One Day in Prague

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.