The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

In a very early post (Don't Ask Me, 2009) I wrote:

I have always liked the idea that the Buddha regarded certain questions as unanswerable: the so-called "Undetermined Questions." That is, when asked these particular questions, he simply said ... nothing. Depending on which tradition you listen to, there are either fourteen or ten such questions, but to a hyper-logical Western mind there seem at root really only to be four questions, which have been expanded -- in what seems like an anticipation of the user-satisfaction questionnaire -- by the addition of supplementaries, so that "Is the world finite? Or not? Or both? Or neither?" counts as four questions. If you added "At weekends?" I suppose there'd be five.

But the core questions are:

Is the world eternal?
Is the world finite?
Is the self identical with the body?
Does an enlightened being exist after death?

All good questions, but you can see why the Buddha might choose to stare meaningfully into the distance at that point. In many ways, this is a more helpful response than the wheel-spinning scholasticism of the Christian church grappling with such questions, or the linguistic nit-picking of philosophers in later centuries. It's not quite "Don't know, don't care" but you can imagine a certain amount of serene finger-tapping going on whenever those questions came up.

Now, I'm no scholar (I'm also not a Buddhist), so it has taken me 16 years finally to come across The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow.

It seems a certain monk, Malunkyaputta, found this silence deeply annoying. You can imagine him lying awake at night, fuming: Why doesn't he just answer the fucking questions? He either knows the answers, or this is all a con-job, and he's not the Buddha, just a very naughty boy! I know I shouldn't, but tomorrow I'm going to insist that he gives me some answers, or I'm outta here! So, stepping up as a convenient straight man for another Great Teaching, he did.

Siddhartha "Buddha" Gautama's answer goes on a bit – time was not a pressing matter in the serene days before mobile phones or even clocks and watches – and in its descent into ever finer detail you can detect a certain sarcasm, I think. You can read the whole thing here on Wikipedia, in what I trust is an accurate translation. But, essentially, what he is saying is: Hey, you! You've been shot with a poisoned arrow! Do you really want to know all this irrelevant stuff – the name, rank, and number of the guy who shot it, blah blah blah, all the way down to the brand of bowstring he uses – or do you want me to pull the damn thing out and treat the wound? Your choice! Die of pointless time-consuming curiosity, or be saved. Time is running out, idiot!

To repeat what I said in that earlier post: in many ways, this is a more helpful response than the wheel-spinning scholasticism of the Christian church grappling with such questions, or the linguistic and metaphysical nit-picking of philosophers in later centuries. "So, is this "Jumping Jesus!" you cried out to when the arrow hit you of the same substance or of a similar substance to God?" "Can an arrow exist without being perceived in someone's mind (or, in your case, arm)?" Who knows? Who cares? Get this bloody arrow out of me! It hurts! Professionally speaking, you might say this is religion as ER surgery, rather than cloistered theology. And all the better for that, too.

All of which somehow puts me in mind of this beautiful song by K.D. Lang, "Simple", from her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel:

"Love will not elude us: love is simple..." Now there's a New Year's message to take to heart.

So, as the final day of the year approaches I wish you all the best for 2026! But do watch out for those poisoned arrows, real or metaphorical. Should you get hit by one  – it happens – follow Dr. Siddhartha's advice and don't waste time wondering about the who, what, when, or why: just accept that "life hurts", as Doc S. likes to say, and get it seen to right away. Keep it simple.

Tranquility

Two companionable crows admire the sunset

Ah, tranquility! A state much sought after, and best achieved without the aid of tranquilisers if you can manage it; there's lots of tranquility outside, if you just go and look. But, of course, you must do whatever you need to do, in order to stabilise your boat in rough seas, walk that tightrope, keep those plates spinning, or whatever your metaphor of choice is, especially at this stressful time of year. Why do we do this to ourselves?

So do go easy on the alcohol an' that if you're no longer young and stupid: I know it can take some of us a very long time to figure out that they really don't help as much as we think in the tranquility stakes. Actually, my advice is to go easy especially if you're young and stupid. I don't know about you, but I am so grateful mobile phones with video capability were still a Sci Fi fantasy in my younger days. It really doesn't bear thinking about. It's bad enough being remembered as an idiot, but for there to be irrefutable evidence...

So, look, if you're in need of calming down just now, I think I can help. Here's one of the best Joni Mitchell covers I know, Madeleine Peyroux and K.D. Lang duetting on a very laid-back version of "River". Give it a go:

Or how about this fado-ised version of "A Case of You" by Ana Moura:

Tranquility restored, I hope, even if by means of two beautifully sad songs.

BTW, that unusual instrument doing the dulcimer fills from Mitchell's original is a "Portuguese guitar" (as opposed to a Portuguese guitar), a sort of hybrid of a 12-string guitar and a mandolin, and a descendant of the mediaeval cittern as used by troubadours, themselves the distant forebears of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell. That curious fan-like cluster of rods at the end of the fingerboard are actually the tuners for the twelve strings, an 18th century innovation known (in Britain, anyway) as Preston tuners.

OTOH, if you've overdone the tranquilising and what you're in need of is a bit of livening up, why not give this a try: OK Santa, a contender for Best Christmas Single Ever if ever there was one – admittedly never a strong pool of candidates – from someone definitely in need of a little tranquilising himself, probably with a dart gun from a safe distance, John Otway. Warning: you may not be able to get that catchy tune out of your head for days. And, yes, that is a Sinclair C5.

