Thoughts on the Year's End

I'm writing this is the dying minutes of 2012. Countries to the East of the U.K. have already welcomed in the New Year, but here there is lttle more than fifteen minutes to go.
For me, it has been seemed like a year of incident - eventful, that is, without an overriding sense of things moving either forward or back.We are far enough into the new century perhaps for it to have reached a point where it distinctive character to have started to form.

Dark Days in Deed

The end of another busy month is here. I need to claim this space for a more notes to be added over the weekend. Meanwhile,  a pictorial reminder of the transitory nature of many of the things we create: a scattering of sandcastles made by art students on the beach at Mablethorpe.

Busy Days

Another month comes to an end, bringing with it Halloween and the short days of Winter. The weather has been largely kind to us here in the UK, though across the Atlantic the East Coast of the USA has been battered by Hurricane Sandy. The devastation seen in yesterday's TV reports was truly awful, with certain images immediately becoming emblematic of the catastrophe. Cars floating in a submerged underpass, and most terrifying, CCTV footage of floodwater bursting through the closed doors of an elevator. It will be some time before we learn the true extent and effect of the devastation.

Meanwhile, I'm a man on a mission, pausing for a short break in North Queensferry, near Edinburgh, en route for Skye and the ferry out to the Western Isles. I've been booked to run a week of workshops  in alternative photographic processes for UHI Fine Art students. We will be using the art studios at Taigh Chearsabhagh Arts Centre in Lochmaddy. Having worked with these processes for years when they have been a minority interest, I've been surprised to see what seems to be a new level of interest in them in the higher education sector.

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.

Building a Wooden Camera

One of the pleasures of living in a state of semi-retirement is having time to indulge in inessential but absorbing activities. This Summer's main time-absorber was building a wooden camera – still not quite complete, but well advanced on the state it was in when this picture was taken.

The project was mostly inspired by my students' enthusiasm for alternative and experimental ways of making photographs. Although they like their digital cameras, they also love doing practical things that involve physically interacting with materials. There is a tangible and tactile satisfaction in making things by hand that isn't gained through working solely with digital processes.

It's a subject that came into focus for me last year after reading Matthew Crawford's The Case for Working with Your Hands, which I blogged about at the time. At around the same time I was asked to teach practical and experimental course units that gave a wide scope for investigating the creative potential of alternative processes. We did a lot of experimental work with large format cameras, using improvised lenses and a variety of negative materials; we also worked with pinhole cameras and alternative print processes, particularly salt printing and cyanotypes. It was during this time I came across, quite by chance – or rather, by Amazon's predictive algorithms – an intriguing-looking book, Primitive Photography: A Guide to Making Cameras, Lenses and Calotypes, by Alan Greene.

 

While Matthew Crawford discusses the value of practical activity, Alan Greene gets straight down into hard-headed practical instruction. It is a book that inspires, but offers no shortcuts to the challenges it sets the reader. The only reward it offers is the opportunity to take photographs as eerily beautiful as those taken by the author himself. It is certainly not a book for a faint-hearted reader, as the densely-expressed instructions require a force of will to follow. The chapter on building a camera makes no allowances for improvisation, error or diversion, it is a matter of following the instructions exactly, step by step, not ever being quite sure which bit of the camera you're making, but with the satisfaction of seeing it gradually take shape in front of you.

Having said that, a UK-based reader like myself has to perform some mental gymnastics to turn the USA-orientated instructions into action. While our two nations are famously divided by a common language, we are also divided by different standard systems of measurement and by a variation in the materials that are readily available. Greene makes extensive use of basswood for example, a scarce and unreasonably expensive material here. Being determined myself to follow the underlying philosophy of the book, which is make the camera out of commonly available materials, I decided to use the nearest equivalents I could find in my local DIY stores, B&Q and Homebase.

The framing is made out of pine stripwood with the nearest metric cross-section measurements. It comes in 2.4m (9ft) lengths and is very cheap. Instead of Luan, I used 6mm exterior-grade plywood. A model aircraft shop was able to supply me with a more expensive 4mm light plywood which I'm using for darkslides.

The cumulative effect of these differences in imperial and metric dimensions has a knock-on effect on later stages of the build. For example, my negative holder, built up out of seven laminated layers of stripwood, is 4mm thicker than the author's example in the book. This necessitated me cutting out and replacing parts of the camera's internal framework that I'd innocently cut to the sizes given in the plans. Suffice to say, my copy of the book has been heavily annotated with points to note for future builds.

