Art Yard

A Visit to Lindisfarne

2012-01-16T21:25:00.003Z

It's always a pleasure tofollow motorway signs to The North, and this time was noexception. As a family, we all chipped in to rent a holiday cottage justoutside Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast so that we could spend Christmastogether: seven adults, two boys and a dog.

The Farne Islands, home to St. Cuthbert and Grace Darling

Luckily, we had a week freeof snow though the weather was mild and windy, giving us days that were bleak,dark and very short.

I always like to have somesort of project on the go for times like this, and this year it was to look atLindisfarne/Holy Isle through the prism of Roman Polanski's 60's black comedythriller Cul-de-Sac. It was a film that made a great impression on me when Ifirst saw it back in 1966 at Lincoln Film Society, in the building in which Inow work.

As well as tide tables offthe Web, I got hold of the DVD from MovieMail. The night before our visit, thelads and I sat down to watch it. Not having seen it for decades, I was struckby its Samuel Beckettian quality — as a kind of riff on Waiting for Godot with bits of Pinter thrown in. Instead ofGodot, the characters wait out the non-appearance of Mr Katelbach fromMablethorpe (a holiday town on the Lincolnshire coast). I was pleased to see this reading of it confirmed out by notes on the BFI website, where I found this niceproduction still.

The most striking thing, onvisiting the place itself, was how Polanski played around with the geography, collapsing a landscape that stretched over several miles into acompact, claustrophobic stage set-like location.

Weather, tides and daylighthampered my attempts to get to grips with the island's essential character, so I cameaway with only a few photographs to post to Flickr. Another visit clearlybeckons. Time and tourism have been very kind to the place and the run-downcastle environs and decrepit sheds are much smartened, thanks to theministrations of the National Trust.

A Note on the Passing of Time

2011-12-31T13:31:00.002Z

Cyclical time is a factof life for the inhabitants of Lindisfarne

            What we call the beginning is often the end
            And to make an end is to make a beginning.
            The end is where we start from.

TS Eliot: Four Quartets

Sometimes I think I should try to find a way of slowing down time – mypersonal, internalized sense of time, not the universal time of clocks andcalendars. Of all the resources we have at our disposal, it's the one that canseem to vanish most rapidly and is the most irreplaceable.

It's generally agreed that time passes more quickly as you grow older, aphenomenon as real as it is alarming. A year, seen as a unit of time, oncestretched comfortably into the distance both in front of you and behind you.Plenty of time to do so many things. Now, a year passes in what seems like acouple of months. Summer becomes Winter and reverts to Summer again in whatseems like a few short weeks.

Two factors seem to be at work. One is the perceived duration of anygiven unit of time relative to the entirety of one's lived experience. Theother is the gradual slowing down of the pace at which life is lived inlater life as energy levels diminish with age.

While the first factor is purely a matter of historical record thatcan't be reconfigured, the second, because it is situated in the present andfuture, may be susceptible to manipulation. I recall Jacob Bronowski, back inthe 1970's in the TV series The Ascent of Man, explaining Einstein's Theory ofRelativity. A point Bronowski made, as I remember it, was that timeappeared to travel at the speed of light — and that if you could travel at such aspeed, time would effectively stand still.

Translated into everyday practical terms,that would seem to suggest that the more you can pack into any given unit oftime, the more time becomes stretched to accommodate it.

Lines from Quartet III: The Dry Salvages
…the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavenderspray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never beenopened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the wayback.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future:
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
. . .

TS Eliot : Four Quartets

The Season Turns

2011-10-28T13:07:00.000+01:00

Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, we are having to adjust to days being shorter than nights. It's always alarming to see how rapidly the hours of daylight shorten at this time of year, and it will be even more noticeable after tomorrow, when our UK clocks revert to GMT.

However, the dark nights bring pleasures of their own, as long as we have food and warmth and enough light to work by.

Late last night I went to put my dustbin out for collection. Although it was moonless, high in the sky above me was one bright star, far brighter than anything else in the sky. Because of light pollution from the town, nothing else was visible, though as my eyes adjusted to the dark a few other stars started to appear.

Curious to know why this one object should be so bright, I Googled for answers when I got back indoors. Astronomy Central's The Night Sky with Binoculars Tonight and the National Schools' Observatory's The Whole Sky at Ten O'Clock Tonight both confirmed it was not a star I'd seen, but the planet Jupiter.

Jupiter

Astronomy Central said that with good binoculars I should be able to see Jupiter's moons, but that advice didn't take into account an unsteady hand and less than perfect vision. My compromise was to stick my digital camera onto a tripod, point it in the general direction and click away at a few different exposure settings in the hope of getting some usable images. The two images posted above were among the most successful. The upper image clearly shows the spherical shape of the planet, while the lower one (taken with a longer lens and longer exposure) shows two of Jupiter's moons quite distinctly visible on the left. Neither image would satisfy an astronomer – but for me, getting any sort of image at all from my chance encounter was a positive result.

The Pinhole Camera: A Shoebox Reimagined

2011-10-03T18:04:00.014+01:00

One of the ritual Autumnal activities for new students is building pinhole cameras. The studios become littered with the dismembered or reconstructed remains of a variety of cardboard and tin containers, their new function clearly indicated by the liberal application of black gaffer tape.

Though these simple devices generally make no attempt to look good, they can produce some surprisingly attractive images. How successful they are seems to be largely a matter of chance. Some carefully crafted creations seem to frustrate their makers' attempts to produce a decent image, while other cruder cameras produce a sharp image every time. Control over the size of the pinhole and the thickness of the material it's made in are critical factors.

Shoebox pinhole photo by Gemma S

This year, I decided I wanted to have some objective standard of construction and performance to judge our home-made efforts by, so I decided to get hold of a commercially made camera. It was also going to be useful to have one that would take regular film rather than paper negatives. A clear favourite was one of the Zero Image series of cameras; made in Hong Kong and sold by Silverprint in London.

The model I chose was the 6x9 multi-format camera, which takes 120 roll film. It is a significantly expensive camera – a lot of money for not a lot of wood, but it is undeniably beautiful and carefully hand-made. It's an eye-catcher wherever it goes.

It comes nicely packaged, wrapped in tissue paper inside a simple card box with a few extras. The photos below give a better idea of what the camera is like and how it works.

The viewing frame in the foreground allows you to estimate the field of view of the camera's various negative formats from 6x4.5 to 6x9cm. There is also a lanyard, good instructions and a numbered certificate of authenticity.

The three round windows on the back of the camera are protected by a sliding cover. They enable you to see the frame markings on the back of the film as you wind on between exposures. The sliding cover carries a rotating exposure calculation dial and this model comes with the optional bubble level.

To load the camera, the top and back plates are removed and the film loaded in the usual manner. It's fairly simple and straightforward.

As I've had the camera less than a week, I haven't yet had a chance to use it myself, although I've loaded it with colour transparency film to use later. In the meantime, a second year student (Jody B) took it out for an hour and shot an old roll of FP4 with it.

Sadly, I hadn't read the instructions thoroughly and misinformed her that she should base her exposures on an aperture of f250 when it should have been f55. However, reciprocity failure came to her aid and overexposure did no harm at all to the ancient film, as the above shot of the South transept of the cathedral shows.

Steep Hill, Lincoln. Fujichrome Provia100F film. Pic by Jody B

What I hadn't realised when I was buying the camera was that there was a difference between the Zone Plate and Pinhole versions. What I had inadvertently bought was a Zone Plate rather than a Pinhole camera. The effect of the Zone Plate is noticeable as the hazy, soft-focus glow in the above image. It's a charming enough effect, but not what I want in every shot. It's a pity that the Zone Plates and Pinhole can't be swapped as I'm reluctant to start trying to modify or hack the camera about just yet.

When the Rubber Hits the Road

2011-09-29T21:25:00.006+01:00

For those of us who choose to work in education, September can be the strangest month. Not for us a sense of the year winding-down as we gather in a harvest or take stock of the year's achievements. Instead, it's the month when we have to hit the ground running; exchanging the calm reflection of the Summer vacation for the mad scramble of a new academic year.

It requires a mental shifting of gears that gets no easier as one gets older: a sea of new faces to remember, new management initiatives, projects and timetables to assimilate. If I try to visualise the experience, I see the scene in a Hollywood movie where people try to climb aboard a moving train – or it could be any scene where the characters struggle fruitlessly against inevitable failure. Well that's the theory, though this year I've felt at times as if I've been thrown from the train and landed face first.

Luckily, my part-time status insulates me against most of the sparks that fly as axes are sharpened and muscles are flexed. It's a fault in me that I'm as quick to respond to provocation as anyone and enjoy a scrap, so it's no bad thing that my status keeps me mostly out of the ring.

Anyway, it was pointed out to me recently that I enjoy the exact mirror image of a normal workload, with a two-day working week and five-day weekend. I responded by saying that I'm grateful to have reached a point in my life where I can subsist on the limited income it gives me and don't have to barter whatever precious time I have left for money I have learned to live without.

Summer Reads and Literary Leads

2011-08-31T15:15:00.004+01:00

IMHO you can never have too many bookshelves and I suppose I have more than most. Laid end-to-end, there are more than 50 meters of book shelving, which is roughly 160 feet. At a conservative average of 12 books to the foot, that's a lot of books in total. Certainly too many to count when there's a life to be lived, but there's probably a couple of thousand titles in all.

Visitors sometimes ask me if I've read them all, to which they get a 'yes-and-no' answer. Given that my reading tends to be mostly non-fiction, I seldom read a book from cover to cover. I trawl through it for the information I need then store it on a shelf for future reference.

I like to think of it as a fairly dynamic process, given that books join my collection as my interests evolve and trickle away as they're lent and/or lost to friends and students. I often think I should use my book collection as a commercial asset and join the long tail of online second-hand book dealers. After all, that's where many of my books came from in the first place.

However, this Summer has been a bumper time for me in terms of the brilliant books I've enjoyed reading. It's a motley collection, but it may say something about what pushes my particular buttons. It will take several posts to do justice to them all, so I'll start with a book I bought by chance one day back in May.

Every so often, a book makes such an impression that it becomes a way-mark in your life. Thinking back over the years, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities was one such, as was Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.

This year's contender was the awkwardly-titled The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford. It's a Penguin paperback that was more succintly-titled in its original US form as Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.

Despite what I said earlier about non-fiction being essentially dip-in stuff, this was a riveting cover-to-cover read. It's partly an autobiographical account of Crawford's dual careers as an academic and motorcycle mechanic, but it is also primarily a critique of the way we interact with the technology that has become such an essential part of our daily lives. For the most part, it's a technology that is not user-serviceable. As Crawford says, "What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed." (p.2)

He is passionately concerned at the general loss of manual competence this engenders; the loss of the ability or interest in using tools. Disappointingly but perhaps inevitably, the book offers no universal solution to the problem. The best the author can do is reaffirm the need for us each to take individual responsibility for the lives we lead, the kind of work we do and the way we interact with the technology we've increasingly come to depend upon.

It was an inspiring read which left me with an urge to read more about this topic. Richard Sennett's The Craftsman seems as good a starting point as any. His The Fall of Public Man is a book I always admired. The other book on my reading list is Peter Dormer's The Culture of Craft: Status and Future. There are other titles that look worth a read, but I've decided to start with these two.

Where To Next? Some Thoughts on Student Progression

2011-07-26T13:28:00.004+01:00

For what it's worth, I'd like to articulate some thoughts about photography students, particularly those within the FE sector.

