2#07 David Lintern: the photojournalist
“What's important to me is allowing other people to speak.”
00:00 - Introduction
03:23 - Welcome, “a photographer and writer focusing on human-powered travel, landscape and the environment”, discussing the book “Thunder Road: Voices from the Cape Wrath Trail”
06:53 - Most definitely not “striding forth under self-imposed adversity”, more details of the Cape Wrath experience
13:28 - War games off the Scottish coast
17:33 - “Vanishing Point” photography project, the struggles of being a freelancer during the COVID pandemic, “lots of freedom, but lots of insecurity”
20:13 - Enjoying “the wrestle” of writing, details of an outdoor media career, “esoteric ramblings”
27:38 - “We were all feeling pretty experimental in COVID, weren’t we?”
28:33 - Coming to the outdoors relatively late, discovering the mountains as an adult. A former life as a London-based cinema projectionist, youth music worker, sound engineer, and university lecturer… seeing “literally thousands of films at the National Film Theatre”
33:23 - Becoming a community music leader, setting up the Soundmix charity (http://www.soundmix.org.uk/who-we-are/), working with the refugee council and “unaccompanied minors”, “what can a scruffy musician do?”
35:23 - An “early mid-life crisis” expressed by walking across the Pyrenees in a two-month charity trip, starting to work with the John Muir Trust
38:10 - A passion for cinema, music and soundtracks, performing background music for TV programmes, an interest in analogue machinery
40:13 - Creating electronic music and dub via Projector Records: “to call it a record label would suggest that it actually functioned… it was basically a group of friends that lived in a house in the mid-90s”
42:51 - Some heartfelt words about a love of the outdoors and life in Kingussie, “when you live here you realise that they’re called the grey hills and the red hills for a reason… it’s a special place”
49:39 - “The bit that’s important to me is allowing other people to speak… really I’m the least interesting bit of the equation”.
53:03 - Enriching your life through experiences in the “heavens”. How can we bring those transformative experiences back down to our everyday lives.
54:23 - Greatest mountain memory… a long winter mountaineering weekend in the Ben Alder range, the Lancet Edge, eerie sounds, unsettling footsteps, a golden eagle.
59:23 - All the time, money, freedom… what would you do? A simple answer… and a more complicated one: fixing the gap between recreational hill people, and those that live and work on the land, conservation and shooting estates (“we have big environmental decisions to make as a society… and we’re not able to have those conversations”)