The Long Shot

Although, as I said in a recent post, I'm most comfortable working within the short focal length range of a "normal" zoom, I think my favourite lens for when I want to have some fun is the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS. On an APS-C DSLR, the zoom range becomes the equivalent of a 110-480mm lens (in 35mm terms), which is quite some reach, but the built-in "image stabilisation" means that it's still a hand-holdable lens under most circumstances. You can really reach out and grab those interesting vignettes in a landscape that otherwise get overwhelmed by context. For example, this oak on campus has been catching my eye all week, as I take my morning coffee break in the Staff Club:



The long lens, used from a slightly elevated position, gets in amongst the branches in a way I could never achieve with my feet on the ground in front of its magnificent bulk. The foregrounding and isolation of decorative detail puts me in mind of the nineteenth century sketches of the likes of John Ruskin and Edward Lear. The flattening perspective of the telephoto lens comes in handy, too, for sculptural juxtapositions like this one:




Or it can compress the reflections in a campus window into something like a painter's canvas:



That two-dimensional look is something I always find attractive in a photograph. At heart, I suppose, I'm still a drawer and painter who uses photography.

Autumn Leaves

I've been keeping my eye open for chances to photograph autumn leaves without falling into cliché. It's not easy, but I quite like these two. I like them because they say "autumn leaves" without saying "photo competition entry".






And then there's this one. The first couple of times I passed this logjam of Japanese acer leaves I averted my eyes and hurried past. But eventually I gave in and gave it a couple of shots. Sigh.

The Best is the Enemy of the Good

I knew I'd regret getting sucked into gearhead world, but -- like Joni Mitchell and Hell in the song "Blue" -- I thought I'd take a look around it, though. Having earned a bit of spare cash (did I mention I sold thirty pictures at my recent exhibition?) I found myself in the unusual position of having the option, should I so decide, to buy pretty much anything that took my fancy, and at a time when new and exciting photographic gear seems to be emerging every week. Within reason, obviously: there was no point in even looking at the Leica M9 but, hmm, perhaps the X1?

I'm just no good at spending money, though. It gives me little pleasure. I do enjoy the thrill of the chase -- getting good stuff cheap, sniffing out, running down and snapping up unconsidered trifles at a bargain price -- but there's no fun to be had (for me, anyway) in simply looking up the good stuff in the catalogue, typing in my Visa number, and waiting for it to be delivered. It feels like cheating. So, as a compromise, I decided I'd pass up on the Panasonic GF1 or the Olympus EP1 this time round, bank most of the money against next year's crop of photo-novelties (hello, GF2 and EP2) and hunt out something tasty on Ebay instead.

I like Ebay. It reminds me of what was once my favourite magazine, the Exchange & Mart, which my friend Alan and I use to pore over together in our early teens. The Exchange & Mart -- which finally ceased in print just this year -- was a typographic and typological miracle, columns of tightly-packed classified ads expressed in a special language of categories, abbreviations, and euphemisms which you had to master to get anything out of it. We rarely actually bought anything -- that wasn't the point. As I have written before, growing up in a new town gives you a thirst for and curiosity about Old Stuff. The Exchange & Mart was a weekly dictionary of Stuff, and a practical education in the value people put on it, and indeed in what people value. Why is a used Gibson Les Paul guitar so expensive? Why is a used Ford Willys jeep so cheap? Who is this writer Henry Miller, and why are his books mixed in with thinly-disguised pornography? And why do people have such a thing about SS ceremonial daggers?

Ebay has the same attractions, but with the added delights of pictures and interactivity. There is an exciting sense of risk, but also a compensating sense of community (decreasingly so, sad to say) . It's all about strategy. There's no sense in wading in and placing an early, hopeful but modest bid. But there's also no sense in making bids that overvalue the item you're after. You need to feel out the market, bide your time -- maybe sitting out the first few times your object of desire comes up for sale, just to watch what others are willing to pay -- and then make a calculated pounce. The ultimate satisfaction, which truly gratifies one's inner market trader, is to realise that no-one else is going to bid, and that the the price is going to stick at 99p for an item without a reserve price and worth considerably more.

So, what was I going to take a caculated risk on? As I have bought into the Canon SLR system in a modest way, I thought it might be worth taking a look at "L" lenses. It should come as no surprise to long-term readers of this blog that I am a "kit zoom" photographer. Eighty percent or more of my work is done with the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens, which comes attached to the bottom-of-the-range DSLR I use, but which I have found to be a perfectly satisfactory lens, though I am not the kind of person to put it on a tripod and photograph test cards to calibrate the degree of its perfection or my satisfaction. It takes very nice pictures.

However, camera manufacturers run two parallel universes, as far as lenses are concerned. There's an affordable "consumer" range, in the main perfectly adequate assemblages of glass, but in plasticky housings and far from weather- or dust-proof, and then there's a "professional" range, with stellar optics, and robust, weather-proof housings. The main difference, of course, is weight, size, and above all price-- you can add a thousand pounds or more to the cost of your pathetic, plastic, "consumer" lens for the pro equivalent. That's a lot of money.

In the case of Canon, the pro lenses are designated "L" (for "ludicrously expensive") and have a tasteful red line around the barrel. It's hard to avoid conflicted feelings... On the one hand, you suspect that that you may be falling short, somehow, on image quality; on the other, if like me you have arte povera tendencies, it's fun to laugh at foolish "advanced amateurs" overburdened with their collection of heavy and expensive lenses.

So, having a bit of funny money I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. I settled on the EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM: one of the cheaper L lenses, but with a good reputation, and covering the sort of modest zoom range I like. I got into my Ebay stalker's hide, and waited, watched and pounced. For £390 I thought it was a reasonable bargain.

Now, if you are susceptible to "fit and finish", a lens like this is a pleasure to handle. It's big, weighty, and everything is just right, from the damping of the focus and zoom rings to the feel of its heft in your hand. My little 450d practically squeaked with delight as I slotted it in. You just know it's going to take your photographs into a new dimension.

Except, it doesn't, not really. Or, at least, it hasn't. In fact, I'm losing a lot of shots I would have got before, doubtless due to the lack of built-in image stabilisation. "IS" in its various guises has been one of the real advances made possible by digital photography -- with good technique you can hand hold at shutter speeds that were previously impossible, and guarantee sharpness at more normal speeds. As you get older (or colder, or both) this is a serious advantage. And the cheapie 18-55mm zoom has it, and the "stellar" 17-40mm doesn't.*

Of course, the shots I do get are pretty good, quality-wise. Several people remarked on the "fossil marble" image in the post Fishy Rice, which was the first "L" image I've posted. There is a certain descriptive clarity which the lens brings to the image-making process which, normally, I would have to bring out in post-processing. But it really doesn't make me think, "The sheer quality of this lens is worth all the shots I'm missing because of its lack of IS". In the end, it's a lens designed for 35mm film cameras, and the game has changed since then.

This is in many ways a pleasing result. I'll stick with my nice, cheapie zoom, and recoup my money on Ebay. I've had a little adventure into gearhead world, and returned intact. But the fact that I've had the lens on the camera all week and have no pictures I really want to share with you speaks for itself. As someone (Voltaire?) once said, "The best is the enemy of the good"...


* There is an argument over whether in-lens IS is superior or inferior to in-body IS. Clearly, a camera system wth in-body IS would mean that the qualities of such a lens migh have a better chance of shining through.

Stormy Weather

In the last year or so I have been noticing a new sort of cloud over Hampshire. What I keep seeing is a downward-breaking plume, falling away from a horizontal cloud or cloud layer, as if a large object had plummeted through the the cloud, or a strong local suction had been applied to it from below. It sometimes has a bit of a twist, but is quite wispy and is nothing like as dramatic as a tornado funnel cloud, but nonetheless noticeable. This element of verticality in the sky is striking and, to my mind, new.

I saw a particularly fine example this week over Southampton as I drove to Romsey to do a Saturday morning shop. As often happens when driving, my mind went off in two different but related directions. First I thought, "Perhaps these unusual clouds are the precursors of storms, or even tornadoes", and then the words in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen sprang into the forefront of my consciousness, and repeated themselves like a mantra.

It took me a while to place the words. Is there anything more infuriating than a name or memory that stays just out of reach? Upsetting, too, if it goes on for too long: once you've watched relatives vanish into the hell of dementia all the humour goes out of memory loss. Luckily, I soon remembered that those words are, of course, one of the elocutionary phrases Henry Higgins inflicts on Eliza Doolittle in the musical and film My Fair Lady, and which figure in the song "The Rain in Spain", once a staple of light radio but now, I suspect, unheard from one year to the next.

The memories flooded back. "On the Street Where You Live", "Wouldn't It Be Luverly?", "With a Little Bit of Luck", "I Could Have Danced All Night" ... I know every note, every word of those songs, although I loathe most of them. In 1964 we went on a family expedition to London to see the film, and we owned the soundtrack LP which was played constantly until the soundtrack of West Side Story took its place. Ah, more, better songs! By the time I reached Romsey I was singing "The Jets Song" and feeling very good.

When you’re a Jet,
You’re a Jet all the way,
From your foist cigarette
To your last dyin’ day.

Of course, the inevitable next thought had to be: they don't write them like that any more, do they? And the truth is, of course, they don't. The ability to write popular songs with the sheer variety, melodic inventiveness, fun, wit and narrative cleverness of those classic musicals seems to have vanished from the world.

Not only don't they write them, they don't play them on the radio, either, and it's such a shame. It made me feel sorry for youngsters brought up on an exclusive diet of beat-driven rock and pop. And worried, too: what if you never learn to recognise and appreciate these more sophisticated qualities simply because you have never learned to loathe "I Could Have Danced All Night", or laughed out loud to "America" or "Gee, Officer Krupke"? And perhaps you can't ever really appreciate beat-driven rock and pop unless you have sat through an hour of dross on Two-Way Family Favourites, yearning to hear just three precious minutes of Elvis or the Beatles.

As it happens, when I had finished the shopping in Romsey, the front page of the local paper caught my eye. It seems a mini-hurricane had torn through South Hampshire on Tuesday, leaving a swathe of mild devastation (fallen trees, damaged roofs, blocked roads) from the New Forest to Winchester. And those words popped back into my mind: In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen... Well, maybe things are starting to change. Perhaps I'd better check where the rain in Spain is mainly falling, these days, though -- if my geography is worth anything -- I doubt it ever fell mainly in the plain.

Storm passing over Llandrindod Wells, Wales

Fishy Rice

Not so unusually these days, but perhaps still worthy of remark, I do all the cooking in our family (and I do mean all -- I cook evening meals six or seven nights a week, plus lunches at weekends for anyone too idle to make their own). When the kids were younger, this would often mean two meals every night, and occasionally three, as someone had usually decided that day that they didn't like rice / pasta / potatoes any more. As it was a rare meal that pleased more than three out of four, I have learned to cook a last-minute omelette or operate a grill whilst feeding myself with the other hand.

I'm not a good cook, understand, or even particularly enthusiastic; it's just that I can be bothered, and the Prof can't. After over 15 years of family cooking I have evolved a repetitive menu of set meals which I can cook on autopilot and with which, no doubt, I have dulled the palette and gustatory curiosity of my children. I'm as predictable as a school canteen: if it's Friday, it must be toad in the hole. In that respect, I resemble 80% of traditional Mums. Though my own mother was a deeply unenthusiastic cook, who relied on staples like frozen burgers, instant mashed potato and tinned and frozen vegetables to get us through the week. By comparison, I'm Nigel Slater.

Just to, um, vary the blog diet a bit, I thought I'd pass on a store-cupboard recipe I made up years ago in a tight spot, and have cooked ever since. It's called "fishy rice", because that's what it is.

Ingredients:

1 tin of mackerel in oil
Long grain white rice (approx. 300 ml by vol. *)
1 heaped teaspoonful of Marigold Swiss Vegetable bouillon powder (accept no substitutes) in 450 ml of boiling water
1 onion, chopped
[optional] 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
half a red pepper, chopped
half a green pepper, chopped
two or three mushrooms, chopped
[optional] a handful of shredded white cabbage, or some frozen peas
Tomato puree
Jamaican hot pepper sauce
Salt & pepper
Random herbs (a.k.a "mixed herbs")

* I have found that one of those small Chinese tea bowls contains enough rice for one person, and contains roughly 100 ml, which makes the "one and half times by volume" calculation for the water very easy.


Pour all the oil from the tin of mackerel into a heavy bottomed saucepan. Heat the oil gently, and fry the onion and garlic until soft. Add the random herbs, salt and pepper, and the other vegetables and stir fry until you're bored with it.

Add the mackerel, breaking it up into chunks and stirring it in with your favourite spatula. If it's getting too dry, add a little olive oil. Add the rice, and stir to coat the rice with oil. Add a few good dashes of hot pepper sauce.

Pour in the vegetable stock -- this should make a wonderful sizzling sound. Stir, adding a good squeeze of tomato puree -- about 10 cm from a tube. Bring to the boil, then cover the pan with a square of aluminium foil, and press the pan lid into it to give a good tight seal. Reduce heat to the lowest you can possibly manage, and cook for 20 minutes.