My annual "book club" post has been taking a break for the past few years, as I have been attempting to moderate my book-buying habit, but I've had a bit of a relapse this year. I'm not going to own up to how big a relapse, so I'll simply recommend these two:

Starlings, by Jem Southam (raft, 2025)

Longer-term readers will know that I have admired the work of Jem Southam for many years, and indeed have been on Christmas-card terms with the great man (simper...) since doing a workshop at Duckspool in 1995. I confess my heart sank a little when this volume was announced: the spectacle of so-called murmurations of starlings gathering to roost has become something of a photographic cliché in recent years, but – having seen the work collected as Four Winters when it was exhibited in Bristol's RWA in January 2023 – it seemed likely he might have something of his own to add.

Indeed, as expected, the photographs in this book, all from one dark December afternoon in 2023, share a strong family resemblance to that body of work: on the edge of darkness starlings gather, flicker over sombre reed beds, and settle for the night. Southam is not one for the jaw-dropping image, unless your jaw is dropped by subtlety of tone, mood, and composition. So, rather than yet another series of spectacular murmuration displays, this is a record of an atmosphere, that same dim, frigid light that was captured so well in Four Winters.

But a really good book is always more than its contents: it is a physical object to be held in the hands, and so its design and materials matter. This one (I have the soft-bound version) has got it just right: large, but not too large to handle (27.5 x 32.5 cm), tactile, and beautifully designed and printed. Unlike far too many photo-books these days, it demands to be held and admired as an object of delight. Highly recommended.

Selfie time! Jem Southam is the one on the right

Near Dark, by Chris Dorley-Brown (Dewi Lewis, 2025)

You may recall that back in June I was encouraging you to sign up for the Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of this book by Chris Dorley-Brown. It finally arrived in November, and was worth the wait. In a way, it's an urban version of Southam's crepuscular work: London streets caught entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) as the French say, at that in-between time when the day relaxes, darkness gathers, and the lights come on (cue Angelo Badalamenti's theme music to Twin Peaks). It has always been a favourite time of day for me, a time for waiting for buses, after-work shopping, and anticipation of the evening to come, and Dorley-Brown renders it superbly with the granular detail only a large-format camera can capture.

If you get hold of a copy (which you should) you will notice my name and that of at least one reader of this blog listed in the back as Kickstarter contributors. Well done us! As my special edition "extra" I chose the print of the Regent Street angel:

Regent Street 2021, Chris Dorley-Brown

We'll soon be going away for our customary end of year procession around south-west England: Southampton to Dorset for Christmas, then Bristol for New Year. Sadly (for us), our favoured Dorset rental has now gone off the market – people may actually be living in it, which is good, really, I suppose – so we'll be trying out another one. Who knows, it might be even better! We will have wi-fi, so I might post the odd seasonal reflection or photograph, but if I get very tranquil I also might not.

So thank you for continuing to read this blog, especially those of you who take the trouble to comment, whether publicly on the blog or privately via email (although not you, you annoying fake-comment spammers, who seem to be slipping through a lot more lately), and let's hope for a better, more peaceful year in 2026! Even if that ████ Trump will want to take the credit for it... (oops, there goes my US visa!).

A reminder of spring, for those who like that sort of thing.

(our back garden, March 2025)

The Last Time I Saw Richard

Alice Neel, Richard, 1980

 Oil on canvas. 111.8 x 76.2 cm, 44 x 30 in

⁣ © The Estate of Alice Neel.

The bright white light that falls from above directly on to his face and chest, the Mediterranean blue polo shirt and the stripey seat back, are all evocative of the positive mood that pervades Neel’s magnificent image of Richard… all around his form she paints a bright blue outline, like an electric blue current, containing him, protecting him, emphasising his presence in the world.

Dr Minna Moore Ede, quoted from the publication Alice Neel: There's Still Another I See, 2022

Really? OK, Mike, take a deep breath. Count to ten. Exhale... Maybe do it once or twice more.

So... I have borrowed the painting above, and the quote, from an email sent to me by the Victoria Miro Gallery, of London and Venice, announcing their participation in an upscale art market that goes by the name Art Basel Miami Beach (now there's a confusing car-crash of locations). This painting is prominently displayed as the lead image in the mail, so is clearly intended as a statement of the gallery's values, prestige, and sophistication. Alice Neel (1900-1984) is clearly having a (very) posthumous moment.

Now, setting aside any biographical stuff about Neel's career and troubled life (read the Wikipedia page if you want to know about that), is this indeed a "magnificent image", as declared by Dr. Minna Moore Ede? Or is it even a competent painting? Perhaps what would appear to be its cartoonish distortions of anatomical proportions, and disregard for conventions of paint handling and composition are actually precisely the features that make it magnificent?

As I'm sure you know, I am a scrupulously fair-minded man, who likes to give the new and strange a chance to sink in and do its thing, but I have to say, so far, I don't get it. I admit I have never understood the late style of Philip Guston, either, who seems to lie somewhere at the the origins of this particular approach to painting, which (if my grasp of the art-historical chain of influence is correct) has also led us to the deliberately "naive" work of highly-regarded contemporary artists like Eileen Cooper, Rose Wylie, Chantal Joffe, or Humphrey Ocean, Royal Academicians all. There is clearly something going on here – a rejection of the elitism of talent and mere skill? An expression of the "female gaze"? A celebration of the primary-school art-room look? – but I don't know what it is. Call me Mr. Jones. Actually, don't: he's coming up next.

Rose Wylie exhibition "Let It Settle", Gallery at Windsor 2020.

Let it sink in...

For me, Rose Wylie is something of a test case. Here's the opening paragraph of a review of a solo exhibition of her work in 2017:

This is how Rose Wylie paints the sun. She does a big yellow circle. Then she adds straight yellow lines around it. Underneath she does a couple of palm trees that are brown sticks with dollops of green on top. On the sea, she adds an outline of a ship with black smoke puffing out of it.

