1. Introduction
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, abstract photography has multiplied into a thousand directions. The medium, born to record reality, now seeks to dissolve it. Yet within that expansion, a paradox has emerged: the more photography speaks about abstraction, the less it remains photography. Galleries celebrate camera-less experiments and digital renderings, but what was once the art of light and time often turns into the art of data or chemistry. Against this dispersion, the Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) has remained the most human form of photographic abstraction — the last gesture where body, light, and world still coexist in the same act.
1.1 What ICM Is — and What It Is Not
ICM photography consists of deliberately moving the camera during a long exposure so that motion itself becomes the generator of form. It is not the accidental blur of failure but a choreography of gesture, where time stretches across the frame as light reacts to movement. Each exposure becomes an encounter between control and surrender. What defines ICM is not only technique but ontology: the photograph remains tied to the real world — to the light that was truly there — even as it transforms that world into abstraction.
By contrast, traditional long exposure, as practiced by artists like Alexey Titarenko, deals with stillness rather than movement. It keeps the camera fixed and allows time to flow across the stationary frame. The result is poetic, cinematic, even metaphysical, but it does not involve the act of physical motion. ICM begins where long exposure ends — when the hand intervenes and turns time into gesture. In this sense, ICM is not about waiting for the world to move; it is about moving through the world.
1.2 A Brief Genealogy
The gesture of moving the camera can be traced back to early experiments in pictorialism, to the restless dream of merging photography with painting. From the 1960s onward, several photographers — often unknowingly — began to explore motion within the frame: Ernst Haas with his impressionistic streets, Freeman Patterson with his color fields, and later Stephen Gill, who blurred urban life into fluid rhythm. Yet the ICM movement as an autonomous language truly emerged in the early 2000s, when digital cameras allowed continuous experimentation and immediate feedback. This was the decade when artists like Chris Friel, Andrew S. Gray, Erik Malm, Kaisa Sirén, and Doug Chinnery began to transform experiment into art.
Éric Petr, Long before the term Intentional Camera Movement was coined, He had already built the intellectual and aesthetic foundations of the discipline. Beginning in 1983, he pursued what he called in situ kinetic photography — a radical exploration of light as living matter, in which movement was not a mistake but a form of thought. Between 1983 and 1993, and later from 2003 onward, Petr developed a philosophy of photography that treated the camera’s gesture as an extension of consciousness itself: the act of moving with light rather than recording it. Series such as Bangkok 2004, Light Corpus and 光 0x1853AC (2020) reveal this search for a luminous essence where color, rhythm and perception merge into one continuum.
1.3 Purpose of This Essay
This essay is both homage and classification. It seeks to map the formation of the ICM language over the last fifteen years and to acknowledge those who defined its expressive grammar. These five artists — Friel, Gray, Sirén, Malm, and Chinnery — form what could be called the First Generation of Pure ICM Photography. Each represents a distinct path within a common field: emotion, geometry, silence, science, and transition. Their collective work not only shaped the discipline but gave it credibility in the wider landscape of abstract art. To study them is to study the birth of a new visual syntax — one that turns movement into meaning.
1.4 The Gesture — The Heart of the Medium
At the core of ICM lies the gesture: the physical act of moving the camera in dialogue with the subject. It can be vertical, horizontal, circular, or diagonal; sharp and brief, or fluid and continuous. The camera becomes an extension of the body, translating instinct into form. Each movement carries its own emotion: vertical gestures evoke ascension, horizontals convey calm or continuity, spirals suggest energy or confusion. In ICM, the hand does not simply hold the camera — it draws with it. The exposure becomes a trace of consciousness in motion, as if the photographer were sketching directly with light.
1.5 Two Poles — Northern Minimalism and Expressionism British
Over the past two decades, the ICM landscape has been defined by two true poles of influence. The Nordic school, shaped by Scandinavian light, embodies silence, minimalism, and restraint — a devotion to tonal purity and the reduction of gesture to its essential form. The British current, born from the grey skies of the Atlantic, translates introspection and emotion into movement, producing psychological landscapes that oscillate between melancholy and revelation. Between these two poles — the contemplative North and the expressive West — the contemporary ICM movement has evolved: a dialogue between stillness and turbulence, between meditation and feeling. Their coexistence has sustained the richness of the medium, allowing ICM to expand without losing its inner coherence.