A recent survey I saw showed a drop this year in the number of National Diploma photography students intending to progress directly to university. Of the 50% who said they were going to seek employment, two-thirds said they planned on working straight away as freelance and/or self-employed photographers. My immediate impression was that their career plans were somewhat underdeveloped. There was no evidence that I could see that they had the remotest understanding of the legal, organisational and financial challenges that self-employment would bring. I fear that some of them may well find themselves drifting into semi-skilled jobs in which their newly-acquired qualifications are of little value.

I've sometimes been troubled by the thought that when we promote our courses, we are in danger of selling unrealistic dreams of high-flying careers to idealistic young adults. Set against that, I've always tried to instil in students the confidence to realize that their career paths are very much theirs to shape and that they should never resign themselves passively to taking only the opportunities life (and chance) may or may not offer them without any effort on their part.

Given that, I sometimes wonder whether we give students enough opportunity to look beyond the boundaries of conventional stills photography to see the wealth of related vocational opportunities that their visual and technical skills give them when combined with their personal interests and enthusiasms. Perhaps there should be more of a diagnostic, Foundation Studies in Art and Design, philosophy woven into specialist ND courses, adapting the concept of pathways and confirmatory studies.

As an example, most photography students have digital cameras that can shoot video as well as stills. Ought we to be encouraging them to construct time-based narratives? Some students could be exploring more fully photography's ability to explore and explain – and its relationship to the written word. Should we be giving them more opportunity to convert their stills into stop-motion animations? Digital media has thrown up myriad related opportunities, based on taking sideways steps, that photography students should be able to grasp. I'm often surprised that, despite the younger generation's much talked-of computer savvy-ness, their digital horizons and wider skillsets can seem curiously limited.

I wonder whether we should be developing assignments that encourage students to think of their photography in terms of outcomes that don't necessarily result in mounted prints on a wall.

Hacking a Vintage Lens

2011-06-29T22:31:00.005+01:00

Despite having lots of more essential jobs to do, I've been spending some R and R time playing with old lenses. Here's one that I've enjoyed messing with:

My guess is it's originally from a quarter-plate camera, given that it has a focal length of 51⁄8" (130mm). There's no shutter, but it has aperture settings running from f7.7 maximum down to f45

The engraving on the lens is as follows:
Busch Anastigmat Ser III No.2 F:7.7 Foc.51⁄8 ins Pat. No.19504
R.O.J.A. Vorm Emil Busch, Rathenow

The chance to see what it could do came with the acquisition of an Illumitran (a top-end slide copier from the days when film transparencies were a central feature of AV production and repro). I can imagine lots of potential creative uses for the Illumitran's working bits, but for this experiment I needed to liberate the bellows that sat on top of it.

The camera end of the bellows came with a Nikon bayonet mount adaptor, while the lens end came with a 60mm enlarger lens, held in place by a couple of thumb screws. It was simple enough to swap the enlarger lens with my vintage one and mount the whole combination on top of a tripod.

Focussing was done with the lens wide open at f7.7, racking the lens back and forth with the bellows. All my test shots were then taken by stopping the lens right down to f45 and shooting at whatever slow shutter speed my hand-held light meter suggested.

My first shot was of the top of the South-West tower of Lincoln Cathedral, taken from the art school car park. The photo below shows a wider view of the car park with the tower in the background. My estimate is that the top of the tower was at least 300ft (90m) from where I stood to take the photograph.

The next shot was a portrait, taken in the shade of the car park trees. I wanted to include a distant view of the city in the background. The exposure was f45 @ 1/4sec. Tonally, the original image was very low in contrast, with lots of bluish haze. Hard tweaking with levels and curves in Photoshop was needed to get a reasonable range of tones.

The final shot was taken near the North-East corner of the cathedral and is of the statue of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

This statue, which is larger than life-size, was photographed from about 90ft (27m) away. The exposure this time was 1/3sec @ f45. A slight adjustment of levels was needed to improve the tonal range, but otherwise it's very much how it came out of the camera.

Agitprop: Political Demonstration as Music Festival

2011-05-20T22:48:00.004+01:00

Perhaps I was too busy elsewhere for it to register, but I wasn't really aware of last weekend's demonstrations in Spain. Thanks to a tweet by Newsnight's Paul Mason today, I found this impressively stylish video of the event via the Egyptian blog 3Arabawy and YouTube:

As a piece of agitprop it pushes all the buttons needed to get your pulse racing and the adrenaline flowing although it doesn't really offer any concrete ideas as to how the change it promotes could be achieved. To be fair, I suppose the demonstration was a protest rally rather than a demand for revolution, though the video clearly referenced scenes from the Arab Spring, particularly the massed gatherings in Tahrir Square. In spite of its strident tone, the video seems to be a well-meaning attempt to promote political activism generally.

Though I'm skeptical about the practical impact of the video's central message, I'm nonetheless mightily impressed by its synthesis of image, text, music, rhetoric and ambient sound. It creates an emotional roller coaster that lasts as long as the music plays.

Art Beneath Our Feet

2011-05-18T00:31:00.004+01:00

Friday's online Guardian published a gallery of sixteen photographs of street paintings of walking figures — the type that are painted on the ground to indicate a pedestrian route. Although we think we know what they look like and perhaps assume they all look the same, Stephen Wragg has noticed a surprising degree of variation in the way they are painted. Luckily for us, he has recorded them in photographs on a new website (www.walkingmen.org/).

Though his project might be seen as a dull typological study of street art, it's far more than that. The figures teem with life and character, each one hurrying along on an imaginary mission. It could be reasonable to assume that some of the figures reflect the subconscious preoccupations of the workers who painted them. In this respect they are an authentic example of folk art.

My favourite among the Guardian's selection is this one:

For me, it immediately evokes an image of an art student carrying a portfolio or painting, the heavy metal slab suggesting the effort needed to manage such an unwieldy load, The decayed state of the painting endows it with the quality of a faded memory.

It's also a reminder of one of André Kertész's best known photographs. Taken in 1928, it records the railway viaduct in the Parisian suburb of Meudon.

Like many others, I have often wondered what is inside the newspaper-wrapped parcel carried by the man crossing the road. Like a birthday parcel that will never be opened, there is a somewhat exquisite pleasure in not knowing what it contains. The man looks at us directly - and will never tell.

A Little Project

2011-04-30T23:38:00.002+01:00

The exceptionally fine weather we have enjoyed in April has lasted right to the end of the month. A new month begins tomorrow with no immediate return to a more seasonal climate in sight.

It has seemed a very busy month too. Lots of projects have battled for their share of time, such as my continuing efforts to complete my multi-flash hack, using circuits taken from discarded disposable cameras. My idea is build a group of these ready-made circuits into an array that can be triggered remotely by sound or an interrupted light beam.

UPDATE (20th May):

Although my ultimate plan is to build a ten-flash array set inside a circular reflector, I have started by setting five circuit boards into a wooden test bed to use as a prototype. at the time of this photograph I had finished the wiring and could fire the flashes using push-button switches.

Testing a Lubitel Camera

2011-03-13T23:41:00.007Z

Thank goodness that better weather is here — scudding clouds and spells of bright sunshine punctuate the daily routine. The snowdrops have now faded, to be replaced by the first daffodils in the sunnier parts of the garden. The better light and longer days give the photography students better odds on getting worthwhile results with their Lomo cameras. The craze for them shows no sign of abating and they seem to be a sought-after and much-traded commodity among my students. The Diana seems to be the current must-have, perhaps because of its medium-format cachet.

Adequate exposure has been the most common problem during the dark days of Winter. In many ways the Lomo cameras are like the old box cameras we used to use back in the '50s — only reliable in bright daylight. One exception may be the Lubitel, with its triplet lens that features a variable aperture and adjustable shutter speeds.

However, one of my students, owner of this Lubitel 2, came to me in some despair as her negatives were all out-of-focus, and she couldn't understand why. So I brought it home for the weekend to check it out. I too found it impossible to determine the focus using the waist-level viewfinder. It seems to be a clear bright glass lens rather than a ground glass or fresnel focussing screen. The image seems to be a bright virtual image that is always clear and sharp regardless of the point of focus.

The camera, which must be at least thirty years old, has clearly been partly stripped and rebuilt by a previous owner, so it could be that a ground glass focussing screen has been removed. The focussing lens is, however, marked with a distance scale so it could be focussed using that, like so many old cameras. So I decided to test the accuracy of the scale by eyeballing a piece of ground glass placed in the film plane.

The camera was clamped to a tripod with its back open and the lens locked open on the 'B' setting with a cable release. A piece of glass was taped over the back of the camera and the projected image examined with a lupe, or magnifier. The tripod was placed so that objects in the field of view corresponded to distances marked on the focussing scale. Film to subject distances were checked with a measuring tape. The results were confirmed as accurate, although the distances marked on the scale were puzzlingly quirky, being marked 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, and 11 Metres plus Infinity, in imitation of an extended aperture scale (though the maximum aperture of the camera lens is f4.5).

All that's left is for us to put a test roll through the camera and check the results we get by focussing using the scale rather than the viewfinder. If we get a result, I'll post an image here.


Two Days Later (photo by Lucy B)

Here's the result. This photograph was taken today in the street outside the art school. One of the second-year students gleefully took off with the camera loaded with an old roll of Ilford FP4, expiry-dated 2004. I hope she stuck to my advice to focus on the hyperfocal distance for general views like this. The hand-held light meter was giving readings of f8@1/60th sec on a very overcast day.

It's not too bad, I guess, though it's very soft. The neg scan was at 1200ppi. The sign for Steep Hill on the building on the right is not legible although the sign for the Pot Shop high on the building to the left is just about readable on the actual negative. General advice on the Web for focussing with the Lubitel seems to be to stop the aperture right down (and I would add 'use a tripod'). Anyway, that's something to try another day! Flavour of the week this week for the first-years seems to be disposable cameras and Do-It-Yourself C41 processing. It's all because of the cheap colour films they can get at Poundland.

On the subject of film, we're thrilled with the results we're getting with our new supply of Czech-made FomaPan 100. The negative quality makes you fall in love with black and white all over again! It's available in all formats at a brilliant price from Silverprint.

A Week on Uist

2011-02-28T23:49:00.000Z

Turning Circle on the Railway Pier,

Kyle of Lochalsh

The end of February means the end of another half-term, the halfway point of the academic year. I spent the week-long break in North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, working with UHI first-year Fine Art students.

The Darkroom is not Dead Yet

2011-01-30T10:30:00.001Z

Every generation experiences it — materials and working methods being rendered obsolete by newer technologies and processes. It's been a fact of life for most of us since the early twentieth century, and in some trades since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Craft skills vital to Victorian and early twentieth century economies have all but died out, sustained only by hobbyists and determined individuals running niche businesses catering to specialised micro-markets.

Those of us who are antique enough to have lived through photography's transition from a film-based activity to a digital process may still feel nostalgia for the the processes and procedures needed to produce finely-crafted prints in a darkroom.

Much as I enjoy producing digital prints, they lack a certain something in terms of the relationship I have with them and the sense of satisfaction I get from creating them. There is a tactile disconnection in the sense that the images seem manufactured rather than hand-crafted. They are processed behind the glass wall of the monitor screen and printed out by the computer for me, rather than by me. It can be hard to feel the same sense of ownership of the finished work that you get from making an image appear through the action of light and chemicals on materials you control with your hands.

This pleasure of making an image by hand is clearly still a real one for many of my students, especially when they are given an opportunity to work with the older processes, such as cyanotypes. There is also a lot of instructive pleasure to be had from improvising with obsolete cameras, using photo-paper negatives cut to size and inserted in the back of the camera in place of the original paper-backed roll of film. Box cameras are particularly good for this, having a distinctive image quality that more modern cameras cannot, and would not want to, replicate (Lomo's and assorted Hipstamatics excepted). Wanting to push this experimental activity a little further, it seemed a good idea to test how far down the path of image quality we could go by increasing the size of the negative.

