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.

Summer Reads and Literary Leads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imogen Heap, Ellipse and Involuntary Memory

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.