1.6 Technology and Maturity
The maturity of ICM coincides with a technological turning point. The advent of mirrorless systems, electronic shutters, and neutral density filters has liberated the act of photographing from technical limitations. Long exposure of many minutes — once impossible without heavy tripods — can now be executed by hand. Precision sensors and stabilized optics have turned gesture into precision, allowing the photographer to compose within movement itself. The result is a paradoxical combination of spontaneity and control. Technology has not replaced the gesture; it has refined it. The contemporary ICM artist stands at the intersection of discipline and intuition — using modern tools to recover the primal act of painting with light.
In that convergence of gesture, philosophy, and innovation lies the essence of this movement. ICM is no longer a technical curiosity but a full artistic language — a way of thinking and feeling through motion. It is the last form of abstraction that remains genuinely photographic.
2. The ICM as the True Photographic Abstraction
In the twenty-first century, abstract photography has expanded into multiple directions — chemical, digital, conceptual, algorithmic — yet the essence of the medium has gradually dissolved. The act of photographing, once defined by the encounter between human gesture and real light, is now often replaced by processes without cameras, sensors, or even the presence of a photographer. In that dispersion, the Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) has emerged as the only abstract practice that still preserves the fundamental triad of photography: camera, light, and world. Instead of erasing reality, it transforms it; instead of delegating vision to machines, it executes it with the body. ICM is not a denial of photography but its reawakening — the last frontier where abstraction and truth coexist.
2.1 The Four Contemporary Schools
Current photographic abstraction can be divided into four major lineages, each defined by its technical relationship to the real world.
1️⃣ The camera-less or pure school eliminates the camera altogether. It is the direct descendant of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, revived today by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Ellen Carey, or Alison Rossiter. The image is born from physical reactions — light, heat, or chemistry — on the sensitive surface. The result is an ontology of light rather than a vision of the world. Its prestige is enormous — MoMA, Tate, Getty — yet its link to lived reality disappears: the image is not seen, it is generated.
2️⃣ The digital or algorithmic school transforms data into image. Thomas Ruff, Jessica Eaton, or Joan Fontcuberta operate at the border between information and representation. Their work is conceptually rigorous, often brilliant, but what appears as light is in fact computation. Time becomes code; the photographic act becomes programming.
3️⃣ The hybrid or pictorial-digital school merges photography, painting, and collage. Figures such as Valda Bailey, Adrian McGarry, or Doug Chinnery (in his later stage) use overlays, textures, and transparencies to create poetic compositions between media. The result is visually rich but ontologically unstable: photography dissolves into painting, the image into aesthetic object.
4️⃣ The ICM school, in contrast, keeps the camera and the encounter with the world. Its abstraction arises not from removing the real but from moving through it. The camera acts as a brush; time becomes matter; light becomes the raw material of transformation. Here, the gesture replaces the algorithm — motion as thought, duration as form.
2.2 The Institutional Elitism
The art system tends to value what moves away from photography more than what perfects it. Camera-less and digital artists usually come from academic backgrounds, fluent in the theoretical language that institutions expect — phenomenology, ontology of the image, materiality. Their discourse aligns naturally with the institutional vocabulary of curatorship — phenomenology, ontology, materiality — which has made their work easier to contextualize within museums and academic frameworks.. ICM photographers, on the other hand, have emerged from a self-taught lineage: individuals grounded in the act of seeing and feeling rather than theorizing. They speak through emotion, gesture, and light — elements that the institutional world still struggles to translate into academic legitimacy.
This linguistic gap has created an imbalance: what abandons photography is accepted as contemporary art, while what refines it remains labelled as decorative fine art. It is a paradox — the closer one stays to the medium’s essence, the further one is from recognition. Yet history shows that every artistic revolution began outside the canon. Impressionism, expressionism, surrealism — all were dismissed as minor, impulsive, or unrefined until time revealed their depth. ICM now stands at the same threshold. It is still underestimated by institutions precisely because it has not yet been theorized enough — because its truth is tactile, intuitive, and human. But that very resistance is its power: it reminds the contemporary image world that creation is not a concept but an act.
2.3 From Experiment to Language
For decades, camera movement was dismissed as error or curiosity — a by-product of technical failure. Early examples of ICM were playful, accidental, or purely aesthetic, producing blurs without discourse. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, a new generation turned that gesture into a language. Valda Bailey elevated the pictorial dimension of movement, creating harmony through colour and layering. Chris Friel transformed motion into emotional expression, inaugurating a new photographic expressionism. Erik Malm fused technical precision with chromatic lyricism; Doug Chinnery brought meditation and form; and Kaisa Sirén introduced the northern stillness — poetry through restraint.