The teacher gave her a gold star and pinned it on the classroom wall. His name is Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the nursery is called the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. The exhibition is called Quack Quack. Oh, and young Rose is 83.

Yup. That's about it. The reviewer, Jonathan Jones, should probably also have mentioned that her paintings are not "dolloped" onto a sheet of sugar paper, but fill enormous wall-sized canvases. But wait, here are two of his final paragraphs: 

Wylie is in no danger of the workhouse as her paintings are highly collectable. Several works here have been lent by wealthy Russians. Is it all a bit of a scam? She is not genuinely naive, let alone a child. She went to art college. Is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?

Anywhere but Britain, I might think so. Yet the sad truth is that we still need the shit kicking out of our staid, conservative artistic tradition. For all the Turner prizes and the Grayson Perry TV shows, when it comes to painting we still queue up to admire the correctly painted swimming pools of Mr Hockney. We still expect painters to do a proper, hard-working job.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian 29/11/17

I'm not a fan of the shit-kicking Mr. Jones, who strikes me as one of those commentators who thrive on a rather superficial and bitchy contrarianism. I'm not sure why he dislikes Hockney so much – lately more than willing to resort to this primary-school aesthetic himself – and I note that he's also a major fanboy of Tracey Emin (not sure whether he has reviewed the tea-towels?). So let's take another deep breath and have a closer look at all this.

You can see his point about the suspicion that it's all "a terribly sophisticated put-on", even if he doesn't think it is. It bears mentioning that Wylie's husband, Roy Oxlade, was also a painter in much the same slap-dash faux-naive style. As it says in Oxlade's obituary, "apparently wild, spontaneous brushwork, bold colour and improvised images characterise his distinctive style". Note the way that the writer has attached "apparently" to "wild, spontaneous" there. Perhaps to be taken seriously as Art, rather than just therapeutic fun, such mark-making has to be seen as intentional, and not really as wild and spontaneous as it might appear? How you can tell the difference I don't know, but admirers of this style seem to value precisely the contrast between a child-like spontaneity (or at least the appearance of it) and the more painstaking, more obviously accomplished sort of painting admired by those ignorant saps, the general public. Jonathan Jones again:

Painting is a wonderful, magic thing. That is why young children love doing it. Wylie has rediscovered in maturity the freedom with which we painted when we were kids.

Well, maybe. The "spontaneous wonderfulness of children's art" thing can be overdone. I admit I failed to learn to love the freedom with which our kids would make apparently wild and spontaneous crayon marks on the wallpaper, but it is also true that, like any proud parents of such self-evidently immensely talented children, we were sufficiently impressed by some of the work that came home from school that we framed several undoubted masterpieces:

In fact that last spontaneous effusion came home from nursery with its three-year-old maker and was taped to the back of the living-room door, thirty years ago, where it has remained to this day. But, let's be honest, fun as it might have been to make, and much as we love it, no wealthy Russian is going to be offering us thousands of pounds for it. There's more to "art" than uninhibited freedom of expression.

Besides, Alice Neel's portrait is hardly wild and free. If anything it's constipated, laboured over, as unfree as any Sunday painter's most painstakingly dull effort. Is it really pervaded by a "positive mood", as Minna Moore Ede claims? To my eye "Richard" exudes the sadness, repression, and anxiety of both artist and subject (her own son, I believe). In the words of Joni Mitchell's song "Edith and the Kingpin":

His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight?

Perhaps that's the whole point, but psychological insight in itself doesn't make for a magnificent, or even a good painting, any more than mere uninhibited freedom of expression does. I mean, take that peculiar seat. It appears to be constructed out of some sort of thick grey spaghetti, incapable of bearing any weight at all, and has been squashed awkwardly into the constraints of the canvas. Of course, this and all the other "defects" one might point to – that scumbled white area around the head and that blue outline, for example, and what the hell is is he hiding under that shirt? – may be, and probably are, a deliberate provocation. But to what end? If this is meant to be, in Jonathan Jones' words, an exercise in "kicking the shit" out of something, then it's a pretty feeble kick.

Now, call me ignorant, a typical untutored member of the British gallery-going public, but surely this is what a magnificent painting of an anxious man keeping a tight grip on something looks like, not to mention being, again in Jonathan Jones' curiously dismissive words, "a proper hard-working job":

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527)

Look closer:

Wow. And compare:

Seriously? And here's a detail from Rose Wylie's "Cuban Scene":

So has the shit been kicked out of us and our staid, conservative expectations? If so, I think we can take it. Spontaneous the Holbein certainly isn't – there will have been many hours of sittings, taking up the time and patience of an important and busy man – but it is supremely accomplished, deeply insightful and, well, truly magnificent. Sadly, but not surprisingly, no child will ever bring something like that home from school. The other two, though? Well, yes, I can imagine that quite easily. Which, I assume, is the intention.

So is it the case that we can't, or that we won't make work of that stature any more? No more heroes, no more Shakespearoes, perhaps? Maybe the refusal of technical refinement is a cry of pain in a world increasingly running out of control? The Hopi have a word for it: koyaanisqatsi. But any comparison between a typical Holbein and the self-inflicted wound of this particular contemporary painting style surely seems to speak not just of different artistic priorities after 500 years, but of decline; desperation, even. What does it say about us, in the 21st century, that a painting like "Richard" is the centrepiece of a prestigious gallery's tempting offer to well-heeled collectors of art? Or, indeed, that wealthy Russians are collecting the work of Rose Wylie? It says quite a lot, I think, although my layperson's ears still can't seem to make out what it is, exactly, that is being said.