Turn off the heat, and leave to stand for 5 minutes. Remove the lid and foil, stir and serve. It ain't pretty, but if you get it right it's very tasty. The secret ingredient is the oil from the tin, obviously (please don't tell me about mercury poisoning, etc.). I can report that if, under stress, you forget to put the rice in, it tastes quite good anyway with pasta. Serves two greedy adults plus two picky children.

Cards

It's time to make this year's Christmas / New Year cards (via VistaPrint, as usual). As has become my habit, I'm doing two: one which gestures vaguely in the direction of "picturesque", and one which doesn't. If you have commented on this blog before now and would like to receive one, just email me your terrestrial address if I don't already have it.


I was heartened to see my statistics take an unexpected leap upwards earlier this week. On closer investigation, however, I discovered that this was because a website specialising in "corporal punishment" had linked to an earlier post concerning my primary school, which happens to mention the use of the cane. Be assured, you very strange people, that spankings and "severe French lessons" do not and will not figure prominently in the subject matter of this blog, so you might as well stop reading now. Unless, that is, you have enjoyed what you have found. But don't even think about asking for a Christmas card until next year.

Three Square

The challenge of working with extreme contrasts in light intensity, which you get at this time of year particularly, has almost become a project in its own right. I've been refining a set of moves during exposure and processing that work well for me and my extremely casual (almost careless) modus operandi; I don't think I could ever resort to a tripod, multiple exposures and HDR software. Nothing particularly clever or secret, merely shooting RAW, exposing for highlights, and making use of the tools within Photoshop Elements 6 like "Adjust Colour Curves". It helps, of course, if you're not afraid or ashamed of inky black shadows...

Autumn Watch

Autumn seems to have come on sooner this year, and to have taken a deeper grip much more quickly, at least on certain species of trees. I don't recall seeing such heaps of leaves on the ground in October; the planes at Mottisfont this afternoon had dumped huge loads, although the oaks are still fairly green.

On the other hand, the trout there seem to be hanging around in greater numbers than usual and are still in their summer haunts, although some of the bigger specimens that dominate the choice spots by the bridge are looking distinctly worse for wear. I've no idea where they go in the winter months -- do the older generation die out? -- but they're usually much less obvious by now. When I first came to Southampton in the mid-80s salmon were still coming up the Test in November in numbers, and had to negotiate a salmon leap built into a mill-weir on the river at Romsey, which had been carefully sandbagged to protect them from damaging themselves on the brickwork. It was a very entertaining spectacle, and you half expected to see a bear hanging over the parapet of the bridge, to swing a speculative paw at the great fish. They've become a rare sight now (the fish, that is) and last time I looked the sandbags had rotted away and not been replaced.

Autumn Day

I'm a sucker for Autumn, it plays on my Celtic sentimental streak like a harp. I discovered I was susceptible to the lacrimae rerum in the sixth form, when we came under a steady drizzle of autumnal, valedictory poetry, for which I had been primed by an unexpected break-up with my first "steady" girlfriend: hey, Werther, c'est moi. Keats, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Goethe, Rilke -- sometimes it was all I could do not to sob into my exercise books during double English. In self-defense I took refuge in portentous, inky marginal doodling, a habit I have continued to this day.

A poem I have always loved from this period of my sentimental education (and which, because of its juxtaposition in the Penguin Book of German Verse, I always misremember as by Friedrich Nietzsche) is Herbsttag (Autumn Day), by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Ranier Maria Rilke, 1902

As I'm at home this afternoon, with a cup of coffee and a German dictionary to hand, here's my (slightly free) translation:

Lord, it is time. That was one big summer.
Disconnect the shadows from the sundials
and let slip the winds upon the fields.

Require the last fruits to be full;
a couple more southerly days
will turn them out perfectly, and hound
that sweetness into heady wine.

Whoever has no house, won't be building one now.
Whoever is alone, will stay that way now:
wakeful, reading, writing long letters,
and restlessly tramping The Avenue, over and over,
driven by the leaves.

I enjoyed doing that. I almost wish I could submit it for approval as a piece of homework to my old teacher, Dr. Splett. But he is long dead, and our school now mutated out of all recognition and, I hear, soon to be moved to a new site. Sad, when you consider a school has occupied that site since 1558.

I wrote "The Avenue" rather than "the avenues" (Rilke's "Alleen" is plural), because a leafy thoroughfare of that name ran up the side of our school grounds, and was a favourite haunt for introspective walks and midnight fun in those far off days. It has a particular resonance, as "Alleen" is a close rhyme for "Alleyne's", which happened to be the name of our school. Sniff...

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1847

As I say, I'm a sucker for Autumn...

Friday!

Well, that was a busy week -- sometimes Friday arrives sooner than you're expecting, but also not a moment too soon. Thank goodness for lunchtime -- here's something I'm pleased with from my favourite port of call, the Pentagonal Pool, taken this week. I've no idea what that irridescent substance is, but it really does catch the light.




The clocks go back an hour in Britain this weekend, and we "gain" an hour's sleep on Sunday morning -- outstanding!

Wally!

Non-British readers may find this post a little baffling, and perhaps even British readers aged under 40. I feel a bit like the aged narrator at the outset of an adventure story: "I think it my duty that I set down, while the memory is still fresh, a true account of what transpired in those long-gone events -- can it really be 40 years ago? -- so that it may be passed on to a new generation, who may find it of no little interest to learn that their elders were as susceptible to youthful folly as themselves -- nay, perhaps even more so. Etc."

To begin at the beginning. You may, at some point, have heard someone described as "a wally", or "a bit of a wally". It's an expression that had its vogue in the 70s and 80s of the last century, but may still be heard on the lips of the older sort. [Sorry, I can't shake off this R.L. Stevenson tone]. We've already discussed "minced oaths" in a previous posts (Gadzooks!), and at root "wally" is clearly a minced-oath version of "wanker", but with the added cachet (back in its heyday) of hipness and contemporaneity.

There has been a lot of discussion, over the years, of the origin of the term "wally" in the pejorative sense of "an uncool, embarrassing person, prone to impulsive acts of clumsiness and foolishness" -- in many ways, an equivalent to the "shlemiel"* of Yiddish. This discussion has been confused by the fact that the word "wally" itself has a long heritage. I remember, for example, how when I was eight we used to walk home from Cubs in the winter dark, and would stop off for a steaming sixpenny bag of chips. A few of the boys with East End parents would ask for "a six penn'orth and a wally, please"; that is, a pickled gherkin, fished with tongs from the enormous cloudy jar on the chip-shop counter, mysterious and murky as a display of preserved body parts.

But the advent of the usage under discussion can be dated, and accounted for, fairly precisely. It all started at one of those chaotic early 70s open air rock festivals (Weeley? Bickershaw?) when a group of friends somehow lost contact with one of their number named, um, Wally. Easily done, in the Somme-like conditions. What distinguished this group from others, however, was that they loyally spent the gaps between acts wandering the grounds calling out, ever more disconsolately, "Wally? Wally! WALLY??" They even got one of the on-stage announcers to ask over the PA, "Wally? Has anyone seen Wally?", and the "Wally" refrain was taken up by the crowd. For a time, to call out "Wally!" in a random quiet moment was considered the very pinnacle of wit, and hilarity would reliably ensue.

Naturally, people brought this novelty home with them, including some of my own friends, who gleefully explained the whole thing the next week at school. It seemed to have been the best bit (indeed, the only good bit) about sleeping in a wet field, in unsanitary conditions, occasionally subjected to a poorly-amplified, wind-blown barrage of music. Sure enough, at the next season of gigs in our little town, someone would reliably shout "Wally!" in a quiet moment, to gales of laughter and the bafflement of visiting bands. It was a kind of in-crowd, "I was there" gesture. I imagine the same scenario was repeated all round the country.

It didn't take long for the novelty to wear off, however. It just stopped being funny. In the end, the only ones to call out "Wally!" at gigs were the kind of attention-seeking, over-excited twits, impervious to their own tragic unhipness, who couldn't possibly ever have "been there" and who, naturally enough, came to be referred to as "Wallies".

Date? 1972. Around the same time as young suburban things in Britain started exclaiming "No way!", using air quotes, and decrying the "rip-offs" which they (alright, we) couldn't "get our heads round", probably later than ultra-cool urbanites but a decade or more before any of these cult-ish new speech mannerisms entered the mainstream.

I have to say, even if shouting "Wally!" stopped being funny in 1972, it still amuses me mightily to hear the likes of cabinet ministers talking solemnly about "Rip-Off Britain" or exclaiming "Higher taxes? No way!", like the small-town head-bangers which, of course, a few of them might once have been. Like minced oaths, it's one of the pleasures of language-watching to see which subcultural currents rise to the surface, and how long it takes for trash talk to emerge from the mouths of the respectable.

And perhaps you can also see the roots (conscious or unconscious) of Martin Handford's mystifyingly popular Where's Wally? books of the 1980s -- the main point of which is trying to find a bespectacled fool named Wally hidden in a vast crowd of tiny people. Sounds familiar? What I hadn't realised is that this very British "Wally" went on to become "Waldo" in the USA, had a bit of a makeover, and found massive commercial success. Who knew? It's Fleetwood Mac all over again.



* Not to be confused with a "shlemazel", a habitually unlucky person. Definition according to The Joys of Yiddish: the shlemiel is the one who spills the soup over the shlemazel.

Put Out More Flags

I'm not sure whether this set of flags spells anything ("England expects...", maybe, or more likely "Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance"*), but I'm running them up the mast anyway.



















Once you start looking, you can't help seeing them everywhere. Stand by!


* Explanation added on 20/10/09 for non-British readers:

It is a (hopefully) apocryphal story told about the British army, that an urgent signal was sent from the front: "Send reinforcements, we're going to advance". This was misinterpeted at HQ as "Send three and fourpence**, we're going to a dance".

** "Three and fourpence" = three shillings and four pennies = about 16.6666666666 new pence.

Time

Once you've got enough life under your belt to have a personal "history", it's sometimes very enlightening to work out some simple timelines. If nothing else, it gives you a real sense of the way subjective time differs from objective time, and personal time differs from historical time. It may be a well-worn cliché to say that time goes faster as you get older, but it is also simply true. This may be due to the fact that five years is half of a ten year old's life but a mere tenth of a 50 year old's life, but the sweet carelessness of our youthful years also makes for more intense experiences compared to the routine and anxiety of later life.

An acute sense of time passing and time wasted can be panic-inducing, though. This is perfectly expressed in Pink Floyd's superlative piece "Time", on Dark Side of the Moon:

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun...

I had a jolt of this kind recently, when I realised that not only had I lived in our current house longer than anywhere else in my entire life -- twenty years -- but also that this was two years longer than I had kicked around in my "home" town, and that the whole stretch I had done in this town -- twenty five years -- was not far short of half of my age. What had started out as a young man's temporary, career-oriented move to a city I didn't especially want to live in, has become my life.


More strangely, there can sometimes be a slippage in the relationship between relative time and objective time in the opposite direction. I remember a few years ago going into one of the Games Workshop stores, where black-clad youths were hunched over tables, painting tiny models of trolls and dragons, heads bobbing simultaneously to the in-house heavy metal muzak. Hang on, I thought, I know this, this is Black Sabbath ... And the penny dropped: these kids are listening to music that is thirty five years old! It was as if I and my 16-year old chums might have been sitting around in 1970 listening, without irony, to 1930s big-band swing, rather than something newly-minted that year like, well, Black Sabbath. Somehow, rock has torn a hole in the fabric of the fashion-time continuum, through which anyone is now free to pass back and forth.*

Talking of which, I listened to Dark Side of the Moon again recently for the first time in a very long time, and stepped straight back in time to 1973. I'm happy to report that part of me is still there, staying home to watch the rain, with time to kill.

Every year is getting shorter,
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or
Half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say...

Very 1973... The "monocle" is the lenscap of a Fed 3

* Afterthought at 5:30: It suddenly struck me that, of course, that is exactly what some of us, at least, were doing, in our enthusiasm for the Blues -- Robert Johnson was recorded in 1936, though obviously most people came to Johnson via Clapton...

Kindle, Schvindle

Way back last year I described my purchase of an e-book reader (My New Toy) and how the missing player in the UK market was Amazon's Kindle. Anyone who uses Amazon regularly will have noticed that, finally, a UK version of Kindle was launched this week. Except, it isn't.

What is being made available is the new "international" version, sold to us in the UK via Amazon in the USA, and which makes available not a new UK Kindle store but (for now, anyway) the existing USA Kindle store. Not only that, but the price per item is going to be 40% greater in the UK ($13.99) than in the States ($9.99). Not only that, but the connection to the Amazon store will be achieved by "roaming" on various 3G phone networks, which immediately puts a question mark over availability (ever tried ringing home from a train? Check out the Ofcom "3G coverage maps"). Hmmm. I ordered a Kindle in the initial excitement, then almost immediately cancelled it. Wait and see, I think.

However, the fact is that I'm encountering two problems with my current e-reader, which even the advent of a full-blown UK Kindle would not address.