The camera we have been using is a clapped-out large format Linhof, with no lens and a cracked ground-glass screen. I fashioned a lens board from black foam board to take a 103mm lens borrowed from a medium-format Graflex Century Graphic folding camera. Although the image circle of the lens barely reaches the corners of the 5"x 4" negative, the vignetting effect it gives is in itself quite evocative of early photographs.


Street scene, Lincoln. Photo by Daniel L.

This is an early attempt, made by a student outside in the street on a scrap of accidentally fogged photo paper, while he was getting to grips with loading the paper into darkslides and determining the optimum exposure time. The paper he was using was Kentmere Bromide non-resin-coated Grade 2, developed in ordinary print developer. In my experience, variable-contrast paper is excessively contrasty when exposed to daylight, something I put down to the blueness of the light. As in the darkroom, using a yellow filter softens contrast but stretches an already lengthy exposure time.

Hayley and Joe by the Bail Wall Photo by Daniel L.

Once exposure times had been arrived at by trial and error, the student embarked on producing some more considered images. This one, of two of his fellow students, was taken against the outer bail wall, in the grounds of the Bishop's Palace.

Composite Portrait of H. and J. by Daniel L.

This is a double portrait of the two students in the picture above. Dan told me that he positioned his subjects using their eyes as the reference point to get the two exposures in register. I find the end result strangely compelling yet unsettling. The image is somehow uncanny – a composite face that is not so much a face, but rather the idea of a face. It has something of the quality of the nineteenth-century photographic experiments of Francis Galton or Arthur Batut.

This is clearly a potentially fruitful subject for further experimentation.

Postscript: The photographs were added to this post in December 2011, although they were taken at the time of the original post. The experiments have been revived with different materials.
There was an interesting article in the Guardian last Christmas on the disappearing commercial darkrooms of London. Note the link to a related video in the article's sidebar. It's worth watching.

Beach Café under Snow

2010-12-20T14:19:00.003Z

Midday weather forecast today like something off Fast Show. Everywhere 'Siberio' for the forseeable future.

Imogen Heap, Ellipse and Involuntary Memory

2010-12-03T18:10:00.005Z

Until recently, Imogen Heap was just another celebrity name that meant little or nothing to me. After all, so many names keep appearing that you just can't keep track. However, her name came up recently while I was browsing Zoe Keating's website. In the Bio section, Zoe said she had worked with Imogen so I thought she must be worth looking up.

A link on the main page of Imogen Heap's website takes you to her YouTube channel, where among other goodies is the fascinating official video of 'First Train Home', the first track on her most recent album, 'Ellipse'.

It's an elegantly constructed production that starts with Imogen's character trapped in a seemingly endless pillared corridor or loggia peopled by partying out-of-focus city types.

As she runs, looking to escape, the pillared walls morph into a wheel of life, a zoetrope, being turned by a larger version of herself. The whole thing has the absurd but relentless logic of a nightmare.

There's one moment in this visually attractive and inventive film to which I find myself unaccountably drawn. It occurs at two minutes in, when the running Imogen slows and pauses mid-stride, like a winding down automaton, to gaze upwards in astonishment at what we learn will be her larger self. It's a 'whoaa!' moment as she leans back in a perfect expression of awe.

Composite (cropped) screen grabs of consecutive frames

As the moment flashes by, I'm immediately looking at another image in my mind. A picture whose exact character still eludes me. I see it and I sense it, but I haven't yet been able to make it tangible. What is the image this moment irresistibly reminds me of?

What I seem to see in my mind's eye is an illustration. It is a frame perhaps from a bande dessinee – a European comic strip or graphic novel – in which the hero has a moment of revelation. It could be the memory of a drawing by Moebius (Jean Giraud). His characters also inhabit a world full of wonderful contradictions of scale.

Perhaps Imogen's baggy pants are a subliminal reference to Hergé (George Rémi), whose hero Tintin wore similar trousers while dashing about on a variety of urgent missions. Who knows?

Much as I've scoured my books, my brain and the web, the precise memory of the original image still refuses to surface. All I know is that one day I will be likely to see again the image that today eludes me and a tiny circle of past and present experience will have been completed.

"And suddenly the memory revealed itself: The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane."

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust.

Demotivational Poster

2010-11-25T22:18:00.003Z

It's kind of off-topic, but it made me laugh:

Found at: http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/

Artemis, aka Diana: Mad, Bad and Dangerous?

2010-11-14T13:50:00.013Z

Just the other day, I posted to Flickr a cyanotype print (blueprint) that I'd made to test a fresh batch of chemicals. To make it I used a photocopy on acetate of a nineteenth-century engraving of a statue. It's the kind of hand-cut engraving that was used by printers before photographically-generated half-tone images were introduced in the 1880s.

I use it as a test image to see how much fine detail is recorded by the cyanotype. The quality of the engraving is superb. It captures both the modelling of the three-dimensional form and the tonal range of the wet collodion/albumen print from which it was undoubtedly copied.

However, one can't help but be interested in the subject of the print as well. It's a statue of an attractive young woman who is strikingly, but negligently, dressed. One of her breasts is uncovered and her hitched-up chiton blows in an unseen breeze that wraps it revealingly around her legs and the other breast. It's an image that is as seductive as it is graceful.

The bow she carries and the dog by her side identify it as a generic representation of the goddess Artemis in her Roman form as Diana. To find out a little bit more about this ancient super-woman, I looked her up in my paperback copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hmmm, not a woman to be tampered with.

Poor Actaeon, a mere mortal, wandering through the woods one day while out hunting, stumbled upon her and her consort of adoring nymphs bathing in a stream. Ovid tells us she was so affronted at being caught without her kit on that she splashed water on him while uttering a terrible curse that turned him into a stag. The poor lad, distraught at his transformation, ran off to try and find his friends but met his own hunting dogs who, not recognising him, set upon him and tore him to pieces. The above painting by Titian shows the fateful moment he glimpses Diana au naturelle. The painting below, also by Titian, shows Diana even more vindictively sticking an arrow into the partially transformed Actaeon.

The Death of Actaeon source: Wikipedia

This was not the only time Diana revealed the harsh side of her nature. Her favourite nymph, Callisto, came to a tragic end through no fault of her own. She was fancied by Jupiter, who seduced her by disguising himself as Diana. The pregnant Callisto was cruelly rejected by the real Diana and after having Jupiter's child, was turned into a bear by Jupiter's jealous wife Juno. When her child, Arcas, had grown, he met his mother while out hunting. Not recognising who she was, he was about to shoot her when the penitent Jupiter averted tragedy by lifting them together to heaven to form the constellation of the Great Bear, Ursa Major.

I won't go into the incident of the wild boar Diana let loose in a fit of temper, except to say it caused havoc, destruction and death before it was finally killed.

These ancient yarns are an extraordinarily heady mix of unrestrained sex and violence in all their different forms. They provide Queer Theory with a wonderfully fertile subject for study.

source: wikipedia

Myself, I merely wonder why, given Diana's objection to be seen unclothed, artists and sculptors have always delighted in depicting her at least semi-naked. What's the sub-text to this? I'd like to think there's an element of payback for the murderous spite she showed to poor old Actaeon.

Ovid: Metamorphoses, translated with an introduction by Mary Innes.
(Penguin Classics series, first published 1955)
Harmondsworth, UK. Penguin Books.

Captain Ska's 'Liar Liar'

2010-11-13T10:10:00.017Z

It would be great to think it could become the Christmas Number One. There's a campaign to get it there, though there's still a long time to go and it lacks the usual warm and fuzzy feel-good factor. There's nothing I can say about the message of the song that the video doesn't say better:

It's great to hear ska music asserting once again its rightful role as an authentic musical voice of political activism. It's reminiscent of the days of Free Nelson Mandela, Ghost Town, etc.

Almost more than my horror at the coalition's destruction of the welfare state, I was appalled to learn of the Liberal Democrat leadership's cynical betrayal of young voters, revealed in the Guardian today:
'Lib Debs planned before election to abandon tuition fees pledge'.

Commenting on the article, redskyinthewest summed up my feelings for Clegg exactly:

Shame on him! I am a student and my politically apathetic student friends turned to me and said 'you know what, i'm going to vote for this guy', first timer voters really believed in him, I saw so many new youngsters becoming interested and even involved in politics because of the hope this man gave, and he's just gone and sh**ted all over them. Shame on him!

Clegg has done more than any previous politician to single-handedly destroy the public's faith and trust in the value of casting their votes. And this at a time when unprecedented public apathy and cynicism towards politics is rightly condemned. Thank God my vote didn't help put him in power, or I'd be really mad!

http://act.libdems.org.uk/group/reclaimyourvote

Zoe Keating: 'Into the Trees'

2010-11-09T23:40:00.006Z

Delighted to see Zoe Keating has a new album – at least it was new when it came out in July. I get so out of touch sometimes.

As with her other two albums, it's going to be well worth splashing some cash on if the track 'Optimist' is anything to go by. Listen here: http://www.zoekeating.com/projects.html.

I still find the video of her first appearance at Pop!Tech in 2007 mesmerising. It was the first time I'd come into contact with her work. One of my few regrets since then is that I've always missed her far-too-few appearances in the UK.

Diane Arbus at Nottingham Contemporary

2010-10-31T22:23:00.007Z

Earlier this month, I paid my first visit to the new Nottingham Contemporary to catch the tail-end of the Diane Arbus exhibition. This exhibition is one of the Artist Rooms circulating shows and will be shown at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Tate Modern early in 2011.

This is not reversed, the signage has been painted that way

Nottingham Contemporary is very conveniently located only a few yards away from the upper level exit from the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre. It is a curious-looking building. Whatever delights it may contain in the way of exhibitions, the building itself has an aggressive, forbidding exterior. Its relatively windowless outside walls are painted a drab camouflage green, making it look like a casemate or fortified gun emplacement. One could well imagine that it would look quite at home along the Maginot Line or among the World War II defences of the Normandy Coastline. Like those structures, it is a multi-level building built down into the ground, descending into a disused railway cutting where the old Great Central Railway once entered a tunnel that burrowed deep beneath the heart of the city.

Maybe it's my ageing eyesight, but I completely missed the main entrance, which is part of the long glass wall beneath the overhang in the lower photograph. Having walked straight past it without seeing that one part of the glass wall was a door, I went down the outside stairs to a patio outside the lower level. There, I could get into the gallery café and up the inside stairs to the main exhibition area.

Once inside the gallery, the exhibition lived up to all the positive reports I'd heard from the students who had already been to see it. Given that her work is so well-known, there is little I feel I can add except to note the pleasure of looking at first-generation and vintage prints of images usually seen as reproductions in books. The classic images we know so well – the identical twins and the boy with the hand grenade – were all there alongside a wealth of images that give an idea of a much broader range to her work.

While all of her work draws our attention to what the exhibition leaflet calls 'the unusual in the ordinary', many of her photographs avoid an emphasis on the grotesque and freakish and 'reflect her broader interest in the rituals and customs of self-contained groups'. In this, it is easy to see the inspiration she drew from the documentary portraiture of August Sander, whose influence she readily acknowledged.

It was an exhibition that would repay a second visit, so it will be a pleasure to go and see it when it travels to London in March alongside what should be an equally fascinating exhibition on the work of Joseph Beuys.

Stuff that Dreams are made of

2010-10-27T00:18:00.009+01:00

The wackiest circuit diagram - ever!

Thanks xkcd for giving this to the world. Nice to see an Arduino in there to keep things under control.
I wonder if Velleman, MUTR, Adafruit or anyone is up to doing it as a kit?