Obviously, skilful technique and realism can't guarantee a good picture, either. Few things are as tedious or as complacent as those photo-realistic pencil portrait drawings you see all over the Web, or yet another bohemian breakfast table rendered in tasteful post-impressionist dabs, or indeed any art whose ambition has stalled at the level of a greetings card [1]. It would be silly to assert otherwise. But surely the remedy for witless skill-for-skill's-sake or oh-so-tasteful retro-cliché is not pretending to paint like a mentally-disturbed six-year-old? Or maybe it was, for a while, but has now become just another off-the-peg style which happens to be in fashion with wealthy collectors, and is therefore peddled to them as "magnificent" by prestigious galleries and art influencers?

A lot of questions there, all going unanswered. So, to repeat Mr. Jones' own key question: "is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?" Well, as I'm sure those who prize spontaneity above all else would agree: first thought, best thought, Jonathan. When talented, highly-trained artists are producing simulacra of the work of untalented, untrained children, however sincerely, you know something resembling a terribly sophisticated dressing-up game is going on. Is this game the best, most representative, most expressive art of our times? I suppose, as always, only time and the cultural gatekeepers of the future will tell.

Anyway, rant over. And, yes, I do feel better now, thanks very much. And exhale...

And yet, like any choice of style, when it works, it works...

(Ben Hartley, "Woman and chickens")

1. I confess that I particularly dislike anything featuring hares. Hares are threadbare glove-puppets that say, "I'm a bit of a pagan, in touch with folkways, and the feel and flow of the land and its seasons. I'm earthy and yet spiritual, and my kitchen is filled with the smell of baking bread..." I mean, what could be more annoying?

Jaws

 Going through my backfiles looking for something completely different I noticed some overlooked pictures with a common theme. Which reminds me: I should probably arrange my six-monthly dental check-up.

Martin Parr

At 71, I am prepared for a generation of heroes, generally a decade or so older, to start dying out. Farewell, Sir Tom! Hold on, Joni! Not yet, Bob! But the swish of the Reaper's scythe can seem to be getting increasingly and uncomfortably close at times. Martin Parr has just died, at the ridiculously early age of 73. If you've already watched the film released earlier this year, I Am Martin Parr (it's on both Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer), you'll have realised he was unwell: not many street photographers use a walking frame. Even fewer manage to look so grimly cheerful about it. Probably just him, in fact.

If you don't know who Martin Parr is then I really don't know why you are reading this blog. There will be plenty of obituaries, so I won't go over the obvious biographical ground. Let's stick to what Martin has done for me!

On London's Charing Cross Road, once known for its many bookshops, there used to be a famous art and photography bookshop known as Zwemmer's. In the days before the internet, the best way – really, the only way – to discover new publications and new artists was to visit such a specialist shop, and browse the stock. In the 1980s and 90s, whenever I was "in town", as we say, I would make a point of visiting Zwemmer's, hoping to find something special to add to my growing photobook collection.

Art bookshop browsers are a grubby, inky-fingered bunch, so Zwemmer's used to wrap the books on display in clear film, which meant that you at least stood a chance of buying an unblemished copy. Now that books generally arrive in the post in a pristine, shrink-wrapped state, it's easy to forget how "shop-worn" a substantial volume might get on the shelves before anyone actually bought it. As it happened, Zwemmer's also published a few books itself, and one of these was Bad Weather, which contained a series of wryly-observed black and white photographs of people in "bad weather" scenarios, some of them hilarious, by an up and coming photographer named Martin Parr, who had used an underwater camera to make them. There was a stack of them, unwrapped and in mint condition, so I bought one.

I became something of a fan, and bought everything of his that was published. I might even blame Martin for igniting my passion for collecting photobooks. although, unlike Martin himself, I am a collector and completist who knows when to stop. I mean, honestly, Saddam Hussein watches... Why, Martin, why? So, although I bought all his books of breakthrough colour work like The Last Resort when they appeared, I stopped after Small World, as it seemed he was repeating himself. Besides, flash photography of plates of baked beans and garish cakes were really not my thing; I preferred the hunt for abandoned Morris Minors in Irish fields (A Fair Day). I think the only subsequent volumes of his I ever bought were the magisterial three-volume The Photobook: a History, compiled with Gerry Badger.

In those days I was still only in the early stages of becoming a photographer myself. I had recently bought my first SLR – an Olympus OM-1n – and was feeling my way past the glossy honeytraps and gearhead porn of Amateur Photographer to the more austere monochrome art uplands of Creative Camera. As I have mentioned before, while starting our working lives in Bristol we happened to occupy the flat above some guy called Paul Graham, and I was still sufficiently photographically illiterate that the only reason I bought a copy of his first self-published book, A1: the Great North Road, when it appeared in a nearby bookshop on Whiteladies Road, was because it amused me that the address of the publisher, Grey Editions, was also mine.

But by the 1990s I felt I was finally getting somewhere as a photographer, but was in need of some direction and validation; I began signing up for workshops at Peter Goldfield's Duckspool establishment in Somerset, one of the best decisions I have ever made. So in September 1992 I attended a four-day residential workshop with Martin Parr.

Although I already knew that his style of "street" documentary would never be mine I was still an admirer of his work; my most recent Parr purchase had been One Day Trip, his photographs of "booze cruise" Channel ferry crossings, commissioned by the Mission photographique transmanche of the Centre régional de la photographie Nord-Pas-de-Calais. However, unlike the workshop I'd done with Thomas Joshua Cooper the previous year, this one was going to be an interesting but not transformative experience.

I think it's fair to say that Martin was not a great teacher. Great teachers who are also first rank practitioners are very rare. True, he was a very incisive speaker about his own work, and the work of others working in a similar documentary vein, but had little to say about other approaches to photography, or even about simply poor, derivative work, which is after all what mainly turns up at workshops. Where Cooper (also not a great teacher, but a very charismatic individual), confronted by shabby or complacent photo-club work, would reach for the verbal stiletto, drive it between the culprit's ribs and give it a twist, Parr was simply lost for words. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... I think he was basically too kind, too English perhaps, to criticise work that he didn't like or understand.