This has been a book and a project that I would recommend to anyone. Building the camera has been an instructive and satisfying experience that should provide lots of further fun, building lenses and recreating those early negative processes.

July Highlights

This is a preliminary note intended to precede new content that will be added tomorrow (1st August).

The posting will be largely concerned with a current London exhibition.

Busy Times

Looking out over the Atlantic, North Uist. Photo by A. Smith

Hell's Bells – What a Month! If Summer is meant to be a time for roller coaster rides, then June has lived up to expectations, despite the unseasonal weather. A busy month, work-wise, starting with a week in the Outer Hebrides, working on plans for reviving a documentary project; then two alternative processes workshops and ending with the diploma student show – the culmination of the most enjoyable teaching year of my entire career.

Lots of little highlights along the way – such as being reminded yet again of the time I photographed Hercules the Grizzly Bear, newly recaptured after three-weeks of freedom on Uist.

Taigh Chearsabhagh, the Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, are planning some kind of commemoration of this 1980 event and wanted to see my pics. It's a story worth telling, but I'll save it for a later post.

Some Large Format Experiments

In spare moments, while the fine weather has continued, I've been continuing my experiments with large format paper negatives. Developing them in film developer rather than regular paper developer has proved to be a very promising experiment. More about that in a later post, I hope.

Meanwhile, I've been tinkering with the cameras themselves. My old Linhof press camera is proving to be a useful test rig for trying out a few of my ramshackle assortment of discarded lenses.

One of the minor faults with the Linhof has been the broken ground glass screen, split right across from side to side and only held together by the spring clips in the camera back. It still works, but it's distracting to look at. The prompt to do something about it came when a student gave me a 12"x 16" piece of picture-frame glass left over from a studio shoot.

Having no better use for it, I cut some pieces to fit the back of a 5"x4" camera. I then got hold of some lapidary grit and decided to have a go at making my own ground glass screens. I found an excellent online explanation of how to do it by an American large format photographer, Dick Dokas.

His instructions were simplicity itself to follow, and  I was thrilled with what I was able to achieve in ten minutes or so of grinding the two pieces of glass you can see in the foreground of my photo. A light sprinkling of grinding powder and water produced a very fine bright translucent finish, similar to fine tracing film. I started off thinking I would use the cheap rubber suction dent-puller (seen in the background) to hold the top piece of glass, but that was completely unnecessary. Simple finger pressure on the top piece of glass was all it needed to keep it moving.

Another problem I've been pondering is how best to control exposure times with some of the lenses I've wanted to experiment with. Some have variable apertures, but none have shutters, so some sort of independent shutter mechanism is needed. Having studied the problem, the solution (I hope) arrived yesterday by post from the USA in the shape of a Packard Shutter, bought from an eBay seller in Floyd, Virginia.

My example is clearly a vintage item, though they're still manufactured by the Packard Shutter Company in California. It's clear that there is a dedicated army of Packard users among large format photographers (predominantly in the US) judging by enthusiast webpages and YouTube videos. In its present form, my shutter is operated pneumatically by a rubber bulb connected by tubing to the piston you can see on the right in the photo. I can see why these shutters have their fans, they're an elegant and simple way of controlling exposure and a classic example of nineteenth century technical innovation.

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!

Lowry Reconsidered

Like a cat grown tired of being petted, winter finally extended her claws at the beginning of the month and nipped us with the first serious snow of the season.

Still, a couple of days later, Sunday lived up to its name and turned sunny and warm; the roads clear enough to set out to catch the last day of the LS Lowry exhibition at the University of Nottingham's Djanogly Art Gallery.

A Lowry-esque Scene: Sledging in University Park, Nottingham

I've always found Lowry's work hard to like, though it's a prejudice that's mellowed with the passage of time. Maybe it's a generational thing for those of us who grew up in the drab austerity of post-WW2 Britain. We wanted to move on and have the good things that the wages of full employment could give us: a life of opportunity, colour, music, sex and fashion. There was little sympathy for the unremittingly dystopian vision of Lowry's art, although it was a world that still existed, at least visually, well into the late 1960's. I remember being in a minibus full of students going to Manchester's Whitworth Gallery to see the Northern Young Contemporaries exhibition, singing Ewan MacColl's  "Dirty Old Town" as we drove through an urban scene that could have been designed by Lowry himself.