Meanwhile, I think the Graffiti Research Lab have a simpler way to use up our surplus leds:

Whatever you do, it's important to stay safe and wear protective clothing, such as the Snorg tee shirt that carries this message:

Thoughts on a Box of Bricks

2010-09-21T22:41:00.006+01:00

This little box of toy bricks I found in a local antique shop may have been only half-full, but I only really wanted the label on the lid. Despite being torn in half and held together by sellotape, the brightly coloured chromolith print had lots of attractive qualities.

There is a kind of law of inverse returns with these cheap toys which states that the meaner the contents of the box, the grander the depiction of the contents on the label will be. This shallow, 8" x 5" (20cm x13cm) box had only ten surviving bricks in it, with enough room to accommodate about six more. Fewer than twenty bricks is scarcely sufficient to begin work on the wonderful model in the picture. Still, the sense of exaggeration is part of its charm. I love the proud satisfaction of the builder as he shows it to the younger boy, who is reaching out to touch it and doubtlessly longing to knock it down! I also like the Alpine scenery in the background, setting the model in its proper rural context as a grand country villa. As there is no identifying text on the box or its contents, the label is all we have to suggest the toy's Germanic(?) provenance.

I haven't yet been able to come up with an explanation for the glaring error in perspective at the extreme left hand edge of the picture. The edge of the table leading away from the picture plane is completely at the wrong angle. Perhaps there was damage to the original artwork that needed retouching in the print shop. That might also account for the rather poorly-drawn vertical band of yellow wall or curtain.

Silhouettes and Photography

2010-09-19T13:33:00.011+01:00

It's always good fun to look through catalogues of upcoming local auctions to see what goodies are coming up for sale. You can play the game of guessing which items will sell for peanuts and which will have bids running way beyond the auctioneer's estimate. I sometimes like to make a fantasy short-list of things I would bid for myself, though I'm seldom tempted into making actual bids.

My eye was caught this month by a nice lot of four cut-paper silhouette pictures that were catalogued: "K.Kaskoune. A pair of early 20thC paper silhouettes and collage pictures and two similar pictures one inscribed "Blecke" 20 x 20cm". The auctioneers estimate was £40 to £80 for the group of four. Here are photos of two of them, copied and cleaned up from the dodgy originals in the online catalogue:

I liked them because they express so very clearly the spirit of the age in which they were created, the 1920's, often referred to as the "Jazz Age". I like the iconography of the period too, the distinctive style of dress and furniture, and the Art Deco stylisation of form in drawing with its use of Pierrot characters, or Cupid, who always seems to be in trouble for bringing love into flirtatious relationships.

In the event, the lot went for more than the top estimate, but for far less than I would have been prepared to pay. A bit of light web-searching showed that these cut-outs were by two significant practitioners of this art form. For example, a Blecke silhouette can be found in the Library of Congress collection and he is referred to in art dealers inventories. The attribution "K.Kaskoune" is interesting as it is clearly a mis-reading of the signature "F. Kaskeline", where the flowery K has been read as F and the capitalised ELI has been read as OU. An easy mistake to make with an unfamiliar name.

Here are the two remaining silhouettes in the set (as found):

My interest in these pictures was prompted because of the silhouette's significant place in the pre-history of photography. The shadow of a person cast on a surface had long been exploited as a way of making a simple likeness by tracing around it and filling it in. The sensitivity of silver salts to light was discovered by J.H. Schulze in the early eighteenth century, so it was a logical step for later photographic pioneers such as Tom and Josiah Wedgwood to attempt to use silver nitrate to make decorative silhouettes by the action of light. Though their experiments were ultimately unsuccessful, they provided an important stepping-stone in the evolution of the silver-based photographic processes that are still being used today.

The Power of Images: the Making of an Icon

2010-09-09T11:05:00.012+01:00

Sorting through a bundle of ephemeral scraps I'd brought back from my recent trip to Edinburgh and the Festival, I came across a page I'd torn from the Saturday Magazine supplement of the Scotsman. It was a listings page that contained a small (roughly 3cm square) photograph of Florence Nightingale.

(A number of programmes were broadcast during August to mark the centenary of her death)

Roland Barthes and others have written at length about the compelling power of photographs, but I was interested to know why I was drawn to this particular image.

The tight head-shot of a Victorian subject against a dark background immediately called to mind Julia Margaret Cameron's iconic images, though I knew that the photograph wasn't hers.

At that small scale, reproduction through a coarse dot screen gave the image a contrasty, Warhol-like, graphic arts quality. The semi-abstract reduction of the image to a matrix of dots is more apparent when the image is enlarged.

Primarily though, it is the quality of the character we read into the face that draws our attention, for it is the face of a woman whose life and achievements working for the public good have become legendary. Like the votive image of a saint, versions of this portrait now adorn everything from key rings and cushion covers to tee shirts.

It is a face that seems to signify goodness through its serene, self-confident expression and simple beauty — the simple beauty, that is, of someone who possesses regular features. She could well be seen as a Madonna, or the heroine of a story by the Brontés or Dickens. I liked it enough to wonder where the image came from.

There appear to be eight known photographs of Florence Nightingale in existence, and the source of this one seems to be a carte-de-visite photograph taken (probably) by Goodman of Derby.

The invention of the wet collodion photographic process in about 1851 gave photographers the opportunity to make good quality glossy albumen prints from glass negatives. These prints could be mounted onto card and sold.

Cartes of famous Victorians were published in large numbers for the public to collect and mark an important stage in the evolution of celebrity culture as we know it today. Although eminent Victorians recognised the value of promoting their image through photography, things did not always go smoothly. There is a story of Alfred Lord Tennyson's discomfort at being pestered in public by a stranger who recognised him from his photograph.

Having found the source of my newspaper image, I was intrigued by slight but significant differences between the faces in the cropped and original versions.

The red outline indicates the original height before vertical compression.

It's clear that the crop in the newspaper version has been tilted to make the head more upright. Interestingly, it has also been compressed vertically, which has the effect of making the eyes and mouth seem wider and the face more square. There has also been a significant amount of cosmetic retouching to make the facial features more defined, the lips fuller, the pupils larger and more limpid. In effect, she has had a make-over as good as any modern-day cover girl.

It would be interesting to find out when this enhancement took place. Although Victorian portrait studios employed retouchers to correct blurry eyeballs and remove disfigurements, I suspect that we are looking at a more recent attempt to glamourise this remarkable woman whose fame rests after all on her deeds rather than her looks.

While the manipulation of this particular photograph is clearly not something to get too bothered about, it does suggest that there may be ethical issues concerning the veracity of nineteenth century photographs as they are used by the mass-media today. The great power and strength of photography for the Victorians was its ability to hold up a mirror to the world and record what it reflected with utter truthfulness. It is a pity if we are to see such honesty treated too casually.

Fernand Léger and Normandy, Footnote to a Summer Holiday

2010-08-31T10:06:00.013+01:00

Pinned to the living room wall of our rented cottage in Saint Julien de Mailloc was this rather faded poster.

Although it showed a painted image, it was only after a few days that I realised that the painting was not the entire image but only the decorative element in a tightly cropped photograph. Most of the detail that would give clues to the scale and context of the painting were excluded, but I suddenly realised that the chevron shape at the top was the gable end of a roof and the band of faded green across the bottom of the image was vegetation.

Although Léger had been a hero, influence and inspiration to me in my student days, I had no idea that we were holidaying in his native countryside, where he returned to live out his final years. Having travelled to France without computers, and with no wi-fi, we were without the means to do an online search for information, so were left in ignorance of the image's significance.

The text on the poster gave the location of the village, so it was easy enough to plan a slight diversion on the next day's trip to the pretty town of Liseux. The winding back roads that took us to Lisores were a delight in themselves as they meandered through fields and orchards sleeping in the Summer sunshine. The village communities in this part of France seemed spread out, like our own village of Saint Julien de Mailloc. Their centres seemed relatively small, little more than hamlets, but with large numbers of outlying small farms. Lisores was no exception, and seemed to be a pretty little community on a steep hillside, scattered around a modest little church. While there, we were sufficiently intrigued by an extravagantly oversized mausoleum in the churchyard to stop and take a look.

There were no signs or clues in the village showing us where to find the building on the poster, nor anyone around in the midday heat to ask. With two small restless boys in the back of the car impatient to get to the swimming pool in Liseux, it was time to abandon mission and press on.

However, my interest in Léger has been revived and I've since been able to find out the significance of Lisores. He was a local man and it would seem that the property was a family farm he inherited. He may have moved there briefly in 1940 following the German invasion of France before emigrating to the USA. He returned to France and Paris after the war and seems to have moved out to Lisores in the final years before his death in 1955. I can't be at all precise with the biographical details as the online sources I've used contradict each other in significant ways. Clearly, more thorough research is needed if one is to get a clearer picture of the part that Normandy and the farm at Lisores played in his life.

What my online searches do show is that we might have been disappointed if we had found the farm. At the time of the poster it was a museum, but it seems to have closed in the 1980's. Alexia Guggémos's Delire de l'Art blog posting in 2008 warned of the decay and dilapidation that was overwhelming the property:

"Elle n’est plus que ruines ! Le panneau indicateur qui y conduit est rongé par les mousses, le chemin d’accès envahi d’herbes folles, la maison elle-même perdue dans les ronces et les orties. Du portail, on aperçoit juste sa façade colorée, encore magnifiquement ornée d’une fresque de l’artiste. La seule qui ait survécu. Tout le reste n’est qu’éventration et massacre."

(It is in ruins! The sign pointing the way to it is eaten away by mosses, the path is overgrown with weeds, the house itself lost in brambles and nettles. From the gate you can see just the coloured facade, still beautifully decorated with a fresco by the artist. It is the only thing that has survived. Everything else is torn out and destroyed.)

More recently, a piece on the Ouest-France website in December 2009 paints a more hopeful prospect for the future. It is apparently being restored by its present owner, art dealer Jean du Chatenet, who plans to reopen it as a cultural centre by 2012.

La ferme musée Fernand-Léger pourrait rouvrir dans deux ans
Lisores Mercredi 30 Décembre 2009

It seems a shame that the world at large seems to have neglected this aspect of Légers's legacy. Though M. du Chatenet's plan cannot bring back what decay and depredation have taken away, it should at least preserve and give new life to what is left. We must wish him every success in his ambitious venture.

Edward Weston in Edinburgh

2010-08-19T14:56:00.008+01:00

While passing through Edinburgh at Festival time, I couldn't miss the opportunity to take a look at the Edward Weston exhibition. It takes up two floors of the City Art Centre, in Market Street and according to the exhibition leaflet, is the largest show of his work ever to visit the UK. The aim is to present a survey of his career and the work is grouped into sections that illustrate the development of his style in relation to his varied subject matter.

Pepper No. 30. 1930

Given that most of us know his work through reproductions in books, there's a certain frisson to seeing original vintage prints, sometimes signed and sometimes coming ever-so-slightly detached from their faded mounts. As well as the still life photographs that we're so familiar with, there were sections devoted to his work in Mexico, his portraits, nudes and early and later landscapes.

There were a fair number of images that are not generally known, especially among the portraits and early work. Seen alongside the better known works, they were key to showing how the stylistic conventions of his more celebrated work developed. The essence of the Edward Weston look.

'The White Iris' (Tina Modotti)
(This photograph was not in the exhibition)

A surprising (partial) omission was the scarcity of images relating to his relationship with Tina Modotti. The influence of Tina Modotti and Margrethe Mather in causing Weston to abandon his wife and conventionality in favour of bohemianism is key to both his oeuvre and his subject matter.