Coincidentally, Duane Michals was receiving an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society during the workshop, so Martin arranged for us all to travel over to Bath to hear him speak, which surprised and pissed off a number of participants – "not what we've paid for!" – but I suspect that I, at least, derived more memorable "takeaways" from that very entertaining hour than from the entire Parr workshop. I also had my one and only ride ever on the luxurious leather seats of an upscale Jaguar (is there any other kind?) belonging to another participant.

As it turned out, I had to leave a day early, having received an urgent SOS message from my workplace – by then I was the Systems Librarian at Southampton University – so I missed out on the intensive group "critique" of my own portfolio. Which was probably just as well. I don't think Martin would have found much to connect with in what I had brought along. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... Although I do treasure the memory of Peter Goldfield's comment – he had taken a preliminary peek at our portfolios – that the person who would really like my work was Fay Godwin, and that I should keep an eye out for the new direction her photography had taken. A few years later I spotted the gorgeous little Stella Press hardback issue of Glassworks & Secret Lives in the window of another Charing Cross Road bookshop, just published, and pounced on one of the signed copies inside.

It should go without saying that Martin Parr was a very admirable man, whose photographic style and chosen subject matter have exerted an enormous influence on documentary photography, and who also dedicated his considerable energies to the generous advocacy of the work of others and of photography in general, not least through the Martin Parr Foundation that he established in Bristol. But he is also much misunderstood, as people often mistake his wry critique – highlighting those visual incongruities that can illuminate society's contradictions as well as people's pretensions and well-meaning idiocies – for a kind of cruelty. But where someone like Bruce Gilden is in-yer-face cruel, Martin Parr was more like a fearless, clear-sighted stand-up comedian. [1]

If he had a superpower, I think it was a variation of that essential delusion of the "street" photographer: that is, he believed he was invisible, and yet able to emerge at will into a disarming display of avuncular affability, once he'd spotted a likely subject. He wasn't invisible – far from it – but that belief in his ability to pop in and out of awareness is surely what enabled him to point a flash gun at drunken booze-cruisers, and causes him to look so cheerful, plodding along the seafront with his walking frame in I Am Martin Parr. Heh, they can't see me! They don't know what I'm up to. Yet...

For what it's worth, I think it will be established that his very best work was done quite early on and that he never quite developed a "late style" that is the equal of his truly ground-breaking work in The Last Resort, say, or Small World. His very early monochrome work is gathering admirers, too, since the publication of Early Works in 2019 (I see copies are already going for silly prices). In the end, as a photographer he seemed to have become the prisoner of his own signature stylistic moves. But, what moves! Few photographers have created and inhabited such a distinctive style, palette, and subject matter, used to such consistent effect. It may not appeal to you, but you know it when you see it. As my partner (not a photographer) so often exclaims when we are out and about, "Oh, look! There's a real Martin Parr!" And, for a photographer, what better tribute is there than that?

1. OK, there is a certain cruelty about the one of a woman in Bad Weather, smiling shyly at the photographer, about to get soaked by the water thrown up from a puddle by a bus approaching from behind... But OTOH it's making me laugh just thinking about it. Thanks, Martin!

Duskier

Not an abandoned vehicle, just rarely moved...

Leaf or tree?

Another little gallery of some recent photographs from my daily late-afternoon walks in the neighbourhood, plus one from the kitchen window and another from a visit to Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey. For some reason it is mostly trees and leaves that are getting my attention recently; I suppose it's hard to ignore them, really, at this time of year.

View from the kitchen

The enormous plane tree at Mottisfont

Outdoor Sports Ground

Illuminations, University Highfield Campus

Twyford Down

What, December already? For one reason or another, this year I've ended up stalled on a number of projects that were intended to end up as Blurb books (angels, lost gloves, chairs in odd places, Twyford Down, etc., etc.). Partly because I keep adding photographs – people will keep dropping gloves (230 so far), and abandoning chairs (just 95 to date) – but also because the bookmaking and picture editing urge that has usually delivered two or three books or magazines a year just didn't seem to get up a sufficient head of steam to get things rolling. But I thought I'd better not let 2025 go by without putting something new on the shelf, so I have quickly put together a magazine of some of the photographs of Twyford Down I've accumulated over many years of walks there. 

This is not so much a carefully designed and sequenced book as a portfolio of thirty-two images selected out of 300 or so. I really like these Blurb magazines, as the quality is the same as the photo-books but they are much cheaper (I'm charging £10.50 for the magazine, and £5.99 for a PDF download). I don't actually expect anyone to buy one – no-one ever does – but it's easily the best way to preserve something of one's work for posterity to stumble across and wonder, did this man have nothing better to do with his life?

So here is a mini preview of the magazine, with a link to my Blurb bookstore:

Twyford Down

Mike Chisholm

I have also put it as a PDF flipbook onto Issuu, which is much the best way to see it, and here is a mini preview of that. To go to the full-screen view, click the four-arrow device in the centre:

As always, any comments are welcome, not least as this magazine will probably become the basis of a more extensive selection in book form. I'm already having second thoughts about that brown cover, for a start...

Dusky

Southampton Common

St. Catherine's Hill

As the days grow shorter, sunset is beginning to arrive well before I come to the end of my usual afternoon walks. No matter how lovely the morning is – and autumn mornings can be truly beautiful – mornings are not a great time for me to be out and about these days, for reasons of (in)convenience most late middle-aged / elderly men will understand, so I need to make the best of whatever the afternoon provides. Which can pose challenges, photographically, both technically and aesthetically. 