With them, ICM evolved from experiment to discipline. What had been a random blur became a deliberate syntax of rhythm, composition, and emotion. The gesture acquired purpose: a way of thinking through light rather than depicting it. Today, the act of moving the camera is no longer an accident but a statement — a philosophical stance against photographic inertia. In the best works of this lineage, movement is not merely visual; it is conceptual. It embodies the passage of time, the persistence of perception, and the unity of emotion and matter. Through this transformation, ICM became a language capable of expression — a form of thinking through motion itself.
2.4 The ICM — The Last Frontier of the Human Act of Photographing
Unlike other schools that delegate creation to non-human processes — chemical or digital — ICM preserves the gesture. The photographer remains present, moving the camera, breathing with the light. Each trace is the mark of a body interpreting space: a physical and spiritual act. Camera-less art happens in the darkness of a lab; digital art within the silent logic of a server. In both, the creator disappears behind the process. ICM, by contrast, is corporeal: each image is the translation of a human movement. There is no automation; there is rhythm and pulse.
For this reason, ICM can be seen as the only abstract form of photography still connected to the human act of seeing. While artificial intelligence now generates endless simulations of vision, ICM reaffirms the value of the eye and the hand. Against automation, it stands as poetic resistance — proof that light still requires consciousness to find form. Every trace of motion becomes breath; every blur becomes memory. Its imperfection is its humanity. In this sense, ICM not only preserves the essence of photography but also its ethics: to look remains a human act. And in that affirmation — against the authorless image and the algorithmic perfection — lies its true greatness.
2.5 Bridge paragraph — Transition to Section 3
Through this convergence of body, light, and time, ICM has become not only a method but a philosophy — a way of recovering the human presence within the act of photographing. Yet no philosophy exists without its interpreters. Over the past fifteen years, a small group of artists has transformed this gesture into a language, each one shaping its own emotional, technical, and symbolic grammar. Together, they built what can be called the First Generation of Pure ICM Photography — the foundation upon which the movement now stands.
3. The Five Masters of Pure ICM Photography (2010–2025)
The contemporary language of ICM photography would not exist without a small group of pioneers who, each from their own vision, transformed an experimental technique into a complete artistic language. Between 2010 and 2025, these five photographers — Chris Friel, Andrew S. Gray, Kaisa Sirén, Erik Malm, and Doug Chinnery — established the grammar, emotion, and legitimacy of movement as a creative act. Together, they represent the founding generation of the ICM discipline: a bridge between the photographic past and the abstract future.
It is important to clarify that this essay does not include Valda Bailey among the five masters, despite her undeniable influence and visibility within the field of abstract photography. Bailey’s practice, though initially rooted in camera movement, gradually evolved into a hybrid language that combines multiple exposure, collage, and painterly construction. In this evolution, ICM became one element among others — a tool within a pictorial system rather than an autonomous gesture. The present essay focuses exclusively on those artists who defined ICM as a self-sufficient photographic language, grounded in gesture, light, and duration. Bailey’s contribution remains significant, but her later trajectory belongs to a different paradigm: the fusion of photography and painting rather than the pursuit of movement as pure form.
3.1 Chris Friel — The Anarchic Terror of Light
After the fire that destroyed his home and studio in 2010, Chris Friel turned to photography as a form of therapy — a way to translate loss into movement. From that trauma emerged a trilogy of series that now define the emotional origin of contemporary ICM: Ghosts, Home, and Shadows. These works are almost monochromatic, built from tonal fields of grey, brown, and black, where the landscape dissolves into atmosphere and memory. The gesture is heavy and inward — long vertical sweeps, trembling diagonals, and occasional circular blurs that seem to echo a body breathing through grief. The compositions are stripped of detail; only traces remain, like fragments of consciousness suspended in fog. In Ghosts, trees and horizons fade into spectral light; in Home, the blurred outlines of architecture and nature evoke the ache of belonging; in Shadows, human silhouettes emerge and vanish, as if the self were observing its own disappearance. Technically, these images were created with early Canon full-frame DSLRs, handheld, using long exposures of two to eight seconds. Editing is minimal but dark: underexposed tones, crushed blacks, and faint solar flares breaking through mist. The landscape turns into psyche, movement into memory — an elegy written in light.
Framed
Framed distils the essence of Friel’s psychological abstraction: a world reduced to trembling silhouettes, fractured gestures, and a kind of emotional chiaroscuro that merges human presence with atmospheric dissolution. In Image #1, a blurred figure appears suspended between recognition and erasure, the camera movement slicing the body into painterly streaks that evoke Francis Bacon as much as long-exposure photography. Image #2, where a seated form dissolves into falling vertical motion, shows his mastery of ambiguity — the subject is both grounded and evaporating. Technically, the shutter times in Framed are longer and more gestural than in his color phase; conceptually, the series turns the human body into an ephemeral event, a memory being overwritten as it forms. It remains one of the strongest articulations of ICM as psychological portraiture.