Edward Weston and Margrete Mather, 1922
(photo by Imogen Cunningham, not in exhibition)

The emphasis seemed to be on his later involvement with Charis Wilson, who both inspired him and gave him the practical help he needed to build a wider reputation and create much of the work for which he is now remembered. A hour-long documentary playing in a side gallery of the exhibition explored this phase of his career. It was too long a film to sit through for the majority of visitors, who mostly glanced in and moved away. As a day-tripper myself, I could only give it ten minutes or so of my time — it's unrealistic of exhibition organisers to expect visitors to do more, especially at Festival time. In this wired world, there should be other ways of accessing this kind of supporting material for visitors who want to learn more. It's surely possible for it to be made available online or via digital TV, if necessary via a secure password issued with the entry ticket.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable and memorable exhibition, the first big Weston show I've seen since the V&A show back in the early 1970's. Glad I saw it, though I couldn't afterwards summon up the willpower or a strong enough stomach to spend more than a token few seconds with William Wegman's bizarre dressed-up doggy pictures on the top floor. I still not quite sure whether I don't get his work, or whether I get it too well.

The Edward Weston exhibition continues at the City Art Centre until the 24th October 2010.

LABLOG

2010-08-19T10:32:00.004+01:00

LABLOG

A cool-looking noise-generator / instrument. Make one yourself at the Dirty Electronics Weekend Laboratory, Nottingham. 18th-19th September.

Skull Etching from Dirty Electronics on Vimeo.

Life in Motion

2010-07-17T21:45:00.004+01:00

The Summer holiday provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on the year so far and perhaps to make plans for the future. As I look back over undeveloped notes for this blog, I find a few notes that seemed important when I made them, but which now puzzle me as I try to understand what I was really trying to say. Here's a diagram I made that clearly meant something at the time:

The notes on the same page as this diagram seemed to be dwelling on the theme of the roots we put down and how strong they may or may not be. Many of us lack the depth of rootedness that earlier generations had. Older age and youth are both periods in life in which one undergoes marked changes in a relatively short period of time. In a culture that is driven by the search for new uses for technology and the systemic obsolescence of current technology, it can be difficult to maintain a sense of personal stability in one's life in order to cope with growing up or growing older.

Filling those short winter days

2010-03-30T23:43:00.004+01:00

An evening by the peat stove, Locheport, February 2010

Curious that life has been so full of activity recently that this blog, which should log those events falls by the wayside for me as a tool to reflect on the passing scene. Perhaps now that the Easter break is almost upon us, there will be an opportunity to collate and comment on the amassed material.

A Sense of Movement

2010-02-28T14:58:00.003Z

The dramatic wintry weather we've endured since mid-December has acted as a marker or way-point, not only separating the old 2009 from the new 2010, but also acting as a full-stop to the decade known as the 'noughties'. Oh that the first years of the new century would have been filled with more naughtiness and fun! Was ever a decade less appropriately named?

Still, Mother Earth trembles silently beneath our feet. Like riding an elevator in motion, we know that movement is taking place though we appear to be standing still.

Memories of Lammermuir

2010-01-31T18:01:00.009Z

Footbridge across to Fast Castle, Berwickshire

A month has now passed since we parted company in Saint Abbs and life resumed its daily cycle. However, like a wheel turning, each revolution takes us onto new ground. Two thousand and ten remains a prospect still full of optimism. The brighter, milder weather that's followed the bitter snows of January carries with it the promise of spring and opportunities for positive action.

It's certainly been a busy month, work-wise, having to turn out every day and putting in more hours than some of my full-time colleagues. The benefit of long hours is seen in my monthly payslip, but the corresponding downside is evening exhaustion. The weekends become so much more precious as a resource. Projects beckon and time has to be so much more carefully managed.

In quieter moments, my imagination has been captivated by the story of the Bride of Lammermoor, Walter Scott's tragic tale of madness, oppression and thwarted love. Not an author I ever thought I would be likely to read, I came to his gothic tale via Donizetti's operatic adaptation Lucia di Lammermoor, which in turn I originally discovered many years ago via the soundtrack of Paul Cox's 1973 comedy-drama, Man of Flowers. (One of my all-time favourite films, not least for the way it visualises the nature of memory in the flashback sequences.) The Christmas holiday provided the opportunity for my third visit to Fast Castle, the first visit in which I began to understand its relevance to Scott's tale.

Every time I've visited the place, lonely and remote though it is, I've always been surprised to find other people there. One curious thing is that they never look like the kind of people you would ever expect to find in such a God-forsaken spot, the sort that Florence (who was with me again this time) calls rough-ty tough-ty. On the bitterest, bleakest day you could ever have wished to stay indoors, we found a minibus-full of dapper twenty-somethings there, dressed alike in smart urban clothes. They were leaving as we approached, so we never got to talk, but never did a group look so out of place as they set off back to their minibus, parked two or three miles away down a snowbound lane. My theory is that they were there because of the Scott/Donizetti connection, and were musicians or singers absorbing the atmosphere. Whatever it was, it was a slighty surreal experience.

There are so many brilliant performances from Lucia that it's impossible to choose the definitive one. Joan Sutherland for the voice - or the acting of Natalie Dessay? What about Netrebko? Caballé? YouTube has Dessay's entire mad scene split into parts 1 to 3. (The above is an excerpt.) Mesmerising and so worth watching!

Chilling (Out of Signal)

2009-12-30T06:41:00.005Z

It seemed like such a good idea at the time – to meet up for a family Christmas at a midway point. No-one could remember the last time we all spent Christmas together as a family. Someone was always needed elsewhere.

Saint Abbs, ten miles North of the Scottish border, seemed to be the perfect location. More or less three hundred miles equidistant for those who lived furthest apart, North and South.

It suddenly seemed far less attractive a proposition a few days before we were due to arrive as the weather closed in. Everyone would need to make their journey in some of the most difficult driving conditions that the British weather can throw at you.

For me, a mere two hundred and fifty mile drive straight up the Great North Road (A1) is always something special. It has its own particular, slightly epic, quality with so much history and a magical landscape lining the road on either side.

New Experiments

2009-11-30T18:43:00.009Z

It's been a very busy second half to the Autumn Term. First Year National Diploma students keen to experiment with lots of unfamiliar techniques. They used an old Jessops Powerflash motordrive head (MD400) to strobe with their camera shutters open on B. There were the inevitable problems of overexposure sometimes when the subject didn't move far enough between flashes. I showed them how to produce a similar effect by using a motordrive to take a rapid sequence of single frames which could be layered in Photoshop and selectively blended to create a strobe-like composite image. The shot above was the first attempt. With care, I'm sure some really nice sequences could be made.

A few of the students were curious to know about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, though none knew what it was. I decided to demonstrate in class, using as an example two of the students who were taking a break near the window. It was fairly late on a very dull November day and the room lights were on. With the digital camera steady on a tripod, I asked the girls to remain very still while I took two shots, one metered for them, the other metered for the scene outside. The two images are shown at the top, with burnt-out highlights coloured red and textureless shadows coloured blue.

Again, I layered them in Photoshop with the indoor shot uppermost. I then carefully erased the window in this layer to expose the background scene of the lower layer. The hair was the trickiest part and there was a slight mis-registering between the layers to cope with. So, it's not perfect but I'm quite pleased with it as my own first attempt to have a go at this technique.

Another technique I've been trying to get students interested in, is pushing photograms beyond the familiar arrangements of keys and coins and other everyday items. Charity shops always have shelves of ornamental items such as the glass bowls I used for these images. Scanning the photogram and manipulating it in Photoshop, I was able create some psychedelically coloured animated .gifs.

The enlarger I used to make these photograms was in a pretty filthy condition, as I found out when I took the prints out into the daylight. The black background was covered in thousands of tiny dust specks. In this photogram, though, they looked like a myriad tiny stars, blinking away behind a baleful planet hanging there in a vast space. It seemed a logical step to colourise the scan to enhance this illusion and to add some random coloured shaped to create an imaginary perspective.

Lots of other creative ideas are developing. Having just repaired our UV exposure unit, I'm ready to roll again on cyanotypes and salt prints (always a favourite with students). Parts for an infra-red and a sound flash trigger are sitting on my workbench. And then there's stop motion animation and stereoscopic photography . . .

Built to Boogie

2009-10-27T20:55:00.009Z

I couldn't resist her. She's a beauty in stainless steel, a simple and elegant combination of form and function. She's a Peter Lynn ST kite buggy that I bought secondhand from a lad in Stamford who's upgrading to something more seriously acrobatic. I hadn't realised there was such a huge but largely invisible kite buggy-ing fraternity in this part of the world. (Perhaps that's the way they like it.) I thought I would struggle to find a buggy, but via the online power-kiting forum, Kitecrowd, I found a found a community of buggiers only too happy to help each other out. I should have realised that Lincolnshire, with its old airfields and vast East Coast beaches, was built for buggies.

Days and Moments to Remember

2009-09-30T20:36:00.007+01:00

Florence and Mum, February 2007

Today has a particular significance as it would have been Mum's 93rd birthday. The poignancy of the date was brought home an hour or so ago, when I had a telephone call from an 83-year old acquaintance of hers, calling to wish her a happy birthday. How much I wished I could have brought her to the phone, but she now only speaks to me in the dead hours of night.

View from my Window, Lincoln College

Time seems in very short supply now that I have returned to work. I'm grateful that my three fairly arduous days a week in Stamford are ameliorated a little by a fourth day day in the congenial surroundings of Lincoln's Cathedral Quarter, working in the top floor studio and darkroom of the old School of Art. In my own student days, the studio was the base room for an architectural technicians' course, run by Edward Albarn, a grand old architect who taught us unruly painters the more refined skills of perspective. He once lost a bet to me when, while drawing a two-point perspective drawing of a church with tower as a class exercise, I thought I could see how you would plot and project the conical spire and its details. He bet me a substantial sum of money that I couldn't do it without being shown, but I could see that the solution was fairly logical and was very embarrassed to prove him wrong. I hate to be made to look like a smart-arse, then as well as now, and refused to claim my winnings though they were offered. They were funny old times and the building still remains chock-full of so many happy memories.

Kite Aerial Photography: An Experiment

2009-08-30T10:27:00.019+01:00

Looking back (as you do) I'm struck by how many of my ideas started out as thumbnail sketches on the backs of envelopes. This Summer's main project was no exception ...
It represented a convergence of need and interest in a very satisfying way. The background is my wish to have a better understanding of the topographical contexts of abandoned structures and archaeological sites in the Hebridean Islands. Simple rectilinear aerial photographs could provide a useful addition to measured surveys, such as those I made on Scarp, off the West coast of Harris. Anyway, doing kite stuff is fun! I've still got fond memories of the home-made kites the kids and I used to fly off the side of Pendle Hill in our Lancashire days.

The catalyst that set the project in motion was an unplanned encounter with a kite festival at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire back in April. Beneath a rainbow-decorated sky the irresistable lure of The Highwaymen stand drew me in and resulted in me going home with spools of kite line and a very temptacious price list.

There is a seemingly infinite amount of information on kite-based photography (generally called KAP by its practitioners) on the Web, much of which is anecdotal, like this blog post.

The best-known and probably most comprehensive website on the subject is Cris Benton's KAP site. As well as this, there's an inspirational video of him on Vimeo or Make:Magazine's mind-boggling Make:television channel (Episode 2). It's a good showcase for the creative potential of KAP.

Other names crop up repeatedly when researching KAP online, such as Brooks Leffler (maker of Brooxes rigs) and James Gentles (maker of gentLED electronic triggers, etc.). The KAP Shop, in the Netherlands, seems to be the main European supplier of KAP-related bits and pieces.

Typical of other useful sites are KAP, How to do it, and KAP. There are also academic sites and papers related to the subject, such as the University of Vienna's Aerial Archive and a pdf'd conference paper on unmanned small-format aerial photography.

My own ambitions at this stage are fairly modest. To hang a camera from the sky and take pictures of any sort would count for me as an achievement.