1. The first is good old "digital rights management" (DRM), which will be familiar to users of music downloads. They simply don't want you to use your purchased books on more than a couple of nominated machines, don't want you to use rival DRM formats on the same machine, don't want you to buy "US only" books in the UK, and sure as hell don't want you lending your books or dropping them off at the Oxfam bookshop when you're done with them. Sure, there are "open" and portable formats like PDF, but even these are sold in DRM-ed versions for in-print items, so an "Adobe PDF" can't be used on your Mobipocket e-reader, even though it can read Mobipocket PDFs and non-DRM PDFs. Oh, and not all e-books are available in all formats. It's pretty tiresome.

2. There are quite a few e-books available, but you simply can't get the books you actually want. Example: I recently came across Charles Portis -- one of those cult writers you can't quite believe you've never heard of before, about whom people rave, and whose best-known books were first published decades ago, but are still in print. Although repeatedly frustrated by previous "dead cert" searches (John Le Carré? Nope) , I really did fully expect to hit paydirt this time. But none of his books is available as an e-book, not a single one.

Now, I'm perfectly happy with my current device as a piece of technology. Yes, it could be a lot easier to buy and upload the e-books. That's where the Kindle would score mightily with its promise of instant gratification: find a book, and download it directly to your device in 60 seconds (unless, of course, you're looking for Charles Portis or John Le Carré). Yes, it would be nice if the pages turned instantly, and navigation were simpler and quicker. Yes, it would be good if the contrast (and, for the sight-impaired, colour) of the "electronic paper" could be adjusted. But, the thing works well enough for a simple, linear, page-turning read in good light. I wouldn't want to use it to study a student textbook, though.

What I object to is that the availability of e-books is making my reading choices for me. I wanted to read more Robert Stone, but all I could get were his memoir of the sixties, Prime Green. I wanted to read Larry McMurtry or Dee Brown on the pioneer days in the American West, but ended up reading Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides instead -- a good read, but not where I wanted to go.

One day, of course, none of these things will be problems. I'll let you know when that happens. Until then, unless you're a first order gadget freak and/or a book fiend in search of an urgent space solution, I wouldn't bother to buy any of them. Though the new Sony Pocket e-reader does look very tempting...

I Can't Go On. I'll Go On.

This weekend sees the first anniversary of this blog, and that means it's time to decide whether to stick with Plan A, which was to spend a year checking out the Blogging Experience -- finding out what it was like having a public shop window and whether anyone would like what they saw in it -- and then maybe moving on to to something else. I always had the example of photographer Alec Soth's blog in mind, which ran a brief but exciting arc from September 2006 to September 2007.

I was unsure whether I could sustain regular written content of sufficient interest and variety to entertain both myself and anyone else who happened to read it. That has not turned out to be a problem, but it has been difficult finding a consistent tone and subject matter, and (perhaps not unconnected) impossible to boost the regular readership into three figures. I've noticed I get the most visits and the most comments when I attempt humour, and when I get into the territory of family and personal history. But it's also clear that most people, understandably, prefer their content to be predictable: the people who arrive here because of an interest in Panasonic cameras are not going to stay to read about Joni Mitchell, and the ones who like blogs to operate in non-stop confessional mode are not going to be turned on by donnish jokes about obscure words.



So, what to do? The thing is, I've got used to making the effort: it's like keeping a diary that I happen to leave open for others to read. It concentrates my attention on what I really mean to say to know that even as few as 50 people may read what I write. And, of course, it's useful being able to give new photographs an informal outing, before new sequences and books take shape. The reactions to them can be quite instructive. I'm enjoying this too much to stop.

So, in short, I am going to carry on for now, but perhaps at a considerably more leisurely pace. I may also try to write less, as in "write fewer words" -- I'm appalled, looking back at what I've written, at how pompous and portentous I can become, once I get going and the word count goes up. So I'll stop now, having undertaken to carry on.

Northam at Noon

I had a day off work today, and decided to take a camera over to a part of Southampton I rarely visit these days: down by the waterside in Northam, one of those mixed light industrial and residential areas that is a palimpsest of successive waves of development and demolition. I particularly wanted to scout some locations for a later, more considered shoot of some gorgeous Victorian gasometers and a spectacular scrap metal yard. The light was not ideal for a late morning photographic session -- rather too bright and too harsh in contrast for my taste -- but perfect for an autumn walkabout, and I had a good time. Here's a little gallery of first selections.

A Chair in the Sky

I keep seeing chairs which people have left in odd corners, presumably to enjoy the autumn sunshine. This puts me in mind of Joni Mitchell's adaptation of the Charlie Mingus tune "A Chair in the Sky" on her 1979 Mingus album, which I bought last year in an attempt to catch up with those lost years between Hejira and Night Flight Home. Maybe I'll listen to it this afternoon.



Or maybe I won't. We've got to pack up the son's things ready to drive him to "uni" (as I must learn, reluctantly, to call it) tomorrow and won't need any encouragement to lachrymose retrospection. Later for that.

My Tribe

In the wake of the Innsbruck exhibition, I've found myself explaining myself and my motives a lot, mainly to the kind of intimate stranger you meet via a blog -- kindred spirits who live on the other side of the planet and who may or may not be using a pseudonym. It's been a bit like a little taster session or homeopathic dose of fame, and as a consequence I've been reading the kind of things writers and artists say to journalists with a new sympathy. No-one wants to be boring, but it must be a royal pain to have your throwaway remarks jump out of a press cutting to bite you half a lifetime later.

As so often, I don't really know what I think until I've said it out loud, and the most interesting and surprising thing I've heard myself say, is that I feel quite European these days. I had been listening to an interview on BBC Radio 4 with the self-taught Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and had experienced an enormous sense of fellow-feeling. That's my tribe, I thought. I've been a long time ECM records listener (not hard to guess, perhaps) and Garbarek is central to that project. As a label, ECM is highly distinctive; not just cerebral Euro-jazz but all kinds of multicultural crossovers such as Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble's surprise hit Officium. Many people will own that recording and classics like Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert or Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa without realising their common denominator.

Of course, one thing ECM is famous for is its record sleeves. They are an education in good taste and photographic excellence. If I could name my dream job, it would probably be supplying images for ECM recordings. In fact, as soon as I've finished this post, I may well sit down and draft a job application: it's not far from Munich to Innsbruck, after all, and maybe Manfred Eicher needs a nice day out...


[Talking of which: If anyone has a copy of the book ECM: Sleeves of Desire (basically, an illustrated catalogue of all the ECM sleeves from 1970 to the mid-90s) which they are prepared to sell at a sensible price, please do get in touch. I do have a copy of the more recent book Horizons Touched (still available and which I recommend to any ECM fan) but Sleeves of Desire has attained the cult status of an unobtainable classic. By "sensible price", I'm afraid I mean less than 100 Euros...]

Dawn to Dusk

As September rolls past the Equinox, the days begin to shorten noticeably up here in the north of the planet. From a photographic point of view, this is good news for us working folk, as it means we get that good raking light coming across the car park and the adjacent allotments when we clock in of a morning, and shining back through some of the better windows on campus as we clock off at the end of the afternoon. It's not my favourite light for the drive home, however.

In compensation, any day now we'll have the first morning mists and frosts. Scraping that first frost off the car windscreen in the morning is one of those moments that, like the first reappearance of the swifts in spring, reassures me that -- despite everything we've done as a species to put a spanner in the works -- things are still working more or less as they're supposed to. But, now that I won't be dropping my son off at the railway station every morning (gulp), I really should start walking in to work again, to help that little bit more to keep it that way.

The Winter's Tale

We went to see Simon Godwin's very effective production of that strangest of plays The Winter's Tale the other evening, and it's been haunting me ever since. It was the first time I'd found myself sitting in the front row of a theatre, with Paulina's spittle flying over my head in the spotlights as she rounds on Leontes, and making eye contact with Time and the old shepherd -- all three played by the same remarkable actor, Golda Rosheuvel. It was an interesting encounter with the reality and transparency of that theatrical "fourth wall".

After a while, Shakespeare's themes in the late plays can start to seem almost obsessive. Irrational fathers and husbands destroy stability through jealous rages, and in the ensuing chaos children are thrown aside and lost, strange unions and separations occur, and women move determinedly to the centre of gravity, faced with the idiocy of their men. Miracles of art and coincidence bring reconciliation of a sort after long passages of time, but a heavy price is paid, and at the end some bitter outsider is left out in the cold. People have often commented on the parallels of The Winter's Tale with the story of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, but there's surely something deeper, more personally tragic, working its way to the surface here. We'll never know, of course, but sometimes some appalling personal truth seems so very close to erupting out of these plays. Maybe that's part of what has made them so compelling for 400 years. Perhaps one day, a production will be so insightful, so compelling, that the whole Shakespeare phenomenon will be laid to rest, like an exorcism. Not yet though, old mole, not yet.


Meanwhile, here are two flags I found this week, window hunting:

Teed Off

When I was at school I had such a pronounced accent (a sort of car-crash of Hertfordshire and Cockney) that my own teachers would mock me, in that ironically barbed way that school teachers used to deploy. My German teacher once remarked that, in stark contrast with my English, I spoke German with the accent and clarity of an aristocrat. The same man was determined to cast me and my equally incomprehensible friend Alan as the gravediggers in the school production of Hamlet. I later discovered that I was notorious in the staff room for always trying to divert the class onto "woider isshoos."

Now, northerners like Tony Harrison seem to have cornered the market in tales of "how my teachers worked class upon me," but all deviations from Received Pronunciation were once regarded as a strong marker of lack of intelligence and/or ambition. At one extreme, this led to the sort of suburban gentility that is so mockable ( "The cake h-which you gave to he and I"); at another, it led to the ruthless self-extirpation of any trace of class (though not necessarily regionality) once you stepped through the door of a university.

However, as Shaw wrote, "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Once you stepped out of your "natural" accent, you were in a social minefield. A pick'n'mix approach to RP (a bit of BBC, a bit of thespian, a bit of Oxford) simply alerted the native speakers that, although you were unlikely to steal the silver, you didn't really belong. The snobbery of the Bloomsbury set was hardly unique, merely very well documented.



This process had started to stop by the 1970s. At university I felt no obligation whatsoever to work on my vowels, though I had already had my cockneyfied glottal stops forcibly removed by my parents, anxious that anyone asking for a "glarssa waw'ah" was doomed to be a dustman. Indeed, the process had begun to go into reverse. I encountered privately-educated contemporaries who -- especially in the context of radical politics -- had consciously taken the edge off their "natural" public school accent by rubbing away some random consonants here and deflating some vowels there, and in a few extreme cases had actually gone to the extent of taking de-elocution lessons. This put the boot on the other foot: you can no more adopt a pick'n'mix working class accent than you could fool Virginia Woolf about the drawer out of h-which you had come. Think Dick Van Dyke. Worse, think Dick Van Dyke trying to sell you a copy of Socialist Worker at the factory gate.

In the last decade, we've seen the rise of a new breed of politician, many of them my contemporaries (like Tony Blair, ptah! and Peter Mandelson, double ptah!), people who have learned to adapt to new realities like chameleons. It seems that voters cannot be commanded or convinced now, but must be won over subliminally by a species of branding campaign. New Labour was the first conduit to power for this new image-aware breed, but the Lib Dems and Tories have them, too. Voice and accent play an important part in this permanent revolution, sorry, makeover of the political class.

The old political parties were unashamedly class-based but, in all parties, an unreconstructed working-class accent was once perceived as an obstacle to power. Consider the CVs of Roy Jenkins or Ted Heath, men of humble origins who acquired preposterously fake voices at Oxford, though nowhere near as preposterous or as fake as the vocal mannerisms of Margaret Thatcher. But that has changed, and now that yesterday's radicals are today's government ministers or opposition shadows, carefully class-neutral voices are to be heard all over the radio and TV, and I have to say some of them do sound very familiar.

All this is a preamble to this simple comment: every time I hear a politician like Ed Balls or Nick Clegg or David Cameron on the media carefully inserting random glottal stops into each sentence I want to scream, "Stop it! You're not fooling anybody!! Everyone knows you were educated at a private school!!" It started a few years ago with Tony Blair, and now everyone's doing it. Even the bloody heir to the bloody throne has started doing it. It drives me mad.

Guys, listen: a glottal stop is not just a substitute for any old "t", and you get no credit for putting one in the wrong place in the wrong words. It's patronising. Just stop it.

DIY

There's an old poster from the 1970s, which I presume started life as a cartoon somewhere. I'm sure you've seen it: two extremely hungry-looking vultures are perched on a tree. One is saying to the other, "Patience, my ass. I'm gonna kill something!"

Something of the same entrepreneurial spirit lies behind self-publication. Face it, you are 99.999% unlikely ever to be "properly" published, so why not do it yourself? If nothing else, at least you may have left a permanent trace in a library or on a bookshelf somewhere. When posterity realises you were William Blake all along, it'll be a good place for posterity to start looking.

I'm a big fan of "on demand" self-publishing websites like Blurb and Lulu. They do seem expensive for the end purchaser, unless you understand the true costs of self-publication. Look, in all accounting, there are two sides to the balance sheet: income and expenditure. But, for most self-publishers, there will be no income side to speak of. I mean no income. As in zero. Accept that you will sell no copies of your book. As in not one. So your pre-publication sums, calculated to deliver that modest profit based on modest sales, are a fantasy. You actually stand to lose thousands of pounds. And we haven't even talked about publicity and distribution. Just forget about it.