Darkroom
Darkroom is Friel’s most mature and uncompromising series — a descent into expressive monochrome where landscapes, interiors, and figures dissolve into pure emotional tonality. In Image #1, a horse melts into the surrounding darkness, the blurred motion transforming animal presence into mythic apparition; while Image #2, a forest rendered as a grainy constellation of lights, reveals his ability to turn noise and underexposure into narrative texture. The technical heart of the series lies in his use of high-contrast black & white and abrupt lateral motions that fracture space rather than describe it. Conceptually, Darkroom is a study of grief, anxiety, and dissolution; each frame seems to inhabit a place between trauma and dream. Many consider this Friel’s masterpiece — the moment he elevated ICM to the register of expressionist painting.
Landscapes (2014 Collection)
The 2014 color landscapes represent Friel’s foundational contribution to painterly ICM: an alchemy of saturated tones, long horizontal sweeps, and dissolving horizons that permanently influenced Gray, Malm, and Bellamy. Image #1, where rust-colored fields bleed into a stormy sky, demonstrates his ability to compress vast spaces into abstract bands of emotion; Image #2, a coastal scene rendered in blue-green motion, reduces land and sea to vibrating chromatic fields. Technically, these works rely on precise, slow panning and an acute painter’s sense of palette; conceptually, they mark Friel’s transition from representational landscapes toward expressive reduction. This series remains the most accessible and formative phase of his career — the moment he discovered how to turn the British coastline into a moving Rothko.
Pairs
Pairs is one of Friel’s most original contributions to the ICM language, transforming diptychs into a narrative form. Each pair is a dialogue: two frames that contradict, echo, or reinterpret each other through motion and tonal shift. In Pair #1, a blurred figure on the left meets a stark, high-contrast abstract on the right — a conversation between body and void; in Pair #2, a textured forest blur is paired with a softer, misted plane, creating an emotional arc from turbulence to calm. The technique is deceptively simple — two exposures, each with distinct motion vectors — but the conceptual result is cinematic: the diptych becomes a temporal sequence, a form of visual syntax. Pairs shows Friel not just as photographer, but as editor, choreographer, and storyteller.
Singles (Curated Highlights)
The Singles collection, though not a “series” in the traditional sense, functions as a curated retrospective of Friel’s strongest independent works — each image a distilled statement of his visual philosophy. Image #1, a spectral horse floating in black void, embodies his ability to transform motion into apparition; Image #2, an almost abstract portrait where the face is smeared into vertical streaks, showcases his command of emotional erasure; Image #3, a forest rendered as glittering pointillism, shows how he pushes low-light ICM into the realm of painting. Technically, these works mix short and long shutter speeds, lateral and rotational movements, and an extremely intuitive sense of tone. Conceptually, Singles is the clearest demonstration of Friel’s core identity: a photographer who paints with disappearance.
3.2 Andrew S. Gray — The Architect of Motion
Among the first generation of pure ICM artists, Andrew S. Gray stands as the Architect of Motion — the one who built order inside the blur, transforming gesture into geometry and time into structure. Technically, Gray works with Nikon and later Fuji systems, using exposures between half a second and five seconds. Unlike the sweeping gestures of Friel, his movements are concise: lateral arcs, short verticals, or gentle pendulum motions, always guided by horizon control. Editing is minimal and tonal, never expressive; his post-production seeks equilibrium rather than mood. Where Friel’s landscapes burn with emotion, Gray’s breathe with architecture. He transformed ICM into a grammar of measured rhythm and proportion, proving that even within abstraction, structure remains the soul of beauty.
Abstract Landscapes — Part I
In Ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey, York, Gray fuses architectural memory with motion, turning the medieval stone arches into trembling silhouettes that dissolve into the dusk light—an exemplar of his ability to make history flicker like breath. Arrival and the Land of the Cyclopes pushes this further into mythic abstraction: a shoreline rendered as a single sweeping diagonal, its colours compressed into a storm of ochres and steel blues, suggesting both the violence and the poetry of approaching land. In Loss Series: Faltering Under the Fury (2015), perhaps the most emotionally charged of the group, Gray uses dense lateral movement to fracture the horizon, creating a landscape that feels wounded yet luminous; the blur becomes metaphor, a rupture in light itself. Finally, Bamburgh Castle on an August Evening anchors the series in coastal drama—its fortress reduced to a ghostly glow above a molten sky, the long shutter transforming waves into a ribbon of soft fire. Together, these works articulate the foundations of Abstract Landscapes I: motion as architecture, colour as atmosphere, and landscape as a memory trembling into abstraction.