Technically, because the overall drop in available light means slower shutter speeds, bigger apertures, and higher ISO ratings, all of which combine to give unsatisfactory results when using a very small pocket camera, hand-held. [1] In compensation, the bright raking beams of warm sunlight that penetrate the general gloom and illuminate the autumnal colours can make for exciting moments of contrast that may only last for seconds, before gathering clouds or the slow roll of the planet shut them off.

Aesthetically, because, well, sunsets... As I say, I try to make the best of it.

Southampton General Hospital

Hollybrook Cemetery entrance

Southampton Outdoor Sports Ground renovations

Somewhere in Lordswood, Southampton...

1. Apart from my phone, my current go-to pocket camera is a Panasonic LF1, a miraculous feat of engineering that packs an image-stabilised 24-200 (35mm equivalent) f/2-5.9 zoom plus a viewfinder into a body the size of a tin of sardines, and which will take a decent photo even at full zoom with suitable care. The bottom four here, for example. Leica were happy to put their name and "Summicron" tag on the lens, and I believe sold a red-dotted version of essentially the same camera as the Leica C, with a much higher price tag, obviously...  

Shades of Grey

Southampton Old Cemetery

I was never much good at black and white film photography in my darkroom days. Most people weren't. What you generally used to see were dull grey renderings of a colourful world that lacked either a true black or a true white, and had little or no graphical impact. These were also usually pictures made of, rather than from something, to use a distinction I like to make. That is, if you're curious what a particular High Street looked like in 1936, a photograph of it is perfect, the more documentary the better. Colour would be even more useful, but unavailable at the time. If OTOH you were looking for an expressive, wall-worthy artwork then both you and the photographer will have been working to a different set of expectations, and the fact that it was made in (from / out of) that particular High Street is probably irrelevant. Most photographers were, and to a large extent still are documentarists. It is, after all, photography's USP.

The darkroom was never my happy place, but I tried to make the best of it, the only alternative being to pay someone else to make even worse prints from my negatives. Obviously, some people are B&W film darkroom wizards. I watched Thomas Joshua Cooper give a printing demonstration on a Duckspool workshop I attended in 1991, and it was a revelation. Although only in the sense that watching some maestro demonstrate their pianistic accomplishment up close would be a revelation: as I determined many posts ago, playing the piano is impossible. The photographs of, say, Finnish photo-maestro Pentti Sammallahti or Emmet Gowin are similarly revelatory. Who wouldn't want to be able to do that? Sadly, it seems I can't.

Somewhere in the 1990s I realised that colour was more my thing, but then discovered that the colour darkroom was an even more hellish experience, essentially a mechanical process using vile chemistry and with little of the scope for hands-on creative intervention typical of monochrome printing (a.k.a. "dodging and burning"). Yes, you could twiddle some colour balance dials on the enlarger, but this was generally guaranteed to make things worse. So I did finally embrace the alternative, which was to pay someone else to make satisfactory prints from my negatives. This was convenient, but very hard on my bank balance.

Then – hooray! – digital cameras, image-processing software, and excellent colour inkjet printers for home use arrived, and everything changed. I was free to indulge my preference for making colour prints, and cook an evening meal for two small children at the same time. Three cheers! In fact, you didn't even need to make a print to see and to share what you'd done: photos look terrific on a computer screen. So, when the Web arrived, a lot of photo-enthusiasts abandoned prints altogether (a mistake, in my view), and simply posted their work online.

However... I still admire the well-crafted B&W print, and image-processing software has put this within reach of anyone similarly inclined. You can simply feed your colour image in at one end, make some tweaks and choices, and out comes a perfectly decent monochrome image. Print it on some paper with a surface resembling a wet darkroom paper, and you'd have to be truly expert to tell that what you are looking at is essentially a fake, or rather (in one of my favourite ugly words), a skeuomorph: an object that copies the defining features of a similar object made from a different, more prestigious material, even though these features are not intrinsic to or serve any function in the skeuomorphic object. For example, the pores and wrinkles on imitation leather, the fake stitching on shoes with a glued-on plastic sole, or indeed the weight and carefully-textured surface of a "baryta" inkjet paper.

"Tintype" shopping bag (made on my phone)

Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, unless deliberate deception is intended. It may seem a bit daft to mimic the "look" and imperfections of wet-plate photography, say, or of a Polaroid snap by using some slick app or plug-in, but where's the harm? The fetishisation of "authenticity" when it comes to different media is one of the more reactionary features of the art world: if you've read my two posts on the exclusion of photography and digital art from open exhibitions (Original Print and Original Print 2), you'll know my views on this. In a nutshell: new technologies for image reproduction (e.g. woodcut, engraving, or lithography in their day) become respectable media for artistic "print making" only when they have become obsolete in the commercial world. Ditto all those toxic, messy, and labour-intensive photographic techniques of the past like wet-plate, tintype, and the rest; see Sally Mann or Joni Sternbach. Lovely pictures, but, crikey, the faff involved...

Monochrome images have also benefitted from this retro-fitted respectability. Once, there was only wet-chemistry B&W photography. When colour film arrived, alongside cheap full-colour printing, it was dismissed as vulgar stuff, only suitable for commercial work, and monochrome was promoted to an art medium. It is doubtless true that colour, badly handled, can be tasteless and a distraction, and that if you drain the colour out of a photograph your attention is re-focussed on wholesomely arty aspects of a picture like shape, tone, and composition. Oddly, though, no-one has ever said this about paintings. "Grisaille" is a pretty niche technique.

