and images, and enjoyed the process of putting them together.
The question that emerged from my MA was: "How do you represent and give meaning to the experience you're having in a place?" I still grapple with that in both my photography and my writing. John Berger wrote that "the act of writing is nothing except the act of approaching the experience written about." Many of my projects strive to balance an intuitive, personal vision within a conceptual framework. John Cage's idea of art as self-alteration rather than self-expression remains important to me.
You have enjoyed several residencies. What draws you to staying in one place to write? And do you find being in one place for a concentrated period of time affects your creativity?
Artist residencies completely shifted my relationship to a place. They give me permission to embed myself in a region's geography, routines and culture. I get uninterrupted time to think, explore, exchange ideas with local creatives and develop new ideas away from the distractions of everyday life. Residencies can also give access to areas where local tourism is difficult or non-existent.
I first experienced an artist residency when I went to JOYA in Almeria, after I graduated from LCC. I found myself mixing with other writers, filmmakers and artists. I took walks every day with my camera, ate great food, swam in the pool, and experimented with analogue printing in the darkroom. At the end of the day we would gather with beer on a bench and watch the sunset together.
After JOYA I went to the Montello Foundation Cabin in the Nevada Desert for two weeks. This residency was a powerful experience as it was remote and solo. The following year I went to La Wayaka Current in the Atacama Desert, which was more communal and gave access to Indigenous ceremonies as we lived in the same compound as a Lickanantay healer and a llama breeder. Photographic projects and writing came out of the first two residencies and I'm still processing my experiences from the Atacama — more on that in a couple of questions' time.
I find that a good combination for a trip is to do a residency and then have a period of travel afterwards. This grounds me in a region and then the travel is more enjoyable because of this. I now tend to do fewer trips and stay for longer.
I've written a short guide to artist residencies on my website here.
How do place-writing and travel-writing differ in your eyes?
For me, they have different centres of gravity. Travel writing treats movement as the story. Place writing treats movement as research. I treat the boundary as porous, depending on what I want to write.
When I wrote Travel Then and Now, about how travel has changed around me over 40 years, the "I" is stronger because the subject is myself and the passage of time.
When I wrote about Estancia Harberton, the "I" is smaller because I want to be a conduit for the place's stories. So instead of saying "look at me", I'm saying "look with me". The “I” is there — but moves through the place and feels things intensely — like an instrument for sensing a landscape.
I'm developing a voice that uses the "I" in a calibrated way rather than a fixed ego. As my writing matures I find that journeys become a way of paying attention as much as the adventures themselves.
How do you work with photographs and incorporate them into your writing? What comes first - words or images? How do you choose which photographs to include in an article?
The photographs usually come first. Then, after a few days, I begin writing in my notebook. I don't try to make sense of either while I'm away and paying attention to the moment. It's only when I get home that I begin to make sense of what I've got and a story emerges.
If a story is written then that will dictate the imagery. If it's a photo story there needs to be a strong series of images first, and the text will be secondary, as I want the viewer to take their own meaning from the images.
You started the Substack partly to test whether your writing resonated, since magazine work gives no feedback. What's the most surprising thing readers have responded to so far?
I started Substack because I wanted to publish longer written pieces. I'd had a few stories published in magazines but didn't get much in the way of feedback beyond contact with an editor. Before I started my Substack I was primarily known as a visual person through my photography and work as an art director.
I was surprised when people reacted so positively to a story called 'Tibet's Forgotten Kingdom', which I had struggled to place in any magazine. These kinds of reactions encouraged me to recalibrate my writing alongside my visual work.
Before I started writing and making photographs for myself, I was in the commercial world as an art director. So it's easy to equate self-worth with getting published and winning awards. While I've had some recognition, I don't want that to be the driving force behind what I do. Substack has been a great place to be able to grow as a writer, without 'gatekeepers', to see other people's work, and to have conversations. I try to keep in mind that writing is thinking, and Substack to me is a kind of sandbox where I can experiment and learn.
What are your plans for the future of your Substack?
My Substack is the email newsletter for my website far-from.com It's where I publish my latest updates, writing and photography.
My sense of what Far From is has evolved, and my Substack has evolved with it.
Most travel media is understandably built around utility — where to stay, what to see and how to get there. While Far From does have utility, it's interested in what travel is actually for. I use journeys as a way into stories about place, wonder, culture, and history. I explore the benefits of paying attention in an increasingly distracted world. If readers finish an essay wanting to look more closely at the world rather than simply book another destination, that gives me satisfaction.
The next stage is a limited-run print publication focused on the Atacama Desert — an analogue issue containing stories and photographs that will not be available online. I have a book idea too, but that's a little further down the line.
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