That was probably 1966/7, but sadly, the stereotype of the North of England as a land of decayed industrial cityscapes still exists among the ignorant today. Fragments of a hacked conference call between Scotland Yard and the FBI, released by Anonymous and published on the Guardian website earlier this month started almost straight away with a cockney-sounding London copper describing Sheffield as a 'Khasi' (army slang for lavatory). The man has clearly never been to the place if he can describe it in those terms. Coming from the inhabitant of a city once known as the "Great Wen", it seemed particularly ironic.

The Lake, 1937. Oil on Canvas

Lowry's paintings help perpetuate this lazy myth. Given that the reality that inspired his work has largely disappeared, his paintings should perhaps now be regarded as historical documents, symbolic but essentially fictional representations of a social scene that emerged in the Industrial Revolution and which faded at least a generation ago. While urban decay and deprivation are still with us, they now have characteristic forms that were not present when Lowry made his paintings.

I was prompted to see the show by a drawing reproduced in the exhibition publicity. Called "The Supper Bar", it is a busy street scene rendered in pencil outline with minimal use of tone to suggest chimney smoke and other atmospheric effects. My main interest was in his use of perspective. 

The buildings are rendered in terms of their height and width, with only about three places where depth is indicated. Like the figures in the foreground, the buildings are drawn to a more or less consistent scale, irrespective of distance from the viewer. Overall, pictorial depth is suggested by placing the nearest features at the bottom of the picture, rising to the most distant at the top.

The impression of compressed depth this gives is similar to the effect of photographing a distant scene through a long telephoto lens. A good example would be one of Andreas Feininger's early telephoto shots of New York. He was one of the first photographers to recognise and exploit this visual effect.

Although the eye level/horizon line seems to be level with the upper windows in the first row of buildings in Lowry's drawing, this may be because that is the centre of the picture. The position of a viewpoint is purely theoretical in fact because, like an orthographic engineering drawing, the absence of a third dimensions means there is no horizon at all.

The use of a high viewpoint combined with vernacular subject-matter suggests an affinity with the images in traditional Chinese and Japanese art and their distinctive use of axonometric projection as a form of perspective. Japonism was still highly influential in the early twentieth century and one may be certain that it was very familiar to Lowry. Echoes of Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) Japanese woodblock prints can be seen, I think, in a simple watercolour sketch such as "Estuary", below.

The Estuary, 1956-59. Watercolour on paper

Despite the prejudice against Lowry's work that I admitted to above, I found the exhibition a fascinating and rich source of ideas and themes that would repay more detailed study. A more detailed analysis begs to be made of the plotting and placing of the individual elements in his work; the grid like structure that fixes and holds fast the generally busy and chaotic subject matter. There is also the role of satire in his work in the context of early/mid twentieth century social change.

A Fight, c 1935. Oil on canvas

This painting, for example reminds me irresistibly of Joseph Lada's comical illustrations to Jaroslav Hasek's post-WW1 satire The Good Soldier Schweik, even down to the dark horizontal line of the kerb echoing Lada's use of a thick black line to represent the ground plane. This is one of those illustrations, printed on the cover of my battered 1946 US Penguin edition:

I feel it would be of great interest to evaluate Lowry's work in the context of social satire in the early/mid twentieth century, rather than categorise it as an aberration in the development of a modernist movement in the UK.

The work in the exhibition was drawn from the LS Lowry Collection at The Lowry, Salford, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal. Another place to be added to the list of places that must be seen.

A Visit to Lindisfarne

It's always a pleasure to follow motorway signs to The North, and this time was no exception. As a family, we all chipped in to rent a holiday cottage just outside Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast so that we could spend Christmas together: seven adults, two boys and a dog. 

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

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

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

As well as tide tables off the Web, I got hold of the DVD from MovieMail. The night before our visit, the lads and I sat down to watch it. Not having seen it for decades, I was struck by its Samuel Beckettian quality — as a kind of riff on Waiting for Godot with bits of Pinter thrown in. Instead of Godot, the characters wait out the non-appearance of Mr Katelbach from Mablethorpe (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 nice production still.

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

Weather, tides and daylight hampered my attempts to get to grips with the island's essential character, so I came away with only a few photographs to post to Flickr. Another visit clearly beckons. Time and tourism have been very kind to the place and the run-down castle environs and decrepit sheds are much smartened, thanks to the ministrations of the National Trust.