The simplest way to take vertical shots seemed to be to pack the kit in a small box that I could hang from a kite line. I had worked out that a box about 3" deep (75mm) and 6" square (150mm) internally would hold most cameras and other components.

I considered doing away with the Picavet cross suspension system and screwing the suspension rings directly into the box itself. However, I realised that a cross would allow me to rotate the box relative to both the direction of the kite line and the main axes of objects on the ground below. To construct the box, I used basswood comb-jointed at the corners for its combination of lightness and strength. Full-size pattern drawings were made to ensure that the pieces would all fit together.

There are more pictures showing
the building of the rig on Flickr.

For the radio-control components, Phils Models in Sleaford provided everything I needed along with plenty of free advice.

At this stage in this project, to have gone out and bought a new digital camera would have been a reckless extravagance. Cousin Rex's expeditions to car-boot sales provided me with three obsolete but serviceable digital cameras (of about two-megapixel resolution) that could, if necessary, be tested to destruction.

The rig, finally finished, painted and varnished went with me on my second visit of the Summer to North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. I'm pleased to say that in spite of the battering it took, it came back in good condition. A selection of images from my trip are in my Flickr photostream. Needless to say, there were lots of steeply-learned lessons for me to work on in time for a much more productive visit in 2010.

Hitching a Ride

2009-08-27T22:01:00.005+01:00

Hitching a Ride
Originally uploaded by Joneau

Our week of testing kites and KAP rig over, Sol and I had fun on the ferry back to Skye by humming sea tunes (Rico's Ska version of SeaCruise being the most tuneful) and doing comparative testing of the ship's food and facilities. The observation lounge scored best all round - the Navmaster GPS screen being the clincher.

Beaten by a Man in a Bathtub

2009-07-17T13:26:00.008+01:00

Hawaiian outrigger racing canoe technology ruled once again at the 2009 North Queensferry Raft Race, part of the annual Gala festivity. Ginger-wigged defending champion Olivier saw off once again his over-designed opposition.

First to launch, he had time to relax by sitting on a nearby inflatable while his rivals took to the water.

I had (misplaced) confidence in this three-man-power double outrigger raft. Sleek and stylish, it looked invincable.

The two-man luxury model, complete with catering facilities on the quarter-deck, was clearly hampered by its parasol on this breezy day. Out of shot, the bathtub was being bailed out following ungentlemanly action by the crew of the double outrigger.

Having deposited its crew and catering facilities in the river, the luxury raft needed some hasty modifications before the race could get underway.

Once the race started, there was no stopping the bathtub. Light and fast, it skittered out to the old jetty and back again, leaving its rivals plodding, despite their superior manpower.

PS: Thank goodness for mobile phones. Never a proper camera around when you most need it.

Crossing the Firth of Forth

2009-07-17T10:50:00.014+01:00

Crossing the Forth Brdge, South to North
(2min 23sec)

Although I've done it numerous times, I still get a thrill each time I take a train across the Forth Bridge. It is indeed a thing of wonder and an object of functional, if brutalist, beauty. Like the Waverley Steps, it also has its place in my family history as something talked about by Dad in his pre-war adventures.

The Forth Bridge also figures in the notebook he used to record his wartime experiences as Sapper CT Pearson of the Royal Engineers. His Company were being moved to Comrie Camp in Perthshire and having boarded their troop train at 7pm on November 2nd, 1942, they travelled through the night and crossed the Firth of Forth the following morning. This is what he says:

"Outside Edinboro we crossed the Forth Bridge and quite a few men carried out the old custom of throwing coins over the Bridge into the Firth of Forth far below. I remember one party who were playing cards at the time and someone threw the whole of their 'kitty' overboard which I understood amounted to over £1. It may have brought them luck."

From Comrie, his Company boarded the ill-fated liner SS Strathallan for their journey to Algiers in North Africa.

The Forth Bridge
from North Queensferry Station

One other piece of railway-related memorabilia came to light the other day when I rediscovered Dad's old wartime wallet. In it, alongside his army pay book and various newspaper cuttings, was this photograph:

On the back of the photograph is written: "Top of Ben Nevis 4400 ft". Fort William was another place Dad had visited on a free pass in pre-war days. I wonder who his pals were? Dad himself is second from the right (with the top of his head torn off).

A Sunny Day in Edinburgh

2009-07-16T18:05:00.010+01:00

Although my Dad (Cyril) was never a great storyteller, I do have some fragmentary childhood memories of him telling me about his trips around Britain when he was young. When he left school, he followed family tradition and joined LNER (The London and North Eastern Railway). LNER's main route joined the two great capitals, London and Edinburgh.

As a railway worker, free rail passes opened up all sorts of opportunities for travel. It's hard today to recapture the sense of adventure there was in simply moving from one place to another. Fragments of tales he told me are brought back by a variety of inconsequential things. Whenever I'm in Edinburgh and am walking out of Waverley Station, Dad is always beside me in spirit as I walk up Waverley Steps. I remember him telling me of the great winds that would almost sweep you off your feet. These winds are a matter of legend.

Even on a balmy day in June there is a noticeable breeze.

It seems that where ever you are in the city centre, there is always the sound of bagpipes in the background. Even in the tranquillity of Princes Street Gardens, the birds compete with (or are perhaps encouraged by) buskers.

Behind the Royal Scottish Academy, an historically kitted-out boy band appeared to be getting ready to strut their stuff. Desultory drum-taps and much moving of kit backwards and forwards seemed to be designed to attract a crowd. As a Man On A Mission that day I got bored and left after ten minutes waiting for them to actually play something. They reminded me, perhaps unfairly but irresistably, of Life of Brian's Popular Front of Judea. (Much posturing but little or no action.) They were probably good when they got started, but here's thirty seconds' worth of my fruitless wait:

Ye Jacobites by name
Let your schemes alone
(from Burns)

Postscript: Time and the Aftermath of War

2009-06-02T17:45:00.007+01:00

A noticeable side-effect of growing older is the way one's sense of time collapses inwards. Events that seem to have happened relatively recently become talked about by a younger generation as if they were ancient history.

The upcoming 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings may start a trickle of TV documentaries on World War 2. All will doubtless claim to offer new insights, which Saturday's 'Bloody Omaha' on BBC2 certainly did. It followed a standard pattern of running for a hour whether the material needed it or not, and was padded out with the usual narrative repetition, familiar-looking old newsreel footage and colourful comments from two or three photogenic veterans.

It is the current fashion for programmes like this to be fronted by popular celebrities rather than knowledgeable experts. Richard Hammond, clown and professional semi-yob, bless him, hardly brought gravitas to this sombre subject. Instead, it was slightly surreal to hear him discussing the war with a youthful academic for whom the war seemed to be a matter of records and statistics to be interpreted whichever way one chose.

Although I'm not old enough to have experienced WW2 itself, I was born in the aftermath and grew up in a world in which its scars and consequences were all around us. Not just the physical scars of bombsites and material deprivation, but the psychological scars on the adult survivors. So it created a strange kind of deja-vu to hear the war being talked about in a way that seemed so detached from the physical reality itself. It illustrates, maybe, how the prism of historical analysis can rob events of life and context, turning them into neutral abstractions to be manipulated to suit any convenient theory.

The spur to say these things was the email I blogged about yesterday, in which I noted the enthusiastic support of corporal punishment in the schools of my childhood. Perhaps the key to understanding this is to remember the proximity of war. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, a decade or so to an adult is only a short span. Not enough time perhaps to heal hidden signs of trauma. Some of the men who taught me had seen active service and may have slaughtered other men or at least lived in daily fear of being slaughtered themselves. In their own warped thinking, it perhaps seemed right that us boys should learn that life was hard and that they should be the ones to teach us that lesson. Having survived the war, there was perhaps some faith in the Nietzschean apophthegm, "what does not kill me makes me stronger". Hmmm...

The Happiest Days of Whose Life?

2009-06-01T12:52:00.006+01:00

In quick succession, I have received another invitation to consider the past. The PTA at my old secondary school wanting to collect memories for a projected book. I'm not the one to ask, I reckon. Anyway, it made me collect my thoughts on the matter, so here's what I wrote in reply:

Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your History of King's School project. Unfortunately, I am not the best person to ask as my memories of King's are largely memories of five years of misery. Excuse me if I explain why.

The boys who were my fellow pupils were all full of ideas, energy and enthusiasm. The late 50s and early 60s were a time when we were all drunk with the idea that we could build a new world for ourselves. Not only were we discovering the attractions of the opposite sex, we would spend our free time walking and talking about new and radical thinking. It was through swapping and trading stuff in the quad that I got hold of my first copies of Ginsberg and Kerouac, that I learned about Angry Young Men such as Pinter and Osborne, that I got second-hand 45s by obscure American bands. It was only the sharing of ideas by so many like-minded spirits that made school anything more than a repressive grind.

To be fair, there were clubs and societies that were worth joining, a Chess Club, Music Society, Boxing. The CCF allowed us to don ex-WW2 uniforms and re-enact in our heads our fathers' wartime experiences. We let ourselves be bullied by NCOs in the name of discipline and spent field-days crawling around in the undergrowth of Sherwood Forest or Belton Park.

The counter-point to this was the unforgivably harsh culture of corporal punishment, particularly when it was allowed to be administered by senior boys, some of whom clearly took a sadistic delight in administering or observing it. The process went completely unmonitored and ignored by staff. Maybe I was unfortunate in being assigned to Newton House. Experience showed it to be a house that cherished its sporting achievements, something that I lacked the competitive drive to excel in. Had I done so, it would have offset some of the "stars" that some teachers liked to regularly set against my name. Stars meant "lack of effort" and resulted in being summoned to appear equally regularly before the House Prefects to be beaten, or "codded" with a gym shoe.

All this happened, of course, under the headmastership of Mr Huggins, whose memory some people seem to revere. I believe things improved under Mr Goodban, who came in too late to be of any benefit to me. Indeed, I left the school as soon as I could, after gaining my O Levels at sixteen. As someone whose interests were artistic rather than academic or sporting, the school had no more interest in keeping me on than I had in staying. Careers advice consisted of trying to persuade people like me to join the local civil service, that is, become a post office clerk.

Being mechanically minded I drifted into various local garages as a "grease monkey", or apprentice motor mechanic, where I could indulge my passion for fast motorbikes. It was chance discussions with tutors at Grantham College three years later (where I attended engineering classes on day release) that my talent for draughtsmanship was explained to me and I was advised to improve my career prospects through full time study. At least King's had given me the five O Level minimum I needed, so I went to Lincoln Art School to get a couple of A levels and take an Art Foundation Course. From there I went to Sheffield Polytechnic for three years to get my DipAD/BA in Fine Art (Painting) followed by a three year postgraduate scholarship to the Royal College of Art to gain my MA. A circuitous route, perhaps, but at least I got to where I was happiest in the end.

Sorry I can't be more positive about King's but that's how it was for me.

Times Past: Time's Passed

2009-05-31T22:55:00.005+01:00

The River Nene at Wadenhoe, Northamptonshire

It was great to hear from an old friend this week, even though he had to tell me the sad news about another friend's death. It got me thinking about things as I put a few words together in reply. It became a sort of statement about my life as it is at the moment. This is what I wrote back to him.

