An eye for sea and sky

One winter afternoon, Igor Emmerich was walking up the estuary at West Wittering on the Sussex coast. On rough days, when the English Channel is choppy, it’s often calm here, and as he walked along the water’s edge he saw a mellow cloud shape-shifting in the sky. He had taken several pictures already that afternoon, but they were too busy. Not this one. He chose an exposure that would darken the picture and pick out the highlights to the cloud’s left, and took his shot fast, before the cloud broke up or floated on. The result, with its tenebrous glow, has the quality of a deep breath.

Emmerich, who is 49, was brought up in Malaga on the Costa del Sol, a stretch of coastline choked with hotels. His mother was Spanish and his father was a German Jew, who left Berlin before the war and made his way, via Rhodesia and the British army, to Spain, studying art at the Royal Academy along the way. Igor started taking pictures when he was 14 on his father’s Pentax MX. They would escape the tourist sprawl by driving west, beyond Cadiz to the Atlantic coast, where the landscape empties out. “I like big wide spaces,” Emmerich says, “and being in Malaga, I wanted somewhere open and clean.” His father taught him about composition, and the most important lesson was that what’s not in the picture is as important as what is. He also instilled in his son the importance of sketching. Emmerich describes the pictures in this photo essay as “sketching with a camera”.