If you understand that, then suddenly the prospect of getting into print and making available for sale (at a profit, if you like) decent-quality illustrated books totally free of cost starts to seem very attractive indeed. OK, the quality may be variable, but it's a small price to pay not to be stuck with several large cardboard boxes full of unsellable books. What, you think anyone is ever satisfied with the reproduction quality of their own photographs in any book, anyway?

The other sort of web-based service of which I am an enthusiast is the sort of jobbing printer typified by VistaPrint. This setup looks like a scam, feels like a scam, endlessly junk emails you with free offers just like a scam, but actually -- isn't. VistaPrint is actually a terrific custom printing service for postcards, cards, business leaflets, fridge magnets, t-shirts, etc., etc. I won't bore you with the details, but if you're in the market for, say, small runs of nicely printed postcards or gift cards of your photographs, then get yourself on their mailing list, and believe that the endless weekly emailed free offers are just what they say they are: free (but plus postage). Actually, my favourite thing about VistaPrint is the relentless creativity they put into getting your attention: each week, there seems to be a fresh new pitch. They really, really want you to have your 100 free postcards! I have used them to print my postcards and Christmas cards for several years, and will do the same this year, too.

Go on, do it yourself. Enough patience. If you're hungry, it's time to kill something!

The Ups and Downs

As you can see, I'm a fan of grids (Ha! It's the way I tell 'em). If nothing else, a subject with true verticals and horizontals is a good test of your camera technique. It's also a good test of your fusspot quotient: do sloping horizons or converging verticals bother you? More to the point, does it even occur to you to notice them?





I confess they do bother me more than I'd like to think, but only in this kind of shot, where getting them "wrong" would be so noticeable (or a conspicuous and provocative act of anti-fusspot-ness). Lee Friedlander can slope those pavements all he likes, as far as I'm concerned -- it works. Although I'm a 100% hand-held photographer, I do tend to notice and straighten verticals when composing in the viewfinder, although I do have a tendency always to raise the horizontal to the left.

In fact, if I had to name one simple thing that had improved my work, it would be "paying attention to vertical edges" and, for most purposes, trying to keep them parallel to the edge of the frame (i.e. not pointing the camera up or down). If nothing else, it means you often have to try different angles of approach, or using the "built in leg zoom", which often means finding better pictures.

Christmas Trees

Anyone who admits to an interest in photography usually becomes a convenient one-stop shop for friends and colleagues seeking photographic advice: usually variations on the question "What camera should I buy my partner for Christmas?" I can imagine there are enthusiasts for whom this is a golden opportunity to sound off -- all that compacted review reading and blog lurking suddenly finds an outlet, and the enquirer finds herself engulfed in a bewildering tsunami of second- and third-hand expertise. Not me, though. I'm not keen on spending my own money, never mind anyone else's.

It generally does no good to explain that I am not a pixel-peeping gear-head with views on the relative strengths of in-body versus in-lens image stabilisation, or that in my opinion one camera at the same price point is much the same as any other and that, in the end, you get what you pay for and the real question is, will you ever make use of half of what you've bought? No: I have been outed as a photographer, and it seems to matter to some people what I think. Flattering, I suppose, really. But, as the venerable saying has it: in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

In the extremis, as Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues, I have been known to direct the enquirer to find out what the intended recipient's favourite colour is, and to go with that. Or to say out loud the sacred names "Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Sony" and to make a note of the one that feels most pleasing or auspicious to invoke. I never include the name "Leica" in this incantation, of course, as I'm not prepared to be responsible for the consequences.

The more interesting (and genuinely flattering) side of becoming known as a photographer is that people want your opinion of actual photographs, sometimes their own, and sometimes -- less hazardously and more interestingly -- those they have come across. As a person who has held strong opinions on most things since firmly rejecting green vegetables at age three, I have constantly to remind myself that having a broad spectrum of strong views is not the normal human condition. I have learned to tread carefully. A snort of derision ("Ansel Adams!") can crush the green shoots of curiosity as effectively as a boot heel, whereas an admiringly raised eyebrow ("Richard Misrach?") can be all that is needed to drive through the green fuse a mighty oak of creativity.

The thing that emerges consistently for me from these random encounters is the extent to which people are held back by an elevation of subject matter over "making pictures". Most people, understandably, take photos "of" something. They want to represent what they see. After all, it's the obvious strength of photography over, say, drawing: it is quite hard not to achieve an acceptable likeness of the reality presented to the camera. But, on the other hand, it is still just as hard to produce a good picture "by, with, or from" the subject rather than "of" the subject.* That is, to make a satisfying arrangement of two-dimensional marks on a flat surface. This (in my view) is the only really productive approach to photography.

It doesn't help that famous photographers are often known by their characteristic subject matter, in a way that painters tend not to be. It confuses people about the "how" of great work. They think, "If only I could stand in the desert where Richard Misrach stood, or find before me the interesting people that Richard Avedon found, or be present at scenes of heart-breaking tragedy like Sebastião Salgado, then I, too, would take great photographs." Well, no, actually you wouldn't. Because, let's be honest, you can't even take an interesting photo of the family Christmas tree.

This has little to do with "art". No-one employs an "artist" to represent the sinks and stoves in a kitchen catalogue, after all. They're just photographs. But the question that few aspiring photographers ask is, how is it that the photographs in the humblest product catalogue or cookbook far exceed in quality and impact anything I can achieve? It's similar to our unquestioning acceptance, as naive filmgoers, of the astonishing but artfully transparent feats of the cinematographer.

Just a little thought, a little analysis, and a lot of looking at good photographs, will raise interesting questions about colour, composition, lighting, and lenses to which, it turns out, there are conventional answers which are reliably known to work (see: the kitchen catalogue) and, sometimes, new, exciting, original answers (see: Misrach, Avedon, Salgado). Learning to appreciate the difference -- basic visual literacy -- is the first giant step down the road to making an interesting photograph of the family Christmas tree.

At least, that's what I tell the few people who don't flee once I have evaded their question about the quality of their holiday snaps and have started to rant about kitchen catalogues and Christmas trees.








* Genitive versus ablative photography, perhaps?

Obliquity

The windows on campus still exercise their fascination. This natural pair came together this week, while taking my new camera body (Canon 450D) on its lunchtime patrols. The venerable 350D body will go to my daughter, who is showing all the danger signals of creative talent.

We Salute Attenborough

I found this unexpected insight into the mind of Werner Herzog (maker of some of my favourite films) on the Werner Herzog Archive:

New Statesman: To British viewers, at least, Encounters At The End Of The World will seem like a very warped take on the traditional TV nature documentary.

Werner Herzog: Yeah but I wouldn't put them down because in Great Britain you have some of the very finest nature documentaries worldwide.
New Statesman: Are you a David Attenborough fan, then?

Werner Herzog: I am. I like his excitement, I like the fervour and how he comes across to an audience is just wonderful. You see the excitement that you feel as a child when you discover for the first time that there are mountains on the moon when you look through a telescope. He transports this kind of excitement, this spirit of wonder, into what he sees and what he presents. So I would not like to put down what you see on television. Some of it is phenomenally beautiful.
New Statesman: In a way, you and Attenborough are trying to get at the same thing, just approaching it in different styles.

Werner Herzog: In different styles, but the wonder and excitement makes us brothers. I salute Attenborough.
New Statesman: Let's hope he sees this interview!

Werner Herzog: Whatever. He knows that he's good.

I'm a David Attenborough fan, too (who isn't?). When I was small, the Zoo Quest programmes on the BBC were an inspiration, and for many years I was an avid collector of creatures in jamjars and wildlife detritus. I still have some of my Zoo Quest books: Quest Under Capicorn sparked an interest in Australian aboriginal people which lasted for many years. When I was about twelve, I used to cover sheets of plywood with imitation bark paintings of goannas, barramundi fish and wondjinas.

It's strange when heroes from two apparently different domains of your life come together like this, and shake hands. Herzog, too, has an interest in indigenous peoples, of course: I wonder whether he read Quest Under Capricorn?

The boy who would be Attenborough

You'll think I'm making this up, but: this photograph was taken on my first camera (a Fed 3) by my father in the Austrian Tyrol, not far from Innsbruck, just seconds after I found this classic Red Deer antler. Remarkably, or ridiculously, I still have that antler, 40-plus years later.*


* Still got the camera, too.

I'd Like To Thank...

As you know, I was unable to attend the opening of "Der Widergänger" last night in Innsbruck but I have given some thought to what I might have said had I been there. It is traditional -- or at least appears to be so, if one takes televised award ceremonies as a model -- to give public thanks to the people who made it all possible, starting with one's parents and ending with wails and broken sobs.

So, here's my list*. I'd like to thank:

The unknown holidaymaker on the beach at Hemsby, Norfolk in August 1959 who let me use his high-quality Zeiss binoculars all day. Looking through those silvery lenses made my heart soar, and sharpened an appetite for simple seeing that has never left me.

John Boxley: my best friend in Infants School, whose pride in my ability to draw aeroplane wings as seen from the side was such that he would get me to sketch them in front of other kids in the playground dust with a stick. "Look, look! He's drawing them FROM THE SIDE!" This early taste of celebrity convinced me this was something worth persisting with.

Miss Dorothy Hendey and Mr. Michael Davies: primary school teachers at Peartree Spring Junior school in Stevenage, who entered me for several national junior painting competitions, two of which, ahem, I won. They made me feel success was the natural consequence of working on one's talents (such as being able to draw aeroplane wings from the side! Damn, I was good).

The unknown holidaymaker in 1967 (at the Gasthof Lamm in Tarrenz, Austria -- "Warum vorbei?") who turned out to be both interested in moths and butterflies (then my main enthusiasm in life) and photography. He took the time to explain the advantages of his SLR for insect photography, but also explained how I might use supplementary lenses on my brand new Fed 3 Russian rangefinder. Such life-enhancing kindness to show to a shy 13-year old boy.

The unknown conference attendee who stole several of my drawings from my college room one vacation. Almost as big a compliment as offering to buy them. So I will also mention Dick of Dicey Corridor because he did ask to buy the original of one of the drawings I used to do for the cover of Strumpet, a radical student magazine. It revived the heady feeling I had experienced some years before when the older sister of a schoolfriend bought my ink portrait of John Lennon. However, it would be another 30 years before I sold anything else.

The difficulty of etching: For a long time I thought of myself as a printmaker. After gouging many linocuts and woodcuts -- those gateway techniques -- I finally gravitated to a course on etching: the hard stuff. One evening, after being shown how to produce a photo-etching from a negative in an enlarger in a darkroom, the penny dropped. Etching is difficult, dated, and dreary; the photographic darkroom, by contrast, looked easy, exciting and fun (well, two out of three ain't bad).

Mike Skipper: Mike laid the foundation for everything I know about photography and the black and white darkroom, on a course in 1984 at the Southampton branch of the Oxford Darkroom. Above all, he took me to one side at the exhibition that was the culmination of the course and said some kind things that convinced me I had started on a lifetime journey.

Richard R.: Richard was my drinking companion for several years when I first arrived in Southampton in 1984. A keen photographer himself who once exhibited alongside Fay Godwin, he is probably the most patient and gifted printer of black and white negatives I have ever met, truly a wizard. Sadly, Richard gave up photography for windsurfing, and we haven't had anything to talk about since. Why, Rich, why?

Peter Goldfield: I said what I have to say about Peter here. I realise hyperlinks don't really work in an Oscar speech, but there we go. For me, without Duckspool, nothing. Simple as that.

Finally, The Weather of the British Isles : I dedicated my master's dissertation to "the weather of summer 1977" because it had been such a blessed washout compared to that legendary sun-fest of 1976. I don't think I could have written the tedious thing otherwise. The weather has been a source of fascination, frustration, joy, despair, exhilaration, anger, but never indifference or boredom, ever since. Above all, it is the ever-changing British weather that gives us the ever-changing British light, and ... and ... which ... I ...[sobs incoherently]


* I could also compile an anti-list -- for example my secondary school which made me choose between continuing art lessons or studying German (noooo!) -- but we don't want to go to that bitter place on this happy occasion.

Oh well

It is one of the great unresolved mysteries of my life that I was never approached to join the Secret Intelligence Service. It is one of the mythic scenarios of university life, after all: the casual approach from a tutor, wondering out loud whether one had any interest in being of service to one's country, the subsequent meeting with the Man from London in the pub, etc. Next stop, a life in which one has to answer the question "And what do you do?" with even more evasion that I have to muster now. Or perhaps not. I believe Spooks'R'Us has a webpage now and recruits quite openly via the newspapers; they probably twitter, too.

I would have said no, of course (I think, probably), but I was such a good fit -- speaks a range of European languages including German and Russian, of nondescript appearance but possessed of an easy charm and ready wit, comfortable with the highest and the lowest in the land, with a wide acquaintance among political radicals and various subcultural currents, desperate for cash and easily seduced by the romance of a Lark ... Dammit, I even had the under-16 equivalent of a brown belt in judo.

On reflection, I think the problem may have been that no single person knew all of these things about me. That, and the fact that I spent three years more or less permanently in bed during daylight hours. Thinking about it, very few people other than a small group of similarly-inclined friends may even have noticed I was ever there.