Hi Vince.
Great to hear from you, even if you were the bearer of sad news. Poor Dave, it was no age to go. Was it the big C? I don't know about you, but I've recently become much more aware of how little time our generation has got left - the future no longer stretches into infinity. I often read obituaries of men who I've always thought of as my generation. Blowing away like leaves on a windy day.
I lost my own Mum earlier this year. She lived with me for the past ten years or more since my Dad died, and as she drifted into her nineties became more incapacitated, immobile as well as virtually blind. Because of having to care for her, I shed more and more of my teaching work until this year I've only been teaching two mornings a week. I couldn't bear to give it up completely. If I did, I don't think it it would be long before I joined the two Daves. Quite honestly, teaching and keeping up with what the new generation is doing is the only thing that keeps me focussed on life. (The extra bit of spending money is nice too!)
Anyway, on a more cheerful note, I wonder what did become of Shirley Lee. I find it hard to imagine she's still around. She must be a very old lady if she is. I often think back to those days and often regret that we let life move us on. I often say to people that the years in Lancashire were the happiest years of my life. Perhaps it was because we were fresh from the RCA, green but full of confidence in what life was going to offer us. I often wonder about other people who crossed our path in Preston. I remember Roger Swanborough (who had also been behind us at the RCA), Sylvia Lees whose husband Peter had been at the RCA at the same time as us, and there was a nice girl Linda who taught fashion. I also have fond memories of Stan Hogg, who ran the printing trade courses. He must surely be dead by now. Lots of the students linger in the memory too because their quirky character. I've still got one or two photographs of that time that bring it all back.
It would be nice to make time to renew old friendships. You're clearly much better at it than me. Although I've loved friends dearly, I seem to spend my life with my head down, burrowing away without looking to right or left and abandoning everything I've left behind me. Not really a good trait, but I've learnt to live with it.

Times Past: A Snowy Day

2009-04-19T10:57:00.006+01:00

Now that Spring is in full swing, it's easy to forget the snow we had in February. Here's a little reminder of a trip we made to meet up with Will and his family. Though they weren't in, we found them snugly settled in the lounge bar of the village pub. The snow had tempted them into making their own Arctic expedition. With snowfalls like this now so uncommon, even nine-year old Sol had never seen so much!

Naughty Fun? My very own barrel of monkeys.

2009-04-18T14:11:00.007+01:00

Took in this homeless bunch, who look as though they've been living rough. They don't seem very house-trained and need a good wash and some clean clothes. Plastic surgery in some cases. (Greg the Bunny has some useful advice on cosmetic surgery) Still, they make me laugh and are good fun to have around. I'm sure we'll get along just fine.

A Trip to New Lanark

2009-03-28T22:49:00.005Z

New Lanark. To someone who doesn't know about it, it's hardly a name to conjure with. Just another name signposted off the busy M74 linking Glasgow to Carlisle and the M6.

Not a bit of it, I knew it would be worth seeing. When I taught the contextual history of early photography, I used to show my students an engraving of New Lanark as it looked in 1816. We would then look at prints of industrial scenes of the mid-nineteenth century, sparking a lively discussion of the changes that took place in that extraordinary time. Changes that continue to resonate through the environmental issues we wrestle with today.

Edinburgh Art (3): Claire Barclay at the Fruitmarket Gallery

2009-03-27T18:00:00.006Z

A visit to the Fruitmarket Gallery is worth making for the cafe alone, I was told. Award-winning coffee and irresistable home-made cakes. A great little bookshop too, specialising in hard-to-find art books and small-press books and zines. The Gallery's position nicely complements the City Art Centre, which is directly across the road in Market Street.

The current exhibition, running until 12th April, is by Scottish installation artist Claire Barclay. The piece in the photograph, which is called Subject to Habit, is fairly typical of her preoccupations. It mixes ready-made objects with specially designed, machine-made objects that seem oddly familiar but which defy absolute categorisation. For instance, the black gym mats in this piece trigger an association which determines how we read the other objects, which in turn are clearly not the objects our conditioned responses would lead us to think they should be. All the work in the show plays on the ambiguity of forms, carrying contradictory connotations such as malevolence and benevolence in an uneasy balance.

An informative video interview with the artist was looping in an upstairs room and the show was supported by a series of talks and a seminar. Edinburgh is indeed a lucky town.

Edinburgh Art (2): The City Art Centre

2009-03-27T15:31:00.008Z

It's always a slightly frustrating pleasure to discover a great exhibition just before it closes. No time for a second look or sharing your discovery with friends. Visual Arts Scotland's 2009 Annual Open Exhibition at the City Art Centre was a luxurious warm wallow in the best contemporary art that Scotland has to offer. Sadly, this year's show closed after a six-week run on 19th March. Every 2 and 3-d medium (and style) seemed to be represented in more than 300 artworks displayed over two floors of this beautiful gallery.

I clearly wasn't the only one to fall in love with Kenneth Le Riche's large oil painting, The Conversation. This detail was used as the front cover design of the catalogue. To the left of this cropped image a shadowy male figure stands outside on a balcony, glimpsed through an open doorway. A well-deserved prizewinner.

Two floors down was the show that brought me here, drawn by my curiosity to see Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank series of paintings (also ended on 19th March). As the archetypical hero and spokesman of my generation as it grew into maturity, Dylan can still do no wrong. His 2006 album Modern Times is as hauntingly memorable as any of his earlier work. But with Dylan, there is always the hidden side where man and myth blur - and nothing is quite what it seems.

I have to say I quite like the work. Stylistically, it is fauve, with loose drawing and flat, vibrant colour. Echoes of Matisse or Dufy.The original drawings are said to have been made when Dylan was on the road and show a world in motion, of short stops and sidewalks, casual acquaintances and cafe tables. There is, in his subjects, none of the sensual intimacy of the original Fauves. Dylan's drawn line is much more fragmentary, angular and broken.

Key to interpreting the work, for me, is understanding that it is a composite of scanned drawings and painted modifications made more than a decade later. Like the mystery of the man himself, it is a subtle layering of reality and fiction.

Edinburgh Art (1): Calum Colvin at the Royal Scottish Academy

2009-03-27T12:00:00.004Z

Natural Magic, on show until 5th April, is Calum Colvin's ideosyncratic tribute to Sir David Brewster, the eminent Victorian scientist/inventor whose researches into light and optics made an important contribution to the development of photography.

It's a fun, interactive show that needs you to press your nose against mirrors or look through coloured spectacles. An aesthetic Fun Factory for grownups. The catalogue is an elegant piece of affordable design, with a white-on-white cover and the handmade look of a brass screw post binding. As a bonus, there is a free stereoscopic viewer inserted in the back cover which is used to view the side-by-side stereoscopic illustrations.

London to Edinburgh by Train

2009-03-27T11:34:00.006Z

The golden rule is always to sit on the right side of the train facing forwards, preferably in Coach B (the Quiet Coach). There you see most of what this wonderful journey has to offer as you speed through Northumberland and the Scottish Borders: Holy Island/Lindisfarne, the righthand sweep across the viaduct at Berwick-upon-Tweed and the wild romantic views of the North Sea, with its fishing boats and lonely ruins. To see all this and then to arrive at Waverley Station. Train journeys don't get any better than this!

Lindisfarne, seen from a train.

In Memoriam

2009-02-19T14:45:00.005Z

Jocy Doreen Rita Pearson
(née Edlington)
30th September 1916 – 15th February 2009

How long will it take to come to terms with Mum's absence? Happy memories – here on holiday in 2004 with Florence in Villedieu-les-Poëles, Normandy, France. Happy days indeed.

One Day in Prague

2009-01-29T23:53:00.006Z

At last I've finished putting together the video clips from our weekend break in Prague. A collage of some of the more memorable sights and sounds. So glad to have had the chance to go back to the city of dreams.

Braving the January Cold

2009-01-28T22:16:00.009Z

On my day out in London, went to check out the Photographers' Gallery in its new location. It doesn't yet feel right, like a supermarket that's reorganised its layout. Ramillies Street is a drab cul de sac in a particularly sterile corner of Soho. A commercial desert tucked away behind the tacky facade of the retail Hell that is Oxford Street.

Well away from the bookish bustle of the Charing Cross Road and the crowds drifting between Leicester Square and Covent Garden. Well away from the cultural ambience of theatreland and the National Galleries. It takes an effort of will to leg it from familiar territory to somewhere with so few attractions, except perhaps for the HMV store on Oxford Street. The only compensation a chance to ramble through streets I knew so well in my student days, Wardour Street and the Berwick Street market. I might even start to become a customer again of Cowling and Wilcox in Broadwick Street.

I suppose it's character-building to have the comfort zone of your routines shaken up a bit by change, so I hope I will start to find my way to Ramillies Street when I'm in town. It's nice to see the cafe unchanged by the flit, and perhaps the gallery will rediscover its talent for putting on exhibitions of significance – ones that linger in the memory for years.

OK. SELF-TEST: Name some shows from long ago that I still remember.

Danny Lyon (bikers)
Koto Bolofo (fashion/portraits)
Martin Parr (The Cost of Living(?) consumer culture)
Historical photographs showing the construction of the Forth Rail Bridge

An odd selection, others would spring to mind on a different day.

Of the two shows on at present, I preferred the downstairs show, Soho Nights.
Far too small in scale to do its Brassai-like subject justice, it nevertheless gave a tantalising glimpse of the smoky bohemian glamour of London-noir. Anna Jay says some nice things about the show in her mondo a go-go blog.

The French Pub: Unofficial HQ of the Free French
From: Picture Post, 1941. Photographer: Kurt Hutton

Even in my student days (the seventies), the York Minster (AKA the French Pub) in Dean Street retained its glamour as a thrilling place for a student to go for a drink, carrying as it did the exotic ambience of dangerous and subversive worlds beyond our own provincial shores. And always the odd disreputable celebrity (of the George Melly type) spotted but studiously ignored in the smoky gloom. At least that's how I remember it!

Speaking of remembering, I must find time one of these days to go for a meal again at Jimmy's in Frith Street. Fiona took me there when we were students. She had been there for a meal with Adrian Henri, so it had a kind of kudos. It must be twenty years since I last ate there, but it's still very much alive and kicking according to a great review by NilliJoon.

Summer's end

2008-09-14T11:47:00.004+01:00

Bright Autumn days are here! Crisp morning air. The grass be-jewelled with dew, spider-web curtains glittering in the hedges. Great news! The long range forecast gives us a week of settled weather for the farmers to get their harvests in. I noticed that some of the unwashed potatoes in the supermarket yesterday showed signs of Blight. Always suspicious, I wondered whether we're being softened up for the introduction of more expensive alternatives. Even Gardeners' World admitted that Blight had ruined their outdoor tomato crop.

The sky is noticeably empty of swallows. They have left us to go in search of warmer days and nights. Even the clothespegs on the line seem to be gathering together. Luckily they don't have as far to go in search of a warm dry home.

Greetings from an Old Friend

2008-08-28T23:56:00.002+01:00

Robot Garden
Originally uploaded by Joneau

He seems as cheerful as ever. One of my summer projects has been to put some of my back-catalogue online (on Flickr). The only record I have of some of my images are in the form of ageing transparencies. It will be good to have a digital backup. Reviewing these pictures again has given me a chance to put my latest ideas into some sort of contextual continuity. There are a number of new ways in which I would like to explore the painted representation of space and movement / time.

Southwell Workhouse

2008-07-30T22:36:00.001+01:00

Not the place to go to for a jolly outing, but worth a visit just the same. Despite its neat and tidy appearance, it evokes many sad and sombre associations. This is a bit of social history that touches our own family histories more than we perhaps realise.

It is sobering to be reminded just how recent some of this history is. Southwell Workhouse still has some of the furniture used by its last residents in the 1980s. In teaching us about the condition of the poor in the nineteenth century, it also serves as a reminder that the seemingly insoluble problems of long-term poverty are still with us today.
The Workhouse is maintained by the National Trust (www.nationaltrust.org.uk/workhouse)

Those of us (and it must be most of us) whose family origins are in the rural working classes may have a family history that was touched by the workhouse. Looking through old photographs the other day, I came across this photograph of my Great Granny, who lived out her last years with her daughter (my Mother's Mother) as the only alternative to the shame of going into the workhouse. Granny and Grandad looked after her in spite of being very poor themselves.
Although Granny and Grandad had migrated into Grantham for work, Great Granny previously lived in the countryside, at Hanby/Pickworth, where Great Grandad had been a shepherd.