Abstract Landscapes — Part II
In Unseen: Sycamore Gap II, Gray transforms one of Northumberland’s most iconic locations into a near-mythic apparition: the tree becomes a trembling axis against a storm-softened sky, the long sweep dissolving rock and horizon into a spectral memory. Evening Dunstanburgh pushes his architectural sensitivity further—the silhouette of the ruined fortress held in perfect tension as colour drifts across the frame in violet and rust, a study in how motion can preserve structure while unmaking form. In Dryburgh Abbey Study, Gray turns the abbey’s internal light into a kind of spiritual haze; lateral gestures fracture the stone into soft, luminous planes, revealing his gift for translating sacred architecture into emotional atmosphere. A Walk by the Coquet, Warkworth Keep Looking On shifts to a gentler register: the river becomes a flowing ribbon of silver and green, while the distant keep wavers like a story half-remembered, its presence faint yet insistent. Together, these works define the essence of Abstract Landscapes II: a phase where Gray refines motion into geometry, balances historical weight with atmospheric delicacy, and proves that even in abstraction, a place can remain unmistakably itself—anchored, breathed upon, and newly imagined.
Abstract Landscapes — Part III
In Standing Stones, Gray turns ancient monoliths into flickering sentinels—the long exposure softens their mass into trembling silhouettes, as if history itself were vibrating beneath the sky; the motion is restrained, a slow lateral drift that preserves the stones’ dignity while dissolving their edges into myth. Solstice expands this atmospheric quietude into something cosmic: warm golds and cold blues slide across the frame in a single suspended gesture, the landscape reduced to pure luminance, a meditation on seasonal light rather than geography. With Quirang, Gray confronts one of Scotland’s most dramatic terrains and renders it nearly abstract—its jagged escarpments melt into vertical veils of green and grey, turning raw geology into a painterly cascade that feels more like memory than observation. Finally, The Great Whale pushes his poetic minimalism to its limit: a vast pale sweep, almost empty, where a single soft curvature evokes the back of a breaching creature beneath a sky of muted silver. Together these works define Abstract Landscapes III as Gray’s most introspective and atmospheric phase—where landscapes become breath, stone becomes apparition, and motion becomes a language of quiet revelation.
Abstract Landscapes — Part IV
Abstract Landscapes IV marks the moment where Gray moves from atmospheric restraint into a more luminous, emotionally open phase: colours become fuller, exposures slightly wider, and the ICM gesture slow enough to stretch light without fracturing form. The landscapes here are no longer dissolved memories (como en la III) but rather sustained emotions, almost chromatic meditations, where each sweep contains a distinct emotional intention. New Dawn, Old Scene (2021) is the manifesto of this maturity: a golden field of diffused light where movement transforms the morning into a warm sigh; the scene is not new, but the emotion is—a rebirth on the same horizon. Home Evenings captures the opposite tone: soft blues and warm browns shifted laterally, the long gesture that transforms a domestic afternoon into something intimate and fragile, a landscape that breathes as if it were a personal memory. Pier Light introduces structure: precise horizontals that support an orange glow vibrating in the center of the painting, an almost musical balance between architectural form and chromatic dissolution, one of his most “drawn” pieces within the movement. And Ruins by Moonlight – Warkworth Castle demonstrates his total technical control: deep shadows, a translucent arc of light, and minimal movement that envelops the ruins in a spectral halo without losing their character; it is nocturnal poetry created with discipline. Overall, Abstract Landscapes IV is his most mature and complete phase: color without exuberance, structure without rigidity, emotion without excess—the final synthesis of everything he has learned throughout his career.
3.3 Kaisa Sirén — Silence and Boreal Light
If Chris Friel revealed the emotion of movement and Andrew S. Gray its geometry, Kaisa Sirén revealed its silence.
Working from the northern latitudes of Finnish Lapland, she transformed ICM into an art of stillness — an act closer to meditation than expression. Her photography stands at the threshold between the visible and the invisible, where motion ceases to describe and begins to breathe. In her world, color is whisper, form is vapor, and time expands until it feels eternal. Every photograph seems to exist in suspension, as if taken not in space but in the pause between two breaths. Sirén’s work represents the contemplative pole of ICM: the point where gesture no longer seeks emotion or design, but presence itself. Her movement is among the most restrained in the entire discipline. She employs exposures between one and three seconds, with almost imperceptible displacement — a slow horizontal or diagonal glide executed within a single inhalation. Where others pursue intensity or structure, she pursues clarity of perception. The editing process is nearly invisible: minor adjustments in temperature or contrast, no overlays, no textural composites. Her palette — whites, greys, blues, and pale gold — mirrors the Arctic cycle: long twilights, snow light, and the fleeting fire of dawns that never rise high. Through this discipline, Sirén proves that motion can be contemplative, and that abstraction, when purified, leads not to chaos but to serenity. She does not photograph the world in movement; she photographs the silence that remains after movement.