The other classic opportunity for Great Things at university -- one that did come my way, but which I passed up -- was the approach from a future kingmaker. Last year, Geoffrey Perkins died. His name may not mean much to non-Brits, but if I say he produced The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and held Douglas Adams' feet to the fire to get the scripts delivered you get the idea. As a writer and producer, he was central to a whole generation of influential (but strangely forgettable) British radio and TV comedy.

When he died, pictures of him in his Oxford days were shown on the news, and I remembered: one evening in 1973 or 74 the very same slightly goofy lad wearing the very same silly tank top and another guy had come knocking on my door.

"We hear you're quite funny," he said, "Would you like to write some stuff for our review?"
"No," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," I said.

And that was that.

What's On In Innsbruck?

For the German speakers amongst you, here is some early press coverage of my show in Innsbruck, courtesy of Rupert Larl. Modesty forbids me from translating for you, though I will point out that the item with "Kitsch" in the headline is not about me, thankfully.





This is an exciting experience for me, as you can imagine: and not just the exhibition, but also reading about myself in my favourite foreign language. Klasse! (does anyone still say that? It was quite hip in 1970...) Like Alice, I seem to have passed through the looking glass...

Septembrist

Increasingly, I find myself asking "What is wrong with this country?" I've always felt a bit of an outsider -- you couldn't grow up where I grew up with my interests and aptitudes without feeling that way -- but I think that nonetheless I've always unthinkingly bought in to that smug view that Britain, somehow, is at the centre of things. After all, there's a venerable tradition of inclusion in Britain which puts strange, difficult folk like William Blake or Isaac Newton or even Winston Churchill at the centre of the national myth, at least after they're dead; you used to feel there was a place for everybody, including "the awkward squad". But recently I have started to feel less like a bit of an outsider than a visitor from another planet.

I only have to leave these shores for the feeling to be amplified tenfold. It's like waking up from a terrible dream. Clean streets, decent houses, no drunken, loutish behaviour, no feral kids or street gangs, reliable public transport, state of the art health care ... Simple things, to be sure, but we -- as a nation -- seem to have decided to unzip our collective fly and piss all over them. We are an unlovely, loud presence at the fringe of everything that is right about Europe.

I read this week in The Guardian that increasing numbers of British artists are taking up residence in Europe, where to be an artist is regarded as an honourable vocation worthy of public subsidy, rather than as a scam for the work-shy. Pianist Nicolas Hodges, based in Stuttgart, "recently gave a Ligeti recital at Salzburg to a packed 1000-seat hall; in comparison, he says, he would have an audience of around 100 at Huddersfield contemporary music festival." It's hardly surprising people are leaving, is it? After all, no British gallery would ever offer the likes of me an exhibition.

It's a funny feeling, though, falling out of love with your own country. I can't help feeling that it must somehow be my fault ("It's not you, it's me") and perhaps it is. Or at least perhaps it's the fault of our generation, with our over-extended childhoods, our corrosive political cynicism, our covert worship of that falsest of gods, America, and our fear of seriousness masked with irony. We mocked and rejected the stuffy, traditional ways that delivered us the peculiar country we grew up in, but never quite came up with anything adequate to put in their place. We thought the European Project was too earnest and too boring to take seriously. We thought politics was "show business for ugly people." We said, "Don't vote, it only encourages them," and "Whoever you vote for, the government still gets in." We were right, of course, on every count, but that was never going to be enough: no surprise, then, that some ugly people took over our politics.

But I don't really feel responsible for all this mess, whether by neglect or a refusal to participate. I'm just a face in the crowd, 2000 light years from home. Instead, all I can do is shrug and contemplate the queue and the contents of the shopping trolleys in Tesco on a Saturday morning. "Are these my compatriots? Is this what they want? What is wrong with this country?"

Septembrations

It's September, and I've had a good break, if hardly a long one, and as a family we've had a positively astrological run of good fortune during the summer: the partner became a professor, the son got the grades for his chosen university, the daughter got good grades in the five GCSEs which -- against our judgement -- she was made to take a year early, and I'm about to have what promises to be an excellent exhibition. So am I relaxed and happy and refreshed? Far from it. Returning to work is so depressing. And so much good fortune in a row is making me edgy.

It's a truth that we mainly choose to ignore, that holidays are not really good for us. We all invest too much in our precious "time off," and it never really delivers. Face it, two weeks of play in a pair of shorts will not turn an ant into a brown-kneed grasshopper, nor will it much sharpen the edge of the boy Jack's dullness. Just ask Gordon Brown...

In a previous post (A Perfect Dordogne Read) I wrote of reading an Andy McNab thriller on holiday:

"As well as a bracing immersion into a single-minded world of Glocks and gollocks*, its compelling simplicity convinced me that I could sit down when I got home and write a bestseller myself. I would become rich, and then lead a life of my own leisurely choosing ever after. This was actually a more exciting fantasy than the book itself.

Now I come to think of it, such infantile musings are often the stuff of my vacation reveries. After all, the most powerful side-effect of any decent holiday is to cast a strong, unflattering light onto the other 95% of your year. It's a tantalizing glimpse of your "if only" life. I suppose that's why France is full of farmhouses, converted but unoccupied most of the year by British owners who have let such fantasies get the better of them."

On reflection, I realise I may have stumbled across a great truth about my life here. The problem is I can't quite figure it out. Maybe it has something to with the way the two parallel realities -- the workaday reality and the holiday daydream -- might be brought explosively into contact by simply enacting the fantasy. Write the bestseller! Live life as a holiday! Leap tall buildings in a single bound! Why not? Well, because. Or maybe it has something to do with recognising the superior and self-contained nature of one's capacity for daydreaming over one's capacity to "live large"? The "fifty things to do before you die" type of person always strikes me as needy, and never particularly fulfilled. Fulfilled people have usually learned to sit quietly in a room, and rarely go in for bungee jumping (though they might have a quiet smile thinking about it).

I have recently found myself in the odd position of repeatedly explaining why I'm not straining every nerve to travel to Innsbruck on September 11th** and I have found myself reaching for an analogy with the distinction between those who want to be writers, and those who want to write. The former are yearning for a lifestyle and fantasize about huge advances, booksigning tours in the USA, and Booker Prize acceptance speeches; the latter just want to be left to get on with writing their books.

Personally, I am not turned on by the idea of enacting the role of "photographer" or "artist." It is very gratifying indeed that Rupert Larl likes my work enough to give me a show in his gallery, but I'm very happy for the work to speak for itself. Although I can be a dreadful show-off, I'm more of a heckler than a main act, and anyway I'd like to think that the images are way better than anything I could say about them. On the other hand, if planes did fly direct from Southampton to Innsbruck and back every day I think my ego could withstand just a little attention. But they don't, so it'll just have to get by.

But what does turn me on is EVERYTHING about making photographs, from the hunter-gatherer outings where the ecstasy of "getting in the zone" is always within reach, to the exquisite agony of long evenings spent editing and sequencing images. For me, it's all about the process. Yes, of course, the destination is important (whether it be prints or self-made books or now an exhibition) but it's the journey there that matters. Crucially, I have found that making photographs is something I'm able to do, want to do, and do do -- day in, day out, year in, year out. Unlike, say, writing, painting, print-making, playing the guitar or any of the other things I never quite transformed from daydreaming or dabbling into doing.

But the thing about going on holiday is that being away from work and from home means that I also take a break from photography -- beaches and sunsets and mountains and pretty villages are not my thing and, besides, what is more boring for a family than a father who wants to hang out in strange corners with a camera for hours on end? So in order to get to do what I want to do I also have to be back at work, which is a paradox I could do without.


* re. "Glocks and gollocks": I forgot to gloss this in the original post -- a Glock is a popular and euphonious brand of sidearm, and a gollock is the British Army's preferred (Malaysian) term for a machete. Neat, eh? I'm going to monitor the spread of this linguo-meme closely, as it's currently unique on the entire internet!

** The ominousness of the anniversary has only this second struck me, and played no part in my deliberations, honest!

Translation Service

I've been asked to provide a translation of the text on the exhibition invitation so -- in case your German is not what it was -- the German texts read as follows:

"We invite you to the opening of the exhibition on Thursday, 10th September 2009 at 18:30.

At 19:00 Jennifer Charmandy will read texts by Mike Chisholm on photography from the blog Idiotic Hat.

Guided tours for school parties through the exhibition may be arranged by telephone on Saturdays 19th September and 3rd October, as part of the programme 'The Long Night of Museums'.

THE REVENANT is open Tues-Fri 15:00-19:00 and Sat 10:00-13:00 until 10/10/09.

web: www.fotoforumwest.at, mail: fotoforum@aon.at, phone 0043(0)512-572236"


There are about 80 images in the show, a selection from the sequences "The Revenants", "Brilliant Corners", "Pentagonal Pool", and "The Mysterious Barricades".

Consider Yourself Invited

Here is the rather nice invitation that Rupert Larl has made for my Innsbruck exhibition. It's a 21cm square, folded vertically about 6.5cm in from the left, so that a narrow slice of the image on the reverse folds over to conceal the left hand column of text and make an A5 sheet -- very elegant. Vielen Dank, Rupert! I only hope that the photographs can live up to their billing.

The title ("Der Widergänger") means "The Revenant", a reference to one of the sequences featured in the exhibition, and to my habit of repeatedly haunting the same spots. Unfortunately, one spot I am unlikely to be haunting in the next month is Innsbruck, though I haven't yet completely abandoned the prospect. But, should you happen to be in Austria between 10th September and 11th October, please do drop into the gallery, and make yourself known as a reader of this blog. It is Fotoforum West, at Adolf-Pichler-Platz 8, Innsbruck.

High

The view from Old Winchester Hill on Sunday

I think if I had a lot of money and leisure, I'd spend most of my time getting high. Not in the chemically-assisted sense, but literally: one of the most reliable thrills is looking down on the surface of the earth from a great height. I'm sure one of the motivations behind the invention of flying machines was simply to see what it all looks like from up there. I'd employ a personal pilot to fly me around in a helicopter or, if that's a little anti-social, maybe some silent steam-punk airship powered by nothing but the force of strong opinions (not so much an aviator as a bloviator).

For me, the best bits of a flight are the first and the last ten minutes, when you bank steeply over a city and its surrounding countryside, having what I think of as an Inverse Auden Moment, where the "something amazing" is not (hopefully) a boy falling out of the sky, but the 21st century equivalents of ploughmen and a horse "scratching its innocent behind on a tree" seen from 1000 feet above. Yes, I'm that idiot going "Look! Look down there!" when half the passengers are trying studiously not to do precisely that.

Two of the greatest aids to timewasting and woolgathering that have been invented in recent years are Google Maps and Google Earth. There's a great post by Struan Gray on his blog on this very subject, which I won't try to improve on. Suffice it to say that, in idle moments, I like nothing better than to trace routes from Old Haunt A to Old Haunt B from the commanding heights of the Google satellite imagery, zooming in to check out the field marks and archaeology which is invisible from the ground, and zooming back out to admire the broader colours, shapes and patterns. The sense of controlling an all-seeing crystal ball always reminds me of the time some friends and I were ejected from the camera obscura perched high on the top of Bristol's Avon Gorge for engaging too ecstatically and too vocally with the large and luminous saucerful of secrets laid out before us by that miracle of optics. I think it was the same afternoon in 1972 we were also asked to leave the Arnolfini Gallery, after interacting too vigorously with an exhibition of kinetic art ("This is an art gallery, not an adventure playground").

Back in those same far-off days when the chemically-assisted sort of high still seemed like it might be a useful route to knowledge, I saw an extraordinary film called Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames (yes, they of the famous chair) which, adopting the manner of an educational short made for schools, proceeded to blow minds simply by proposing a journey out into the universe in a series of 10x enlargements, starting looking down on a man lying on his back on a blanket and ending at the limits of the observable universe. The trip is then reversed, but this time it doesn't stop with the man on the blanket but goes straight on through to the inner space of the sub-atomic level. Like, Whoah! I imagine it's a little quaint, now, but at the time it mapped nicely onto a series of [sub]cultural concerns that sought to negotiate a link between art and science, and found an austere new sublimity in the objective but "conceptual" insights of maps, graphs, catalogues, inventories and indeed photographs.

This sensibility found expression in works as various as the music of Terry Riley and Philip Glass (think of the film Koyaanisqatsi), the famous "Self Burial" photo-sequence by Keith Arnatt, the land art of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and the early films of Peter Greenaway. There was an exhibition ("1965 to 1972 -- When Attitudes Became Form") in 1984 at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh which documented some of this alternative to central casting's appallingly inaccurate "flares and flower power" view of the period, and the catalogue is worth seeking out. Its legacy today can be seen in the camera-less photography of Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller, and its decadence can be detected in the ironic but pointless scientizing of artists like Mark Dion. "If in doubt, make a grid" was always a handy guideline, but has probably outlived its usefulness.*

Of course, the desire to get up high and look down from a great height is as ancient as our envy of the freedom of birds. A shaman's inner journey to the Otherworld is usually at some point an experience of flight -- it's as if flight were a latent human capacity just waiting to be realised. During WW1, for the first time in human history, significant numbers of men did experience that realisation (and troops on the ground will indeed for the first time have witnessed "something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky"). One such aviator was O.G.S. Crawford: archaeologist, Marxist, crank, and pioneer aerial photographer who learned his trade as an observer flying over the Western Front, and who acquired an enthusiasm and sense of wonder for what the aerial view could reveal about structures on the ground.