But: in our digital world, is it daft or dishonest to take an image file, in colour by default [1], and pass it through software that will render it as a monochrome photograph, in a range of B&W "looks", from faded album snap to selenium-toned exhibition print? Any more or less than it is to turn it into a skeuomorphic "tintype" with those characteristic plate and processing imperfections ladled all over it? I don't think so, not if what you want is a picture made from something, rather than a documentary rendering of something. After all, journalists must tell the truth, or something very like it, but fiction writers can just make stuff up. Spoiler alert: there is no such person as Sherlock Holmes, and never was. Sorry! And as for poets, well:

In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it. So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen. They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, – and not recognized it."

R.H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press, 1952)

Southampton Old Cemetery

("And did those feet in ancient time...")

1. Unless, of course, you buy a super-expensive monochrome-only camera or have your camera's sensor doctored to only produce monochrome files. Both of which strike me as pointless and extravagant, but each to their own...

Unfinished Business

Like anyone with a strong visual bent, I keep a scrapbook of pictures I come across, and want to keep for reference and inspiration purposes. As all of these are found on the Web these days, I use a digital scrapbook. In my case, it's Evernote, but I'm sure there are similar packages that can do the job just as well. In fact, there might well be something better out there: the trouble is, like so many software packages, Evernote's developers have ambitions for it to become something more – yet another does-it-all multi-user one-stop organiser for busy worker bees – but all I want is a digital scrapbook to dump my cuttings in plus the occasional note, thanks very much. It's ironic, really: they think I might leave them for another package if they don't keep shoving new stuff at me, but that's precisely why I might.

Anyway, one thread that connects a number of the things I've dumped in there is that they relate to my home town, Stevenage, a "New Town" begun in the post-War optimism of the late 1940s (I know, I know... I think I may have mentioned this just once or twice before, and I'm sure this won't be the last time...). A few of these are aerial views of the town in its pristine, just-built state. It looks so neat from up there that it could be a scale model of the town, rather than the real thing. Pete Seeger's condescending song "Little Boxes", heard so often on the radio in the mid-60s, comes to mind. Although we actually rather liked our little boxes, which were all made of good solid brick, not "ticky tacky", whatever that is, so fuck you and your stupid banjo, Pete.

In my mind, I can still walk those streets and play in those fields and woods just as I did for the twenty or so years I lived there, before finally leaving home for life in older, dirtier cities with more complicated stories to tell. The one above, for example, was my immediate neighbourhood from about 1957 until 1964, ages 3 to 10. As we were the first occupants of our house in Peartree Way, this must have been taken around 1956/7. How white the pavements are, how neatly uniformly the houses stand in their rows, and how few cars there are to be seen!

Obviously, there are also none of today's typical custom add-ons like stone cladding, porches, conservatories, loft extensions, and front gardens paved over to accommodate more cars; at least, not yet. Back then the council (actually, the Development Corporation) didn't allow alterations, and every house here, and in the entirety of the New Town, was rented from them. Before, that is, Thatcher gave everyone the "right" to buy their council house, and the whole idea of decent social housing for all at a fair rent was wrecked forever. So fuck you, too, Maggie.

And here is the neighbourhood of my teenage years, 1967-73. We lived on the fourth floor (fifth in US terms) of that large block of flats with its tall white chimney: Chauncy House, named after Henry Chauncy, a local antiquarian. It seems those flats, now demolished, were the very first part of the New Town to be built, in order to accommodate the architects and supervisory types who planned and managed the vast scheme of construction. No doubt they had all returned to Hampstead or settled in some nearby village once the job was well under way.

I never really knew those streets with the same intimacy as those around Peartree Way. Only free-range children roaming and playing outdoors get to know every nook and cranny of their patch in the way the local cats and dogs do: doors and gates were rarely locked, and we'd be in and out of each other's houses and gardens all day long. But as a restless adolescent in those flats I mainly wanted to escape the tedium of home life whenever possible to wherever the action was: friends' houses, youth clubs, pubs, and music venues – even the public library was more exciting – and later there were the secluded rural "tied" cottages occupied by some lively lads who'd left school at the first opportunity to become farm hands, and where an all-night "scene" would flourish over the weekend.

I know... You may well wonder at my continuing obsession with this small town of no great intrinsic interest beyond its network of cycle paths, the progressive spirit of its foundation, and its subsequent betrayal and decline. Not least because I left it at the first opportunity myself and never went back, other than for parental visits, kept as brief as possible: two nights good, one night better. The name "Stevenage" itself has since become a byword for "nowheresville" in Britain, and a handy punchline for any joke about "chavs" and white-van drivers. So, yes, it is a little odd, I admit. Our children, born and raised in the historic port of Southampton – on the face of it a rather more interesting place – could not care less about their home city: they're Londoners now!

But something about our nowhere town seemed either to repel or to draw us back with equal force. It surely couldn't just have been the presence of "family", although it is true that some of us did have Appalachian quantities of parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins scattered liberally about the place: nourishing for some, toxic for others. In the end, I suppose it might simply come down to the difference between those who said, "There are worse places to live than Stevenage", and those who replied, "Yes, but there must be much better places to live, too!"

In the "repulsion" camp I have pals and playmates who, in the venerable expression, have shaken the dust of Stevenage from their feet, and put the greatest possible geographic distance between themselves and our town (although often from "Britain and the British", too). They enjoy expatriate lives in France, Greece, the United States, Canada, even South Africa and Australia, and I doubt they give a second thought to the scenes of their New Town years, and if they do, it will not be with any great pleasure. Certainly, none are blogging about the place or downloading old postcards and photographs with a certain obsessiveness.