Looking for Lost Dreams
In Looking for Lost Dreams, Kaisa Sirén distills the essence of her poetic minimalism into a series governed by restraint, atmosphere, and emotional quiet. Artistically, the collection operates as a meditation on disappearance: in Image #1, Image #2, and Image #3, pale birch trunks drift in and out of visibility through slight vertical gestures, while a palette of whites, greys, and winter blues transforms each frame into a visual afterimage rather than a literal landscape. Technically, the series demonstrates exceptional precision—sub-second to one-second exposures generate clean, steady vertical lines without turbulence; fog, light, and movement integrate seamlessly; and the editing remains invisible, producing that signature “weightless” texture that distinguishes Sirén’s early Scandinavian work. Conceptually, Looking for Lost Dreams is a study in memory’s instability: the forest becomes a metaphor for recollection itself, where form dissolves the moment it is perceived. The strongest images—Image #1, Image #3, and Image #5—encapsulate this quiet philosophy, offering a world that exists not in presence but in the subtle residue of perception.
Morning Thoughts
“Morning Thoughts” marks a shift from Sirén’s monochrome restraint into gently chromatic atmospheres: blues, violets, peach tones and pale greens carried by long linear sweeps. Its ICM gestures are broader than in her minimalistic work, creating a visual language closer to watercolor or mist submerged in color. This series is emotionally warmer than her winter cycles—quiet, introspective, but with a soft optimism. Technically, the strokes are longer and more fluid, sometimes lasting close to a second, producing layered gradients that stretch across the frame with painterly smoothness. Conceptually, the work explores the threshold between awakening and dreaming: images that feel like the first thought of a day, half-formed and luminous. It is one of the clearest examples of Sirén’s ability to merge atmospheric abstraction with emotional subtlety.
Story of the Trees
“Story of the Trees” is Sirén’s most textural and rhythmic forest series, where repeated vertical sweeps carve the trunks into vibrating strands of color. Unlike her minimalistic pieces, these images are dense, tactile, and almost musical. The palette—purples, ochres, soft greens—creates a layered emotional complexity, halfway between serenity and tension. Technically, Sirén uses mid-length exposures (0.7–1.5 seconds) combined with a steady vertical drift, giving the illusion of woven fabric or rain falling through memory. Conceptually, the series feels like an intimate conversation with the forest: trees are not objects but voices, retold through movement. It is one of her most influential ensembles among ICM practitioners.
Speechless Sea
“Speechless Sea” distills Sirén’s fascination with boundaries—horizons dissolve into gradients that make sky and water indistinguishable. The motion is gentle but decisive, often horizontal, elongating blues and soft whites into dreamlike bands. Emotionally, the series is meditative, evoking silence, distance, and the feeling of standing alone before an infinite surface. Technically, Sirén’s exposures in this series are extremely clean: minimal noise, perfectly controlled blur, and tonal transitions that feel almost digital in smoothness despite being pure ICM. Conceptually, “Speechless Sea” expresses the loss of edges—where the world becomes continuous, fluid, and contemplative. It may be her most timeless and universal series.
3.4 Erik Malm — The Scientist of Color
Among the masters of Pure ICM, Erik Malm stands as the movement’s scientist — the figure who transformed intuition into analysis and sensation into method. While others painted through emotion or contemplation, Malm dissected the physics of motion and light. His photography bridges art and optics, emotion and measurement. Each image becomes an experiment: how far can color stretch before collapsing, how does movement alter wavelength, what is the geometry of blur? Based in Sweden, Malm works with full-frame cameras and precisely measured gestures, often using a semi-fixed tripod that permits rotation and oscillation. Exposure times vary from half a second to eight, depending on the chromatic resonance he seeks. He rarely edits beyond tonal calibration; his post-production is analytical, never ornamental. What distinguishes him is control — the idea that beauty can emerge not from spontaneity, but from exactness. In his hands, ICM becomes a study of vibration, a science of perception, a disciplined dance between calculation and emotion.