One of the privileges of working in a university library is close contact with a huge stock of books, most of which are dull or impenetrable, but some of which are exceedingly interesting and rare. One of my favourite finds has been O.G.S. Crawford's volume Wessex From The Air, published in 1928, and filled with wonderful aerial photographs of classic archaeological sites like Stonehenge, Maiden Castle, and Eggardon Hill. Its binding, typography, text and illustrations all reek of the atmosphere that pervades accounts of those post-war years, exemplified by J.L. Carr's A Month In The Country. For years the book was my private enthusiasm -- almost as much as the photographs I loved the ink interpretations of them, carefully hand-drawn and lettered and enclosed in ruled frames, in that style that textbook illustrations always used until the advent of cheap lithographic printing; they are unselfconcious works of conceptual art.

I had little curiosity about the author himself. Being a plunderer rather than a scholar, I am usually on the look out for visually-stimulating material, not a potential subject for a thesis. But, remarkably, last year Kitty Hauser arranged an exhibition about Crawford's photography in the gallery on our campus, and published an intriguing book about his life, Bloody Old Britain. It turned out that Crawford had lived locally and worked for the Ordnance Survey, whose exquisite maps are the ultimate conceptual bird's eye view of our landscape. There's a review of the book by Simon Heffer here, from which I quote this:

The ultimate act of stupidity by Crawford's masters was their refusal to ship the Ordnance Survey's records, books and maps to a safer location before the Blitz - as a port, Southampton was a prime target for the Luftwaffe. Crawford eventually took the matter into his own hands, and had much that was vital shipped out surreptitiously to his village home. Two final vanloads of his most personal papers were waiting to be driven out one evening when the drivers were called to a 'dental parade'. The vans and their contents were obliterated that night in the bombing, a blow from which Crawford seems never properly to have recovered.

Ironic, or what? The former military aviator's views of the ground from above destroyed by military aviators looking down on Southampton. On a personal note, I should add that my grandparents had moved to Southampton in 1938, and my grandfather, a veteran of the trenches of the Western Front, was in the Millbrook Home Guard, watching over the Docks. He would have witnessed the raid that destroyed Crawford's papers. You don't have to be high to get that feeling that, somehow, it all just fits together.



* Somewhere around this time, the word "experiment" seemed to detach itself from the laboratory and became a sort of mission statement. There was "experimental" music, film-making, and theatre. Intellectually curious young people didn't just get off their faces, but "experimented" with drugs, which always sounded better in court. Strange to think there was once a time when lying in the gutter looking at the stars could be regarded as an "experiment" but, although in retrospect experimenting with drugs is about as wise as experimenting with Russian roulette, it was by and large an innocent and geekish enterprise to which the word "experiment" was not completely inappropriate.

The Big Show

Long-standing readers of this blog may recall that back in November I was approached, completely out of the blue and much to my surprise (and, I admit, not a little suspicion), by a publicly-funded photographic gallery in Innsbruck, Austria about a possible exhibition of my work. Things went quiet shortly thereafter, and I began to speculate whether this might be some elaborate but oddly ineffective scam.

Well, it has come to pass. If all goes to plan, there will be a show of 80 or so of my photographs (selected from the sequences Pentagonal Pool, The Revenants, Brilliant Corners, and The Mysterious Barricades) at the Galerie Fotoforum West in Innsbruck, from 11th September to 10th October, provisionally called "Der Widergänger" (The Revenant). Eighty images is a big show, and it's all a little bewildering.

There is, of course, the ongoing feeling that they must have got me mixed up with someone else. I am no stranger to "self esteem issues," it's true, but I am also not deluded and although I do not suffer unduly from false modesty I do know the contemporary art photography scene very well, and I thought I knew my place in it. I even took a certain pride in being an "outsider". It's all a little confusing. But my German is reasonably good and the gallery director, Rupert Larl, has unambiguously identified me as that English guy who spends his lunch hours endlessly photographing the same puddles of water. The Revenant, c'est moi.

If anything, this is an illustration of the power of the internet, and the new paradigms it has brought in. By putting it "out there" the work of a completely unknown artist will be seen by considerably more people than ever wander into most art galleries. Like many unknowns, in the past I have spent hundreds of pounds printing, framing, and putting up modest exhibitions in modest public spaces, and been glad of the opportunity. Sometimes I recovered my costs in sales, usually not. In the end, as I mentioned back in November, I had decided that hanging my work onto a wall was an outmoded rite of passage which I could easily do without. Ironically, the Web then brought me this extraordinary opportunity to do precisely that, on a scale and in a manner and in a place I would never have dreamed of. It's hard to take seriously.

Unfortunately, I will almost certainly not see the show myself. It would be difficult to pick a worse time for me to travel abroad than September shading into October. I have a responsible job in a university library which pays the bills, and my busiest time is looming -- a computer system upgrade, the usual preparations for the start of a new academic session, with the added complication of planning for a possible Swine Flu outbreak when the students return and start breathing all over each other and our staff. Too bad. But, should you happen to be passing through Innsbruck in September, why not drop by, and let me know how it looks?

But Rupert, who is self-evidently a very cool guy, has a plan. In my absence, he has arranged for a Canadian opera singer, Jennifer Chamandy of the Tiroler Landestheater, to read extracts from this very blog. No, really. It's going to be just like the Oscars: "Mike can't be with us this evening, so Jennifer will read out some thoughts on swearing and umbrellas..." I have suggested that, in the interests of verisimilitude, she probably ought to be made to wear a false red beard.

The gratifying thing is to look back on this "old" work with new eyes (in this case, Pentagonal Pool) and think: "Yes, that's not bad: I can see why someone would want to look at it."

Flat

I recently got a chance to offload one of my favourite anecdotes as a comment on Mike Johnston's blog. It's simply the best non-theoretical insight into the Long Debate on "representation" I know of. Here it is again:

"Just then my eye was caught by an unframed canvas standing on a shelf above Jacqueline's head and to the right. It was a portrait of a girl—Jacqueline, I would have said—in tones of green and black and white. She was shown in profile, looking off to the left, and Picasso had given the face a mildly geometrical stylization built up of triangular forms which emphasized the linear treatment but at the same time preserved the likeness. I pointed to the painting. 'How would you explain to a person whose training made him look on that as deformation, rather than formation, why you had done it that way?' I asked him.

'Let me tell you a story,' Picasso said. 'Right after the Liberation, lots of GIs came to my studio in Paris. I would show them my work, and some of them understood and admired more than others. Almost all of them, though, before they left, would show me pictures of their wives or girl friends. One day one of them who had made some kind of remark, as I showed him one of my paintings, about how 'It doesn't really look like that, though,' got to talking about his wife and he pulled out a tiny passport-size picture of her to show me. I said to him, 'But she's so tiny, your wife. I didn't realize from what you said that she was so small.' He looked at me very seriously. 'Oh, she's not really so small,' he said. 'It's just that this is a very small photograph. ' "

—Picasso, interviewed in The Atlantic, July 1957

In the best version of the story, which I've never managed to source, Picasso then turns over the photo and exclaims, "My God! You poor man! She's also completely flat!!"

Owl contemplating butterfly on cheek
Mapperton Manor, Dorset

Staycation

For a large proportion of Britain's population a "holiday" has become so synonymous with "going abroad" that the newspapers have skewed the original meaning of staycation to signify "having a holiday in Britain", which apparently a lot more people are doing this year. This year I'm doing both. A week, now finished (sigh) in Beaminster, Dorset (pron. "Bemminster"), followed by a week at home.


This Vermeer-like interior is the cottage in Beaminster we had rented, viewed in an antique mirror hanging opposite the door. Those are not Dutch clogs by the door, but my son's trainers.



This is a bit of Dorset viewed reflected in the stained glass of the chapel at Mapperton Manor. I like the way it echoes my partner's obsession with completing a four foot wide jigsaw puzzle with which she took over the dining table all week.

Fish pond at Montacute House

As I'm still on holiday but now within reach of my computer, I'm not sure whether I'll post anything more substantial this week or not. Maybe a couple more postcards: not so much "Wish you were here" as "Wish I was still there", perhaps.

How Deep is Deep?

I'm going to be away for the next week, so please talk amongst yourselves, or visit some of the fine sites listed on the right. In case you get bored, here's something to think about:

One of the metaphors we take for granted in the discussion of the meaning of our lives is the idea of depth. We talk of deep meanings, of profundity, of inner depths. But the deepest deep I can muster in my own body (let's say, from the innermost top of my brain to somewhere down in the pelvic region) is, according to this tape measure, about 80cm. And, so far as I can tell, most of my thoughts appear to be occurring in my head which is, what, 15cm deep? So all those deep feelings and profound thoughts are not particularly deep, if you take the metaphor literally. So why is the notion of depth so important to us? Where have we all experienced this unplumbed abyss that is the imaginary validation, measure and location of our most important thoughts and feelings?

(This is a question, not a setup, by the way: I won't be bringing any answers back from Somerset and Dorset; I'm just hoping for a relaxing week in some locations familiar from our earliest family holidays. See you later).

Straws in the Wind

I'm a bit of a photo-book enthusiast, and when I come across a photographer I like, I tend to watch for and snap up anything they publish in the way of books and exhibition catalogues. Other enthusiasts don't need convincing that regularly dropping £20 or £30 on a book is a worthwhile activity (it's cheap compared to heroin or fast cars), but even regular folk sit up and listen when I take them on a tour of abebooks.com. It's rare for quality photobooks to depreciate in value, and not uncommon for them to add an extra zero. Like any other form of gambling which is not purely chance-based, you just have to study form and stay ahead of the game. There's really no point at all in buying into Cartier Bresson, for example, and Martin Parr peaked a decade ago, but [name withheld] is a sure thing. My principle is that I always only follow my own taste and I never buy books at collector's prices, only at the published price or as lucky second-hand finds.

One of my enthusiasms is Susan Derges, whose camera-less imaging of water at night is a shining example of quite how delightfully inventive, dedicated and slightly deranged you have to be to achieve true originality in a saturated market. Her publications have been few and rather special, so when I spotted a recent catalogue for an exhibition at the Purdy Hicks gallery in London, I was straight on the phone. When I received it today, its heft, paper, print quality and binding seemed strangely familiar. After a minute, I spotted a familiar blue logo on the title page and the penny dropped: an up-market London gallery is now using Blurb to produce its catalogues!

I'm not sure whether this is an endorsement of Blurb, or an indication of hard times in the gallery world; a bit of both, probably. Now, I knew some well-respected and much-published photographers like John Gossage had experimented with Blurb and Lulu, but this is different. I'm also not sure what I think about it. It's a straw in the wind.

Obviously, Blurb books produced by you or me have a certain fantasy element to them, like toy money. Who wouldn't prefer to be published "properly" by Nazraeli or Dewi Lewis? But once the likes of Susan Derges also start to become available "on demand" via the likes of Blurb, then the nature of the game starts to change. If nothing else, we're all keeping classier company.

But, clearly, if the gallery (or fellow artist Christopher Bucklow, who seems to be acting as the "Blurbarian" in this case) pulls the plug on its availability, it will immediately becomes a "collectable", whatever its humble origin. Wouldn't it be ironic if that disposable, democratic, Web 2.0 ethos served to generate a new source of ultra-rare collectors' pieces, printed in tiny editions? Not sure what I think about that, although I'll have no complaints if, in time, my £17 purchase adds a zero in value...


Talking of straws in the wind, can't you just see the tumbleweed blowing down "Engineers' Row" now that all the students have gone home?

Patience

If there's one important lesson I've learned in photography, it is to discard as little as possible, and periodically to review my backfiles to see what I missed first time round. Almost always, overlooked gems are sitting quietly waiting to be discovered, overwhelmed at first sight by their gaudier neighbours, but patiently secure in their own merit.

The ease and difficulty of retention and review have changed radically in recent years: paradoxically, what was easy and what was difficult in the days of film have reversed in the days of digital. Roll-film negatives cannot be discarded selectively, and they're a relatively stable, easy-to-store medium (transparencies are a different matter, but I hated the things and rarely used them). But they are tedious to review. The ranks of miniature frames on even a good contact sheet can only hint at what a full-sized, well-printed version of each might eventually look like. It takes patience, good eyesight, experience, and imagination to get the most out of a contact sheet.

For the digital photographer, the situation is quite different. The temptation to delete unsatisfactory shots in camera or after they have been uploaded is very strong. Each frame represents many megabytes of disk space, and when disk space is running low ruthlessness seems the obvious course. On top of that, digital storage is volatile: you need to back up your images in several places RIGHT NOW before your hard disk fails. But even these backups are volatile -- CDs and DVDs use dyes to record data, and dyes fade. Sometimes, it feels like it's all "writ in water". But reviewing has never been easier: utilities like BreezeBrowser enable you to brood over your images like a stamp collector.

