The Decline of Non-Fiction for Children

The online edition of the Guardian carried an article today noting the decline of childrens' non fiction books.

In an associated open thread on their BooksBlog, it asked for readers to contribute comments on their favourite non-fiction books from childhood. Here's the comment I posted:

Back in the 1950's, my parents bought a 10(?)-volume set of books called 'Pictorial Knowledge' from a door to door salesman for my brother and me. I think they were published by Newnes and had bright red, shiny, leather-like covers. They gave us countless hours of pleasure; they looked, smelled and felt lovely and were full of exciting pictures illustrating factual articles on every topic a child would be interested in: art and literature as well as science and technology. Of all the books I encountered as a child, they had the greatest influence on my intellectual development, fuelling a desire to know more about the subjects they covered.

Available secondhand from Amazon / Abebooks

The best practical book I owned (and still have) was "The Boys' Country Book", edited by John Moore (Collins, 1955). Beautiful illustrations by Shirley Hughes, and full of now very non-pc articles on everything from rock climbing to 'shooting for boys', all written by boyhood heroes of the day. It was a book that opened up a world of possibilities, inspiring you to be better than you were without being competitive or trampling on others.

Title Page Illustration

It's worth remembering that comics and magazines in those days, such as the 'Eagle', 'Boys' Own Paper' and 'The Childrens' Newspaper' contained a lot of fascinating factual content.

After posting my Guardian comment, I looked online and found that the entire run of The Childrens' Newspaper has been archived and is available from Look and Learn in DVD form. Individual issues can be browsed through on the website and downloaded. This was an exciting discovery;  the website is an extraordinarily rich resource for anyone wanting images that have historical and/or educational value.

Reassessing the Educational Value of Photography

The value and meaning of photography as an activity has changed in recent years.

This has been largely due to the Digital Revolution, a term that will just as clearly define the present historical period as the term Industrial Revolution defined the 19th Century.

Until comparatively recently, photography was a very specific activity that used standardised materials and equipment in a manner that was tightly controlled by the technical limitations of those materials.

As a photographer, your role in making photographs was generally limited to operating a camera with a greater or lesser degree of proficiency. The outcome being a folder of finished prints provided for you by technicians.

The prints could be saved and stored, displayed or reproduced, but they generally had no other function than to be a record or memento of specific people, places or events.

Any other outcome for the image was also the province of technicians, using specialised equipment and materials beyond the means of most photographers.

It was unthinkable that personal (as opposed to commercial) photographs would be displayed, published or broadcast to an audience outside a personal network of contacts.

In saying this, I seem to be describing still images. My remarks apply equally to the even more dramatic changes in the field of moving images with the move away from cine film to the endlessly rewritable medium of digital video.

Photography is now much more than an Arts and Crafts/Design activity or the medium by which we are informed or entertained by old school media.

What do these changes to the way we use photographic images mean for society and education?

Anyone who carries a mobile phone is potentially able to instantly publish images or video at any time of the night or day.

Given this, it's surely not fanciful to suggest that photography has changed in that it has become a commonplace medium of public discourse, akin to the spoken or written word.

It has become an intrinsic part of the way we converse or express ourselves, and given its broadcastability, beyond the confines of face to face interaction.

As educators, we need to recognise and accommodate this changing role of photography. It can no longer be thought of as merely another craft specialism within the confines of art and design.

It demands to be seen as a fully academic subject that encompasses the study of it in terms of its role as both a language form and as a technology that is radically modifying the forms of public discourse.

Titan Pinhole Camera Test

It's beginning to seem as if pinhole cameras are becoming a regular theme in this blog.  There's no special reason except that I can't resist tinkering with stuff that's lying around and we've had this Ilford Titan camera in college for a while now. This week, it seemed like a good time to try it out while the students were busy finishing off their project work for the end of term.

As well as wanting to get a feel for it and see how it worked, I wanted to test out a theory I have about paper negatives. The photographic paper we tend to use in the darkroom nowadays is the ubiquitous resin-coated multigrade (variable contrast) paper. Indeed, there is now very little alternative since the mass market for specialist silver-based papers was killed off by digital photography.

However, I have always found that multigrade paper negatives shot in daylight have always been excessively contrasty. I put this down to the blue content of daylight acting as a multigrade filter and hardening the contrast. Using an orange filter to counteract the blue is of little help as it merely has the effect of introducing a safelight over the lens and excessively extending the exposure time.

For this experiment, I used a box of graded paper, which took a bit of effort to source as it's not commonly stocked by our suppliers. It was Ilford Ilfospeed Resin Coated, Grade 2 (glossy). Detail should record well on the smooth surface, bearing in mind that the image would be scanned later.

For  the test, I decided to use a sunny corner of the college car park. There were white and black surfaces and plenty of sunlit and shaded mid-tones and textures. As well as taking some basic shots to get an idea of suitable exposure times, I wanted to do a further experiment.

I wanted to see if there would be a significant difference if I processed the negatives in a film developer (such as ID11), rather than paper developer (we use Ilford Multigrade).

After some preliminary trials, this is what I got with a 24 second exposure in harsh sunlight. The negative was developed in paper developer for the usual one to two minutes.

This was taken a little later, in more or less the same light conditions. This time the negative was dish developed in ID11, diluted 1:1 with water. I developed it for about ten minutes with more or less constant agitation.

Although both prints are far from perfect, I think they provide an incentive to experiment further. There is clearly a much more subtle range of tones in the second image, noticeably in the dark shrubbery above the car and in the white notice pinned to the white door. Overall, I'm impressed by the sharpness of the image – it's pretty good for a pinhole camera. I have a feeling that the vignetting will be much reduced when an optimum exposure/development balance is found.

While I was preparing to write this post, I checked out an excellent video review of the camera on the Walker Cameras website. This is the company that developed the camera for Harman/Ilford, based on their experience on manufacturing mould-injected plastic large format field cameras. I totally agree with the reviewer's positive comments and was impressed by the images he produced on his day out in Broadstairs. It's a video well worth watching, even though Leon the reviewer misreads the roman numerals on his box of Multigrade paper. Oh the joys of extemporising to camera!

When the Rubber Hits the Road

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.

Where To Next? Some Thoughts on Student Progression

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.

The Darkroom is not Dead Yet

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.

The Happiest Days of Whose Life?

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.