Landscape Collection
Malm’s Landscape Collection is the clearest expression of his scientific approach to color and motion. Here, ICM becomes geometry: arcs, spirals, and orthogonal strokes that build a visual architecture within the blur. His color theory is rigorous—combinations of cyan, yellow, teal and magenta arranged with near-mathematical balance—yet the images remain emotionally resonant due to controlled instability. Technically, this collection shows Malm at his most refined: long controlled sweeps (0.5–1.5 seconds), often combining micro-oscillations with directional pulls, producing a textile-like layering of tones. Conceptually, Landscape is not about place but structure: he abstracts forests, lakes, and valleys into systems of color, turning geography into chromatic physics. This is the collection that made him a reference among ICM purists.
Animal Collection
The Animal Collection is Malm’s most experimental and risk-heavy body of work: animals are transformed into flowing masses of motion, where biology dissolves into energy. His technique is unusually bold—ICM while tracking fast-moving subjects—resulting in silhouettes that hover between recognition and abstraction. The palette tends toward earthy neutrals and muted blues, reflecting natural environments rather than the vibrant chromatic overlays of his landscapes. Technically, this collection demonstrates mastery over instability: panning motions combined with subtle roll or tilt, executed at shutter speeds longer than traditional wildlife photography allows. Conceptually, the collection explores the tension between presence and disappearance, turning wildlife into symbols of fragility and transience. Though less iconic than his landscapes, these works show his range and technical audacity.
Lighthouse Collection
In the Lighthouse Collection, Malm applies his controlled blur language to architecture, using the lighthouse as a recurring symbol of isolation and orientation. These images reduce the structure to a vertical axis around which color gradients flow—deep blues, storm greys, sand tones—creating visual poems about solitude and stability. Technically, he uses intermediate shutter speeds (0.4–1s) with subtle horizontal sweeps, producing images that feel like long-exposure paintings rather than conventional ICM. Conceptually, the lighthouse becomes a psychological anchor: a still point inside the blur, a metaphor for presence within chaos. This is Malm’s most atmospheric work—less about color-science precision and more about mood, distance, and existential quiet.
Bird Collection
The Bird Collection is Malm’s lyrical counterpart to his more structured landscapes. Here, ICM traces the movement of wings, turning flight into gesture. Some works lean toward figurative silhouettes; others dissolve birds entirely into flickering strokes of white or color. Technically, these images require exquisite timing: shutter speeds often between 1/10 and 1 second, combined with precise tracking that transforms flapping motion into calligraphic marks. Emotionally, the collection speaks of freedom, fragility, and impermanence—birds rendered as the pure trace of their passage through air. Although not as chromatically complex as his Landscapes, this body of work showcases Malm’s sensitivity to temporal rhythm and his ability to transform speed into poetry.
3.5 Doug Chinnery — The Bridge Between Worlds
If Chris Friel gave ICM its emotional turbulence, Andrew S. Gray its structure, and Kaisa Sirén its silence, then Doug Chinnery gave it continuity — the bridge between the early purity of motion and the expanded visual language of contemporary abstraction. His career embodies the transition from photography as gesture to photography as idea. Trained in fine art and rooted in the British landscape tradition, Chinnery began the 2010s as a master of long exposure and intentional movement, yet gradually evolved toward a painterly and conceptual practice that integrated photography with mixed visual thinking. Through him, the technique ceased to be merely aesthetic; it became discourse — a way of understanding perception itself. Technically, Chinnery belongs entirely to the school of Pure ICM, yet with a natural openness toward experimentation. His early works, made with Canon and later Fuji systems, rely on exposures between one and six seconds — long enough for the landscape to breathe, short enough for form to persist. His gestures are fluid, diagonal, and often executed while advancing physically toward the subject: dunes, harbors, and coastal skies. He avoids post-production artifice; color grading remains tonal, subdued, and harmonically balanced. Even in his most experimental moments, he never abandons the photographic root. His motion is tactile and reflective — the camera behaves like a painter’s brush tracing time upon light, still anchored to the real.
Tales of Water
Tales of Water transforms seascapes into lyrical abstractions through soft, elongated ICM strokes that dissolve literal detail into painterly atmospheres of shifting blue and grey tonalities. Chinnery uses slow shutter movement and minimal post-processing to create fluid chromatic gradients that feel closer to colour-field painting than photography, allowing water to become a metaphor for memory, transience, and emotional drift. The images function as meditative emotional spaces—serene, introspective, and beautifully ambiguous—revealing his signature ability to use motion not as disruption but as a vehicle for contemplative stillness.