Although Great Granny remained illiterate throughout her life, Granny was educated at Ingoldsby Board School. She is somewhere in this photograph, taken when she was 13 years old.
Somewhere also in this photograph are some of her brothers and sisters. (Great Granny had 12 children: 2 died in infancy leaving 5 girls and 5 boys to grow to adulthood.) At least two of the brothers, and probably some of the other children in this picture, ended their days in Grantham Workhouse.

Before I end this post, there is another more recent photograph I came across. I remember this old gentleman very well. He was a friend of the family and used to visit us in the 1950s. I was still a child and we lived just off Dysart Road, quite near Grantham Workhouse. Mr Matthews had been a farm worker in his youth, but had been removed to the Workhouse with his wife. They had to live separately in male and female wings but were able to be together at designated times of the day.
This photograph, taken by the Grantham Journal, seems to have been taken for a special occasion, perhaps an anniversary. It's the details that are fascinating, such as the bare, painted-brick walls and the old girl peeping out of the bedclothes in the background.

Do I not like this!

2008-07-24T12:03:00.002+01:00

Indeed I do! It's a diagram I came across in The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art by Malcolm Bull (pub. Penguin, 2006).

This highly readable book explores the way that the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome was reconstructed and remodelled to fit the allegorical fantasies of Renaissance art. It's a mythology that continues to resonate through Western art today.

One of the pleasures of looking at Renaissance and post-Renaissance paintings is to contemplate the physical characteristics of the landscape in which the figures disport themselves. Malcolm Bull's diagram quite cleverly throws all this away and reduces the landscape of classical mythology to a simple set of Cartesian (x-y) coordinates. The dominant locations at the top of the y-axis are Mounts Olympus and Parnassus. At the subordinate base of this axis are Hades/Forge and Arcadia. The horizontal x-axis moves across from productive activity on the left to leisure on the right.

While the gods, in their adventures, move around this xy-plane, their natural home loci are shown. At the central intersection (the crossroads) is stationed Mercury, the messenger of the gods. From this neutral position he keeps himself busy by moving freely throughout all sectors.

I love the reductive logic of this diagram. It would be great fun to invent a new geography of this mythical landscape by combining its concept with painted landscapes we have seen of classical scenes and actual maps of the seas and land masses as we know of them today.

Stone Fruit

2008-07-24T11:39:00.000+01:00

It is a stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones.
The metaphor was Thoreau's, writing in his journal about the Indian arrowheads he would find in the freshly cultivated fields around Concord, Massachusetts. However, he was making a broader point about the importance of being aware of the historical evidence that surrounds us.

It is too easy to overlook Cromford in Derbyshire as you speed along the busy A6 towards the more obvious charms of Matlock and Matlock Bath. This busy arterial road, once one of the nation's most important highways, bisects the community, leaving the village on one side of the road and the remnants of its industry on the other. Both are largely hidden by the rocky and wooded landscape on either side of the road.

While the village is well worth exploring, it is the Mill buildings that mark a key stage in the early development of the factory system of production.

The first mill on this site was built in 1771 by Richard Arkwright to mass-produce cotton yarns for weaving. The mill was powered by water from a lead mine drain and a warm thermal spring, giving a reliable year-round source of power. Arkwright's spinning machines were known as 'water frames', after their source of power. The weaving industry for which these yarns were produced was still a cottage industry and the surplus of yarns that Arkwright was able to produce provided a spur for innovations in weaving and the supply of constant and reliable power by water and steam.

The Mill is maintained by the Arkwright Society. It's a great place to visit and spend half a day at least. A nice tearoom, bookshops, walking or just chill out by the banks of the old canal. I've posted pics of it on my Flickr stream (it was an unseasonably gloomy day in June).

Let the Good Times Roll

2008-07-13T14:23:00.001+01:00

It's always good to make time for a trip to London. This time, the Great North Road seemed quiet enough, so we drove straight past the railway station and didn't stop until we reached the hem of Old Lady London's petticoat: Mill Hill (in the Borough of Barnet). This is where the traffic really begins to build up and slow you down. It's generally easy enough to get parked up and continue by Thameslink into the city itself.

The two highlights of the trip were the exhibitions at the Photographers' Gallery and the BP Portrait Award show at the NPG (National Portrait Gallery). The Photographers' Gallery is always an essential point of call for me because I like its simple cafe. Nothing fancy, but a decent cup of coffee (in a cup, not a pint mug) and simple tasty sandwich. Mine was Brie cheese and salad in a roll, Flore's tucking into Mozarella and salad in a ciabatta roll above.

Anyway, for once, looking at the exhibition was a pleasure rather than a duty. The one-person shows can be pretty heavy going sometimes, but this one was a group show that meant you could skip the work that didn't engage you and spend more time enjoying the rest. The exhibition may be over by the time I post this, but the work is still online at: www.photonet.org.uk/freshfacedandwildeyed08
As the title of the show suggests, it's a show of some of the best current postgraduate student work. While it was all pretty good, I was most impressed by Gavin Fernandes's 'Monarchs of the East End', formal portraits of fictional characters from a dreamlike subculture who could people mythologies as old as time itself.

Simon Dixon's 36 Views was fun, parodying Hokusai's famous series of woodcut prints showing Mount Fuji from a variety of viewpoints. Dixon's Fuji was Roseberry Topping, a hill on the edge of the North York Moors, seen from a variety of distinctly unpicturesque locations.

Murray Ballard's Cryonics Facility was creepy but compelling.

Just round the corner, down the Charing Cross Road, the NPG continues to assert its trendy credentials with the BP Portraits Awards exhibition. It was a show to really renew one's faith in the viability on oil paint on canvas. Diversity of scale, diversity of technique, it was an object lesson on what can be achieved with this most fundamental medium.

Craig Wylie's K was the overall winner, and deservedly so. One of the largest paintings in the show at 6ft10in high and 5ft5in wide (2.10 x1.65m), it dominated the first bay in the gallery. I'm not a fan of the Photorealist style, but this painting is a tour de force.
In the best tradition of Summer Shows, there was something there for everyone, and all the work was worth a closer look.

Wylie's painting had, for me, echoes of the best of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs, particularly the one I love the most, her photograph of Mrs Keene, The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, made in 1866.

The painting and the photograph share someting in common. It's to do with what Roland Barthes called the punctum, in this case the eyes, which in both images engage you directly and inescapably. They gaze out at you and create the sensation that the sitter is there in front of you in this elusive moment we call the present.

The ability of the best photographs to reach out across time and space, is key to its extraordinary power. Mrs Cameron's hundred-and-forty year old albumen prints do it as well as any other. A good place to see online examples of her work is in the George Eastman House collection (www.geh.org). George Eastman was of course the founder of Eastman Kodak and his mansion in Rochester, New York is now a museum.

An Afternoon in Arcadia

2008-07-07T21:14:00.001+01:00

Maze Entrance
Originally uploaded by Joneau

The beautiful weather of late June is too good to be wasted. Loaded up the campervan, DaisyMay, with Mum and Florence and some food and trundled off to Derbyshire. There was one sole purpose – to revisit Chatsworth House, to explore the gardens and to photograph the architecture and the statuary. (I have posted a few of the photographs to Flickr.) I want to have enough images to finish a long-neglected essay on the influence of classical forms on English architecture.

I particularly wanted to take a colour version of one of my favourite monochrome images from the old days. The new version is on the Flickr Photostream as SouthEast Corner of House. Somehow, the composition isn't quite the same – so I'll have to find the original.

To mine own country from the Aonian height;
I, Mantua, first will bring thee back the palms
Of Idumaea, and raise a marble shrine
On thy green plain fast by the water-side,
Where Mincius winds more vast in lazy coils,
And rims his margent with the tender reed.

Virgil: GeorgicsIII

Moments out of time

2008-06-30T07:21:00.000+01:00

It 's that time of year again. On the third Thursday of May, I was booked to give my annual talk to Stamford Photographic Society.

What to talk about? How my students at Lincoln were gripped by Lomo fever? How digital technology and the Web are altering the style and subject-matter of photography forever? How digital photography has made it easier for us to explore old-time printing processes? Yes, all that and more.
I always try to incorporate historical references, so we also looked at the photographs of Lady Hawarden, taken between 1857 and 1864. Although the Victorian era seems increasingly remote, these images float out of physical time into a dream time not bound to any historical moment. Time as measured by clocks and calendars becomes irrelevant, fooled by the contents of the dressing-up box.
The images' charm is enhanced by the strange shapes made by scissors or decay, as they were originally pasted into albums. The pictures we have are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, who publish the best book on the subject, readily available though Amazon.

Virginia Dodier (1999) Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life 1857 - 1864. London, V&A Publications.

Stamford Photographic Society meet on the third Thursday of the month in the drama studio at Stamford School.

SPRING AT LAST

2008-04-08T09:01:00.000+01:00

What a change in the season! The blessed weather of April and the promise of growth and blossom to come. We’ve been on British Summer Time for a week now and are enjoying the novelty of those lovely longer days – getting longer by the day! The BBC weather girl said temperatures at this time of year increase by about a degree a day. You wouldn’t always think it when we have snow flurries like those we’ve had over the last few days.

Yesterday, the Nottingham Eye was taken down. Glad I got a chance to take Sol for a ride on it first.

The urge to be on the move starts up again. My two weeks holiday has started, so where should I go if I’m to resist the urge to spring clean?

Emerging into the Early Autumn Light

2007-10-11T14:39:00.000+01:00

Somewhere, an invisible wheel has turned full circle. We are on firmer ground now, but in a different place.

This has been a week of blessed weather, with the trees shimmering green and gold in the early October light. An anticyclone has been hugging these islands, but is now drifting slowly away to Scandinavian shores.

Is it too fanciful to think that the forces that control our emotions are in some way similar to those that govern the weather? Sometimes, a palpable tension can build up in our relationships that needs a storm to burst upon it to clear and reinvigorate the air. That was how it was last week with Mum. A crisis built up over her refusal to consider having help from Social Services on the days I go out to work - combined with her truculence over the fact that I sometimes need to leave her at home alone. I have truly felt trapped between a rock and a hard place.

Thank goodness for family. Mike and Sue are willing to drive all this way to cover for me three days each week and Mum is making visibly more of an effort to display a little independence. I know the situation is more complicated than these few words suggest, but I don’t feel I can go into it any more at the moment.

Dark Days

2007-08-18T20:54:00.000+01:00

Et in Arcadia ego, indeed! A stark reminder of our mortality has intervened with Mum's illness. A visit to the out-of-hours GP on Saturday 4th led to immediate admission to the Emergency Assessment Unit at the hospital and an eleven-day stay in the Acute Medical Ward. She was discharged on Wednesday, but is still very weak and having to spend her days in bed.

The worst times for me when she was in the hospital were quiet times at home, doing routine jobs. The solitude became very oppressive. Standing at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window at nature going about its business, I wanted to call to her. Knowing she wasn't there, I found my eyes filling with involuntary tears.

Anyway, she's back home now and we can try to pick up the threads of daily life again - with a heightened appreciation of the value of the shortness of the time we have together.

Touchdown in Arcady

2007-08-01T16:01:00.000+01:00

Today seemed like a good day to jump (it's the first day of an August month). The weather has at last turned warm and settled. Planes drone lazily in our big Lincolnshire skies and enough has been achieved down here on Earth to take some time out. Et in Arcadia ego.