Hartley Library extension

For example, it's taken me five months to notice this image, a no-brainer for the "Campus Windows" project. Shame I didn't spot it in time to get it into my Photography.Book.Now book, but never mind, that thing will be twice the size by the time I've finished a full year's worth of window hunting, assuming of course I manage to resist the temptation to go round for yet another year (or two). Of course, another year's worth would simply postpone, prolong, and intensify the agony of editing yet another enormous sequence down into something digestible...

The corollary of this, I've learned, is that it's important not to rush to judgement. For example, I'm quite excited by these three recent images, taken within minutes of each other at a recent graduation ceremony. They are so similar to each other that really only one can survive into any final cut of a "Campus Windows" sequence. But which?

Umbrellas

It's odd to reflect that for very many years, until about the age of 40, I had never actually held an umbrella. Somewhere along the line, I had absorbed the idea that an umbrella was not something a proper man of our background could ever use. If it rained, a working man sought shelter, adjusted his hat, or simply got wet. As our gym teacher used to shout, when any boy seemed reluctant to turn out in the rain for a cross-country run or an afternoon of rugby: "You're not going to melt, lad! What are you made of, meringue? " Once the days of hats had passed, even to pull up an anorak hood was an admission of wimpishness, if not an act of Bowie-esque gender ambiguity.

Of course, because a degree of calculated campness was allowed and encouraged in "gentlemen," an accessory like an umbrella used to have a certain liminal potency. Experimenting with such things marked you out as an aspirant to the condition of a gentleman. Or as homosexual: it is almost impossible to exaggerate the bafflement and suspicion British men of working and lower middle class extraction once displayed towards the manners and behaviour of British men of upper middle class and aristocratic origin, and especially popular entertainers who adopted the gentlemanly manner. "But he can't be married with kids, he's obviously a poof!" This unsubtle attitude to sexuality in the British male went alongside (but never hand in hand with) an astonishment that women might prefer a well-spoken, clean, attractively-dressed individual over some hyper-masculine oaf with a horror of mirrors and soap, a blind spot much exploited by cads and bounders over the years.

But, back to the umbrellas. When I started to tire of either wearing an unseasonal coat or arriving at work soaked to the skin, I gradually began to see the possible benefits of a device designed both for portability and keeping you dry. (I think "Duh!" is the appropriate response). The first time I took one out for a spin was a revelation. The thing was alive. Far from being some static appendage, it lifted and tugged at your hand like a kite. In gusty conditions, it could take considerable effort to keep it under control. You also had to be alert to the direction and angle of the rain, not to mention oncoming pedestrians. But, well handled, it actually did keep you dry.

Some of my pre-umbrella attempts at keeping dry
were, in retrospect, a little OTT

So, I became an umbrella enthusiast. I own a number of them now. My prize umbrella is a golf-sized storm-proof item, which won't turn inside out in the strongest winds, due to its cunning construction and ultra-strong materials. Unfortunately, due to my lack of height and its capaciousness, it does make me look rather like a stripey mushroom. Also, in a strong gust the wet safety panels tend to blow out with a spectacular farting noise, which can be startling. My backup for emergency use, permanently stowed in my backpack, is an ultra-feeble collapsible job which I won in a raffle, and which will turn inside out if I breathe on it too heavily, never mind in a moderate wind.

The River Test in Early Summer Rain

But there's more to umbrellas than keeping dry, of course. They create their own style. You can't help but look a bit of a fool with a half-collapsed folding umbrella dangling from your wrist like a dead bird, and you certainly can't walk down the street with three foot of pointy stick under your arm or slung over a shoulder without adopting a certain atavistic swagger. If you're even a little bit of a fantasist it easily becomes a sword or a rifle, and your stroll down the high street morphs into "cheery tommies march whistling up the road to Ypres" or a scene from, say, The Duellists.

Back in 1980 I lived for a year in London, and I'd often pass James Smith & Sons in Bloomsbury on my way to University College. Check out that venerable umbrella maker's window, which also advertises "life preservers, dagger canes, and swordsticks"; the association of umbrellas and weaponry is not entirely fantasy. In my pre-umbrella days, I used to wonder what would happen if you crept up behind a City gent and yelled, "On guard!" Now I think I know. Please don't do it.

The Silly Season

I'm not sure how this works in other countries, but in Britain a sure sign that you have "arrived" is whether or not you have to turn up for work between July and September. Needless to say I do, so clearly haven't. But all the top politicians, judges, academics, BBC presenters and so on are now quietly vanishing for a couple of months, leaving the country to stumble on without their lead. I expect we'll manage somehow.

I think originally it had something to do with clearing out of London at the height of the Stink / Plague / Riot season, but that excuse has worn pretty thin. Like the recent furore over MPs' expenses, it's yet another privilege that looks increasingly dated and indefensible. Frankly, the only people who need that much of a break over the summer are secondary school teachers, for whom nothing is too good.*

But, apparently nothing worth mentioning ever happens to anyone worth writing about in the summer (and no doubt all the top reporters and all their top connections are out of town), so the newspapers traditionally descend into the Silly Season. The paper still needs filling (but they do get thin at this time of year, don't they?), so the UFO reports, items tenuously based on statistical research, and "man bites dog" stories acquire a seasonal prominence. As someone who enjoys a good crop circle story, this is not all bad news, as it were.

If my stats are anything to go by, blogging appears to hit a summer lull, too. It's conceivable that most of my readers are top drawer folk even now throwing open the blinds of their Tuscan villas, but I suspect it's more a case of the general Northern Hemisphere holiday season casting its benign blight over anything requiring more effort than spreading a beach towel. So, my response will be to reduce the frequency of posting a little. Again, the stats tell me that people rarely go back to read old posts so, just like the papers, you'll have to forgive me if I save up the Good Stuff until the days start to shorten noticeably.




*Any judges reading this need to have tried at least two terms teaching classes of 30 15-year-olds before I will accept their exculpatory whinings.

A Perfect Dordogne Read

In a recent review in the Guardian, a novel was described as "the perfect Dordogne read," a very Guardian expression and sentiment. The Dordogne being that part of France favoured as a holiday destination by the British lettered middle classes (who, moi?), and reading being what such folk like to do on holiday. Or at least, intend to do. Reflecting on my own holiday reading, I realise that I rarely end up reading the books I take away on holiday. Sometimes because I simply prefer gazing into space to squinting at a sun-blasted page, but quite often because I am ambushed by some unexpected book left behind by someone else, found on those curiously random bookshelves you find in holiday lets.

Dordogne readers

A book, especially an unexpected book from an unexplored corner of the reading world, can colour your mood for an entire holiday. Sometimes, I have found myself anxious to return from a pleasant real-life excursion just to re-engage with some story, like an old man fretful of missing "my programme" on the TV. One year a discarded Andy McNab thriller, of all things, had me gripped by the throat most of one whole holiday week. As well as a bracing immersion into a single-minded world of Glocks and gollocks, its compelling simplicity convinced me that I could sit down when I got home and write a bestseller myself. I would become rich, and then lead a life of my own leisurely choosing ever after. This was actually a more exciting fantasy than the book itself.

Now I come to think of it, such infantile musings are often the stuff of my vacation reveries. After all, the most powerful side-effect of any decent holiday is to cast a strong, unflattering light onto the other 95% of your year. It's a tantalizing glimpse of your "if only" life. I suppose that's why France is full of farmhouses, converted but unoccupied most of the year by British owners who have let such fantasies get the better of them.

Auvergne Nintendo player

The most curiously reflexive form of holiday fantasy reading is, of course, travel writing. There you are, sprawled somewhere moderately exotic, filling your head with someone else's thoughts about somewhere even more exotic. I find this too confusing to cope with. My partner, being a practical person, does like to gather and read local guides, and make notes of possible outings, but for some reason I find this confusing, too, though I do enjoy reading those tourist pamphlets which have clearly been translated into English by the local Head of Tourism's ten-year-old daughter. However, last year I did find myself reading someone's abandoned copy of Bill Bryson's travels in Australia towards the end of the holiday. I discovered that Bryson can make me weep with laughter, and the episode with the dogs in a Sydney park nearly hospitalised me.

But I've never yet found out what happened to Bill further North, as I had to abandon the book half way through when the time came to go home. It is one of the unwritten rules that, although you may leave your own books behind, you should not take "native" books home. I usually leave my more boring unread choices behind, especially if this is their second or even third outing (a W.G. Sebald, for example, that I finally abandoned in France), mainly to relieve the burden on our own shelves and to save myself the trouble of ever reading the thing, but also to add a touch of mysterious tone to the rack of thrillers and bodice-rippers. Indeed, given the ongoing accommodation problem with books in our house, I'm beginning to wonder whether it would be worth filling a couple of boxes with books to dump wherever we go next, maybe replacing them with a return cargo of wine, like ship's ballast.

All's Well

I went up to London yesterday with my son and my partner to see All's Well That Ends Well in Marianne Elliott's outstanding production at the National Theatre. I'd never see All's Well in the theatre, and must admit I thought of it as just another of those slightly odd plays WS cobbled together out of his bitbox of play parts -- a wrong righted by a roundabout route, an unfunny clown, some swaggering soldiers, a mocked misfit, the ever-popular bed trick ... What, no twins? ... but it turns out it's an extraordinary play and one with a lot of strong female roles and, most amazingly, written out of a proto- feminist viewpoint. Shakespeare's sister, indeed. Marianne Elliott brings out its fairy tale elements in a very compelling way, with a set that at times turns into Arthur Rackham-esque tableaux. An exhilarating afternoon in the theatre, much recommended.

Wrapped trees on the South Bank
(Part of "Walking in My Mind" by Yayoi Kusama)

In the foyer of the National there is a show of the photographs of James Ravilious. These were, frankly, disappointing, and a reminder of how poorly even the best 35mm black and white photography is served by over-enlargement. I'll admit that I'm a bit of fetishist for finish, and that nothing puts me off any piece of 2-D visual art quicker than a sense that the artist was rather more interested in the content than the look of the thing. But 35mm negatives are tiny things and, like printing on a balloon, the more you blow them up, the thinner and less visually satisfying becomes the result. There's a very sweet spot around 8" wide where any well-exposed negative looks great. Then there's a final point around 15" wide where only a very well-exposed negative on fine-grained film looks good, but most images are beginning to lose visual appeal -- the grain is spread out too far and the blacks are not black, the out-of-focus areas look smearily grey, and highlights are pure paper white. If you want to print BIG, don't choose 35mm.



The worst experience I ever had like this was in a rather magnificent French chateau now given over to the arts, La Roche Jagu in Britanny. They were showing a travelling show of the Magnum agency's "greatest hits" and the quality of the prints was jaw-droppingly bad. They might even have been photocopies, I suppose, or poorly-printed scans -- it can be surprisingly hard to tell behind glass -- but I doubt Magnum would put its name to anything like that. They were simply very poor prints, that vaguely resembled the famous originals, so familiar in print. But I have seen and salivated over real Josef Koudelka prints, for example, and these versions were travesties. Mystifying.



Talking of mystifying, this week has seen the start of graduation, an occasion I can never fathom. At last count I had four degrees (well, three and a half --I was in a position to buy one of them from a certain overrated English degree factory) but I have never yet attended a graduation ceremony. I suppose I am at heart one of life's Quakers, and abhor any occasion that inclines men to wear suits and women to wear idiotic hats. It may be the primary reason the Prof and I have never married, after 35 years together -- the embarrassment would have been too much.

The most mystifying -- indeed, semi-mystical -- aspect is the transformation of yet another cohort of students, for God's sake, into swaggering Masters and Mistresses of the Universe, trailing colourful gowns and camera-toting parents (or, in the case of some overseas students,what look like entire extended families plus film crew). Though I suppose this may simply be the mass emergence of precisely the ones who were least evident around campus during the rest of the year. They worked hard, they got their good degrees, and now is their moment in the sun, idiotic hats and all.

Get tickets here, collect idiotic hats in the next tent

Downward Skies

I have mentioned a number of times the special relationship I have built up over more than a decade with that idyllic chunk of rural Hampshire occupied by Mottisfont Abbey, and in particular with the stretch of the River Test that runs through it. Until recently, it had been something of a default setting. Not sure where to go this Sunday? Drive over to Mottisfont. Not sure what to photograph? Why not the river at Mottisfont?

The whole estate is in National Trust ownership, but most people go to visit the house and formal gardens. This suits me fine as, even at the busiest times of year, it leaves the broader landscape of the estate (an enormous acreage of river, woodland and farm) virtually unvisited. Away from weekends, especially, you can guarantee solitude, but still be within easy reach of a friendly teashop. There is even a second-hand bookshop within the Abbey, which has a mysterious propensity to stock photographic treasures -- for example, I found a first edition hardback of David Bailey's Goodbye, Baby, and Amen a few years ago (not a book I'd normally have sought out), and Marketa Luskacova's wonderful Pilgrims (a book I'd been seeking for years). I keep half-expecting copies of The Decisive Moment or The Solitude of Ravens to turn up.

For several years I worked intensively at a series of pictures of the river, mainly but not exclusively using an old Agfa Isolette II folding camera (bought for £15, and which turned out to be fitted with the sought-after Solinar lens / Compur shutter combination). I got to know the Trust's estate manager, and as he liked my work he gave me access to the grounds during the winter closed season, and then very generously part-funded an exhibition of some of the work in 2003 (The Colour of the Water), which stayed up for 18 months. It was the closest I have yet come to feeling like a "real" artist.