Quiet Horizons
In Quiet Horizons, Chinnery reduces the landscape to its barest essentials, creating tranquil compositions built from horizontal motions that blur sky, sea, and land into calm bands of colour. The work exemplifies his mastery of restraint: slow, deliberate ICM sweeps create softened horizons where cool blues and muted neutrals gently merge. The series offers a visual language of serenity—minimalist, spacious, and rhythmically controlled—where the horizon line becomes a psychological threshold rather than a geographical marker, inviting viewers into a state of breathlike contemplation.
Images of Elsewhere
Images of Elsewhere represents Chinnery’s most expressionist and colour-rich body of work, using dynamic ICM gestures—arcs, vibrations, and layered sweeps—to create shimmering atmospheres that dissolve recognisable landscapes into fields of emotional colour. Greens, reds, golds, and deep blues blend into softly fractured surfaces that recall abstract painting more than observational photography. Conceptually, the series explores displacement and dream-territories, conjuring a sense of an imagined place beyond geography—an “elsewhere” constructed from movement, sensation, and intuitive response.
Dreams of Tuscany
Dreams of Tuscany reimagines the classical Tuscan landscape as a drifting, nostalgic memory rendered through gentle vertical ICM strokes and soft, warm palettes of ochre, gold, and green. Instead of depicting Tuscany directly, Chinnery filters the region through a dreamlike haze where trees, fields, and villages dissolve into lyrical abstraction. The series evokes cultural memory and the emotional warmth associated with the region, transforming familiar terrain into a soft echo—a vision of Tuscany as remembered rather than seen, infused with quiet romance and temporal distance.
3.6 Synthesis — The Architecture of a Generation
Together, these five artists built what can now be considered the first canon of ICM photography. Their approaches differ — expressionist, structural, meditative, scientific, pedagogical — yet all share the same principle: the photograph as gesture, the world as rhythm. They transformed the act of photographing into a choreography of perception. Between them, they encompass the full spectrum of movement: from the anarchic to the precise, from the ecstatic to the serene. Their legacy is not only aesthetic but philosophical — they redefined what it means to see through time.
From Friel’s fire to Sirén’s silence, from Gray’s geometry to Malm’s chromatic harmony, and from Chinnery’s bridge to the future, the ICM movement found its architecture. They proved that abstraction in photography can be as deep, emotional, and disciplined as any other art form. Theirs is not a style but a foundation — the root system from which new visions will grow. The light they set in motion continues to move through every photograph that dares to dance with time.
4. The Future of Motion
The story of Intentional Camera Movement is still being written. What began as an act of curiosity has matured into a language — a way of thinking through light, time, and emotion. The five pioneers of the movement established its grammar, but not its limits. Their legacy is not a closed circle, but an open horizon.
ICM stands today at a decisive threshold. It has proven that abstraction can remain photographic, that motion can preserve truth, and that gesture can embody both science and spirit. The next chapter will depend on those who continue to explore its possibilities — artists capable of merging intuition with reflection, sensitivity with theory.
In a world increasingly dominated by automation and artificial vision, ICM reminds us that photography is still a human act: a dialogue between body and light, between chaos and form. Each movement of the camera becomes a heartbeat against the mechanical, a refusal to let perception be programmed.
The future of ICM will not be defined by style, but by depth of vision — by those who understand that abstraction is not escape, but revelation.
The camera will continue to move, not to blur the world, but to rediscover it — again and again — as vibration, memory, and light.
Epilogue — The Second Wave of Pure ICM (2020–2030)
As the pioneers defined the language of movement, a second wave began to rise — artists shaped not by tradition, but by the convergence of intuition, digital light, and post-photographic thought. Patryk Kuleta (Trynidada, Poland) brought architectural geometry into the realm of emotion, merging ICM motion with digital fusion to create a new, viral aesthetic of modern abstraction. Alexander Shapovalov (Russia) turned the urban landscape into a lyrical and psychological map, translating the pulse of cities into a choreography of color and shadow. Stephanie Johnson (USA), founder of ICMPhotoMag, became both artist and architect of a global community, bridging the gap between movement and pedagogy, between creative solitude and shared evolution. Wim van Teeffelen (Netherlands) reintroduced purity — every tone deliberate, every gesture balanced — reminding us that control can also be poetry. And David Day (UK) sought silence in luminosity, carrying the spiritual minimalism of ICM into a meditative, almost musical space.
Together they represent the dawn of a new generation — one that no longer asks what ICM is, but what it can become.
Text and research by Héctor Morón Solís (2025)
Pure ICM: anothers five Voices (Part 2)
Allegorical Abstractionism, a new abstract language