But then there are those who somehow failed to escape the town's gravitational pull, and ended up walking the same old streets, maybe even living in the same old house if their parents had managed to buy it. One of my very oldest friends abandoned a promising social-work career in angry despair – he "retired hurt" as they say in cricket – and retreated into semi-monastic, off-grid isolation in a flat in one of the town's largest tower-blocks. Another, after a disastrous life of serial failures, homelessness and imprisonment, returned home to live out his final years in a small council bedsit, still sufficiently sound of mind and devoted to all things Stevenage to help edit a website dedicated to its history and nostalgic reminiscences. Others simply never left, of course, tied to the town by the conventional bonds of friends, family, work, and (it has to be said) complacency and inertia.

Whatever, I seem to have fallen somewhere between the two extremes: I left home for good in 1977, but have never stopped thinking about the place.

Setting aside any egotistic over-regard for the facts of one's own life (as if!), the best explanation I can offer for my constant return to the subject is that I have unfinished business. We were the children of a great utopian experiment, the very first New Town, of which an important element was the intention not just to house but to create strong local communities for people who had abandoned the blitzed slums of London. They had a common desire to start a new life, one as far away from the hierarchies, miseries, and disadvantages of their old life as possible. Added to their number were the construction labourers who had built the place and decided to stay and raise families, plus those fleeing the "idiocy of rural life" in nearby villages [1], which created a rich, if occasionally volatile mix. Here, finally, were to be the "homes fit for heroes" promised after the First World War.

For the best part of three decades it worked, too. We New Town natives grew up in the understanding that community mattered: in the words on the town council's coat of arms, "The heart of a town lies in its people". More specifically, it lies in those people who can be bothered to show up and take part. My grandmother, for example, a veteran trades unionist (she had been "mother of the chapel" at publisher J.M. Dent), ran the town's Over-60s Club. Several construction-union activists were prominent town councillors and at least one, Alf Luhman, became mayor. During the long school summer vacations Play Leadership schemes were run by volunteers such as my sister, who did their best to keep us youngsters out of trouble.  As did the various churches with their youth clubs and societies; again, my mother was captain of the Girls' Life Brigade troop at our local Baptist church.

But in the late 1970s it all began to crumble; or rather, it was undermined by political malevolence, and toppled by the inward-looking, self-centred spirit of the times. All things communitarian had begun to seem unfashionably earnest, a bit too churchy: frumpy folk arranging jumble sales and home-made cake stalls, running clubs, mimeographing and distributing newsletters, and attending tedious meetings in draughty community centre halls, which always seemed to be timed to clash with the good stuff on TV. So boring.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that some of us – having been given the massive mobility leg-up of good schools and life-enhancing opportunities – find ourselves looking back, pondering how things might have turned out if this experiment in social engineering had been allowed to continue and encouraged to spread out across the country, rather than killed off just as we, its first-born generation, were coming into maturity. It is as if some promised inheritance had been stolen, just as my father's pension was stolen when in the 1970s Tube Investments took over and dismembered the Stevenage engineering firm where he had worked for decades, George W. King, making him and seven hundred others redundant. As I say, unfinished business.

So you'll have to forgive me if I seem to go on a bit about a place most people will, at best, have merely glimpsed as they speed past on the motorway or on a train heading into London, or laughed at as some lazy comedian's punchline because, well, it's that sort of place, Stevenage, isn't it? And perhaps it is, now, but it didn't use to be; once, it was a special place, a modest beacon of hope, where I had the great good fortune to be born and brought up.

However, "never go back" is very wise counsel, and I don't suppose I ever will go back: instead, I can indulge in time-travel and a bit of Blakean "mental fight" through the medium of old pictures like these, downloaded into my digital scrapbook. Stevenage has changed, I've changed, the world has moved on. Besides, pretty much everything I remember has since been demolished, built over, renovated, or repurposed. There are already so many ghosts hanging around the place, I'd just be another revenant looking for somewhere, something, or someone to haunt. In the end, my "unfinished business" is also Britain's unfinished business, and will remain unfinished until there is a substantial change in the political weather of our country. It could be a very long wait.

I also remain unconvinced that some return encounters are a necessary form of "closure", as we like to say these days, or might even turn out to be a revelation of sorts, waiting for us at the end of the road:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.
from "Little Gidding", by T.S. Eliot

Well, maybe. These are fine, evocative words, much quoted by people who crave a mystical fix, but I don't think Eliot had anywhere like my home town in mind, and AFAIK never did return to his own starting point, St. Louis, Missouri, either. Maybe the gate he had in mind was the gate back into Eden? If so, lots of luck with that.

But when I consider that skeletal clock tower in the Town Square that appears in so many images of Stevenage, cooling its feet in the pool where we used to sit on the wall idling away the sunny afternoons, surrounded by shops that had seemed such solid pillars of ordinary, everyday life – Woolworths, W.H. Smith, the Co-Op, all now long-gone – I realise that it does still stand for something. If only as a defiant sixty-foot finger to all those who resisted, and still would resist the construction of New Towns; something that, to my surprise, is now back on the government agenda, in name, if not in spirit.

In fact, to my even greater surprise, it seems that both the tower and the pool it stands in were actually "listed" in 1998, to protect them from the predations of the developers, and the whole Town Square itself has been placed on the Heritage At Risk Register, for whatever that is worth. Not much, I suspect.

But what a shame nobody thought to do something similar for our true heritage before it could be stolen from us and sold off, house by house, until Stevenage was no longer a bold new idea, but just another run-down nowhere satellite town, thirty miles from London.

Summer 1972...

1. A phrase from the Communist Manifesto. Apparently this is a mistranslation: the German word "Idiotismus" does not mean "idiocy" ("Idiotie" in German) but something more like "isolation from the general community". Although, TBH, it was more the intrusive and unrelenting busybodiness of rural life that caused many village folk to flee to the brightly-lit, well-provisioned anonymity of town life, which was perhaps a foreshadowing of the way the community-building project would collapse back into thousands of atomised TV-watchers and screen-gazers.