Although I did self-publish a little booklet to sell with the exhibition, I have since struggled to do justice to the images in book form. I'm not really sure why. I think it has something to do with trying to negotiate the gulf between a stranger's perception of what are, in reality, many quite similar images of "just" water, and the meaning that these images and their small variations have acquired for me, not to mention their emotional significance in my own life. Although I strongly believe in taking pictures without regard to any third-party opinions, to make a book is different: it is an act of communication, and you have to meet potential readers half-way. This can sometimes be a more demanding task than it might seem.

Another problem has been doing justice to the film originals. The Agfa camera is simplicity itself, a superb optic mounted on a bellows on a light-tight box, with controls restricted to manual focus, aperture and shutter speed. It produces subtle, rich 6x6 negatives (generally on Fujicolor 400 ASA film), which I then proceed to travesty by scanning them on my Epson flatbed scanner. I'm sure that -- drum-scanned by a sympathetic expert scanner -- these would make superb wall-sized prints; as it is I can't print them larger than 12" square anyway, but even at book size the (poor) quality of the scanning shows, to the expert eye at least.

But I keep working at it, and here is the latest interactive version of a book called Downward Skies which I have put on Issuu, and which is the closest I've yet come to a satisfactory presentation of this work. Your comments would be much appreciated. Please note that although this PDF "dummy" is fitted out with all the bells and whistles of self-publication, it is not yet available to buy, though you are welcome to download the PDF.

Open publication

Briggflatts & Tutti Frutti

Two very different recommendations:

First, there is an excellent new book and CD/DVD package from Bloodaxe of the poem Briggflatts by Basil Bunting (ISBN 978-1-85224-826-0). As well as the text, there are biographical and critical notes, plus a DVD of a 1982 Channel 4 documentary on Bunting and, best of all, a CD of Bunting reading his poem in 1967 in his gloriously archaic but precise Northumbrian accent, which raises the rolling of Rs to an artform : to hear him enunciate the lines "rut thud the rim,/crushed grit" is a rare pleasure. Basil Bunting and this poem in particular occupy a special place in the history of British poetry, straddling friendships in the 1920s and 30s with Ezra Pound and Louis Zukovsky and the birth of the British "alternative" scene in mid-60s Newcastle at Tom Pickard's Morden Tower.

Second, I was amazed and excited to learn that John Byrne's Tutti Frutti -- screened on BBC TV in 1987 and never seen since, neither as a repeat nor as a video/DVD release -- is finally to be released on DVD on 3rd August, and Amazon is taking pre-orders (Region 2 only, I suspect). This incomparable series was one of the peaks of British TV drama, by turns comic and tragic, and its virtual disappearance and unobtainability for 22 years (allegedly because of rights disputes over some of the rock'n'roll classics used) has been a scandal. If you've never seen it, I think you will find you have a rare treat in store. In my memory, it's a rare instance of the Real Thing -- it will be interesting to see what effect those 22 years have had.

Very different recommendations, but both 100%.

Mirrors, Windows, Walls

Being a competitive but essentially realistic guy, I avoid competitions. Like the Lottery, they promise so much, but never deliver anything. But for the same reason, I find it hard to ignore them, like Charlie Brown with that football. For example, I had resolved not to go anywhere near this year's Photography.Book.Now competition, or even Paul Butzi's SoFoBoMo.

The Photography.Book.Now competition is run by Blurb, an up-market, relentlessly hip, web-based "publish on demand" company, who have clearly realised that their core market is not aspiring cook-book writers, but photographers like me. Last year, they launched P.B.N as a fairly typical competition, in that the costs of prizes, judges' fees, etc. -- plus no doubt some profit and some publicity -- are covered partly by sponsors but mainly (I presume) by entrants paying an entrance fee. I don't really go along with the cynical response that describes this as a scam, but -- like any competition with the prospect of winning 25,000 dollars (!) -- I suspect most entrants do try to second-guess the judges and produce a book that they think will win, rather than a book that they like. Interestingly, though, last year I did pick and vote for the eventual winner, Beth Dow.

Now, some people regard the likes of Blurb as little better than a Web 2.0 version of vanity publishing, but I think that's unfair and also misses the point. Having spent many years making low-tech books of my own photography, I was very excited by Lulu and Blurb when they first started up. Unless you have struggled with printing and binding your own books, whether it be a "simple" concertina-style presentation of a few words and images or a full-on attempt at imposition and sewn binding, you have no idea what a simple joy it is to lay up an elaborate book in software designed for the purpose, and receive through the post a nicely-produced approximation of what Blurb calls (slightly generously) "book-store quality." However, the down side has turned out to be very variable quality control -- it seems to be impossible to guarantee that one print run will resemble another. But it's a parallel experience to digital photography: old hands who have struggled with film and the darkroom are blissed out by the sheer ease with which unprecedented quality can be achieved, newcomers tend to be like spoiled brats for whom nothing is ever quite good enough.

The one good thing about competitions is that they can push a procrastinator over the edge into actually doing something. For example, finishing off a series of photographs, putting them into sequence, making a book, even if only in the form of a "book dummy" or a PDF. This is a very worthwhile thing to attempt, and the free BookSmart software package from Blurb simplifies the process a great deal. It's simply a lot of fun to play with. In the past, I have not needed this stimulus, and have produced a number of books, self-published under my own imprint. But I've lost some impetus over the past couple of years, and finally conceded that a stimulus and a deadline were precisely what I needed. The prospect of winning 25,000 dollars had nothing to do with it.

I have several potential books bubbling under, but I decided the simplest and quickest would be the "campus windows" images, sequenced in a simple chronological order. I also decided that this would be a one-off, an infeasibly expensive item for my own shelves only, so I went for the new 30cm x 30cm format, on the best paper -- nearly £50 for one copy at 78 pages in hard covers... That may sound expensive, but compared to the cost of even a limited run of a small, cheaply-produced paperback from a conventional printer (thousands, trust me), it really is peanuts. Plus you don't end up with stacks of boxes of unsellable copies. Two evenings later, I had gone as far as I wanted with Mirrors, Windows, Walls, a provisional, de luxe version of what will eventually be a smaller but "properly" published book.

Here is a PDF version, courtesy of Issuu:

Open publication

The bad thing about competitions, of course, is that you never win. Which is, of course, why I don't like them. What was I thinking?

Wattie Surprise

As well as poverty, melodrama and secrets, the pursuit of family history can turn up some more unexpected surprises. Such as, for example, a relative with an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Following back my Scottish paternal line has been very easy, by and large. The Scots being a businesslike yet sparse people, the records are thorough, well-maintained and, amazingly, almost entirely online, including most parish records. I was able quickly to trace several generations of Edinburgh artisans, crammed into tenements around and on South Bridge, back to a carpenter who had sought the city life around 1800 but not, as I had presumed (as do most people with Scottish ancestry and a "clan" surname) escaping from the Highlands, but from the Lammermuir Hills in the Borders, where his father was a shepherd.

My ain folk at Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford,
near Melrose, Scottish Borders, August 2006

Now, the Scottish diaspora has meant that the former colonial world is full of descendants of Berwickshire shepherds, and there is clearly a deep hunger for "roots" in places like Canada, New Zealand and Australia. You have only to visit a few websites and bulletin boards to discover you have boatloads of distant relatives, descendants of cousins of cousins who once watched sheep in the hills near Westruther, Longformacus, and Cranshaws. It was one of these antipodean cousins who informed me that I was related to Walter "Wattie" Chisholm, the peasant poet of Berwickshire. Here is his DNB entry, in full:

Chisholm, Walter [pseud. Wattie] (1856–1877), poet, was born at Easter Harelaw, near Chirnside, Berwickshire, on 27 December 1856, the son of James Chisholm, a shepherd, and Janet, née Brodie. In 1865 he left school in order to assist his father, who was then shepherd at Redheugh, a farm in the eastern part of Cockburnspath parish. It was probably while tending sheep on the western borders of Coldingham Moor that Chisholm first attempted composition, for by the time he was about sixteen or seventeen the neighbours were already talking about Chisholm's verses. At Whitsuntide 1875 his father moved to the neighbouring farm of Dowlaw, and during the summer of that year Chisholm, having hired himself out, was shepherding in the Yetholm district, by the side of the Bowmont. In the winter he returned home, and attended for a short time his old school at Old Cambus. By this time some of his poems, with the signature of Wattie, had found their way into the ‘Poets' corner’ of the Haddington Courier, and were copied into various local papers. Others appeared in the People's Friend, and in the competition promoted by the People's Journal his lines entitled ‘Scotia's Border Land’ gained the second prize at Christmas 1876. In the spring of 1876 Chisholm went to stay with some relatives in Glasgow, where he worked as light porter in a leather warehouse. While visiting his parents at the new year of 1877 he was seized with a severe attack of pleurisy, from which he never recovered. He died at Dowlaw on 1 October 1877, three months before his twenty-first birthday. He was buried in Dowlaw churchyard. His collected poems were published in 1879.

Well, as you can imagine, my first instinct was to try and find a copy of that 1879 collected poems, but it's a scarce item. That whole "peasant poet" thing (James Hogg, John Clare, George Heath, et al.) was pretty old hat by the 1870s, and I doubt more than a handful of copies were printed. But, by the same token, even rare books can be pretty cheap if rich collectors are not looking for them, so I kept checking the likes of AbeBooks.

The next surprise in store for me for was when I recently carried out my routine periodic search for Wattie's poems in AbeBooks, and found listed for sale ten copies of "Poems by Walter Chisholm, a Berwickshire Shepherd Lad (1879)"... TEN copies! On closer inspection, it became evident that these were "print on demand" items, made by direct scanning of an original copy, which was, if anything, an even bigger surprise. Think about it: an obscure volume by an obscure Scottish shepherd boy is available for scanning somewhere (or a copy has already been scanned, probably in the USA) and listed on a premium second-hand bookselling website as a candidate for printing on demand, by ten different suppliers, all for a mere £10 or so. A convenient [book]worm-hole seemed to have opened up in the space-time continuum between me and 19th century Scotland.

Unfortunately, I am not in a position to announce the existence of a hitherto unknown genius of world literature. Wattie's poems and range of reference are very impressive ... for a Berwickshire shepherd who died age 21. Some are in dialect, some are in "standard" poetic English. They are neither William Wordsworth at one extreme, nor William MacGonagall at the other, but something boringly inbetween. Here is his sonnet to that other shepherd, James Hogg (author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner):

SONNET TO THE MEMORY OF
THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD

Shepherd of Ettrick! thou who oft hast sung
Of Love and War; and all their forms displayed,
And brought to light old legends long decayed:
Cold in the grave now lies thy Doric tongue --
The wizard harp is silent and unstrung
That shewed the scenes the pure Kilmeny saw,
When, borne by fairies from the greenwood shaw,
She sojourned long their blissful realms among.
Yet dead thou art not; for thy name is still
Green as the banks of thy famed Yarrow stream;
O'er Scotia wide, by heathy dale and hill,
Thy songs and ballads are the shepherds' theme.
Rest thou in peace! thy country owns thy claim
To wear the poet's laurel-crown of fame.

Yawn. Though the astonishing thing, really, is that this actually is a sonnet, in yer actual iambic pentameters (and "Doric," which strikes such an odd note, refers to Hogg's Scottish dialect, not classical Greece). The education system in mid-19th century Scotland must have been doing something right or perhaps the opportunities for self-education must have been greater than one imagines. After all, strong feelings recollected in tranquillity do not overflow spontaneously into sonnet form. When he writes in the dialect, it does swing a bit more:

I wander alane o'er the muirlands sae dreary,
Where blythesome an' canty I've mony a day been,
Nae mellow-toned mavis lilts love to his deary,
Amang the broon brackens, that ance were sae green.

(from "I Wander Alane")

But not a great deal more.

One last little surprise was to discover the book was originally published in Edinburgh by James Thin, of 55 South Bridge. Given that the branch of the family to which I belong was living there in the 19th century, and has a long tradition of working as bookbinders and pocketbook makers, it's not impossible that one of my direct ancestors handled and bound up the sheets of cousin Wattie's volume.

Dark on Dark

Although the main thrust of my photography is in colour, I do keep returning to a combination of monochrome tonality and the glimmering, chaotic abundance that seems to happen at various kinds of boundary. Black and white can make a virtue of the kind of highlights that rarely seem to work in colour, unless you go in for that "high dynamic range" look i.e. combining three or more different exposures into one image using software. HDR is something which very few people can pull off with dignity, and which presumably requires the use of a tripod (thanks, but no thanks).












The screen doesn't do justice to the shadow areas in these images -- on paper, they have a much greater richness of tone and detail, that might almost put a knowledgeable viewer in mind of the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper, ahem, though I do say so myself. I can't quite (yet) bring myself to fake the selenium split-toning that these images demand... Would anyone care how the shadows ended up that rich purplish black?

The Heat, The Flies

We've had a mini heat wave this week, and it's been hard to work during the day, and hard to sleep at night. Avoiding the sun has taken me into some odd corners, but that's where the photos are. I've had some good finds this week, too. But, as Bob Dylan sings in Idiot Wind, "I can't help it if I'm lucky..."