Every Angel Is Terrifying

I have always had an admiration for moody, blurry, grainy, expressionistic black and white photography, as practised by people like Chris Friel, Trent Parke, Irma Haselberger, or (a recent discovery via Tomasz Trzebiatowski's Photosnack) Olga Karlovac. I have no talent for it myself, and my many attempts over the years have rarely made it into the "keepers" box. Which is fine: much as I enjoy listening to Glenn Gould play Bach, I can barely tap out "Happy Birthday" on a keyboard. We are who we are, and I suppose I'm just not a moody, blurry, grainy, expressionistic sort of person. To invert Joni Mitchell, I'm not frightened by the devil, but I'm drawn to those ones who are afraid.

So, talking of the devil [checks behind his left shoulder, oh so casually: nothing... Must be busy today...] I've been doing my own, rather different monochrome thing with some angels I've been meeting around the place, as part of a longer-term angelic project. As mentioned previously – and I'm beginning to wonder, after sixteen years of blogging, whether there's anything I haven't mentioned before, at least once – I've been having fun with some cheap second-hand compact cameras, the sort that offer a ridiculously huge built-in "super zoom" range, inevitably coupled with so-so image quality. Or, in the case of the intriguing Canon Zoom device, truly appalling image quality (see the post Zoom!).

These little compacts fit comfortably into a coat pocket, though, and I enjoy being able to wander about, relatively unencumbered, and choosing between getting up close, taking a broader view, or isolating tighter compositions out of the middle distance; something I'd never do if I had to tote around the Fuji X or Micro 4/3rds equivalent of a 24-800 zoom, even assuming such a beast exists and I could afford one. 

The fact is that you can discover an awful lot of useful post-processing tricks when you try to rescue interesting images of inferior quality, tricks that will also find application in your more usual work. With these angels – spotted doing their apotropaic and tidings-bearing thing in various locations – I have converged on a range of monochrome "looks" that I find both satisfying and appropriate. Moody, blurry, grainy, and expressionistic they're not – don't think I haven't tried – but angels, after all, are ambassadors of clarity and light. Apart, that is, from the ones who are not. About whom, the less said the better.

For beauty is really nothing
but the onset of a terror we can only just endure,
and we marvel at it so because it serenely disdains
our destruction. Every angel is terrifying.

(Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.)

from Duino Elegy 1, by Rainer Maria Rilke (my translation)

Here's my favourite angelic annunciation, by the way. Greetings! 

How's Your Father?

For no particular reason I've been thinking about the expressions I would often hear in my childhood that seem no longer to be current. Things like, "You daft 'a'porth!", "I'll put salt on your tail!", "Corks!", "So 'elp me!", "That's enough of your sauce!", "Done up like a pox-doctor's clerk", and so on. If that sounds like I grew up in a parody of a Cockney sit-com, that's not entirely inaccurate. Although my family were local yokels, most of our New Town friends and neighbours were East Enders displaced by the Blitz. My godparents, Auntie Win and Uncle Les, could easily have been characterful extras in the Queen Vic.

So the other day, like a bubble rising to the surface of my memory-pond, I seemed to hear my paternal grandmother's voice exclaiming, "What a right old how's your father!" Which is certainly not something you'd hear anybody say today, but then Daisy Mabbit was born in 1893. Although I have to say that, now it's bubbled up again, I quite fancy saying it myself whenever a particularly intricate cock-up presents itself. I like its Britishness, it's mouth-filling resonance, and the way it avoids both unnecessary crudity and imported Americanisms like "snafu" or "clusterfuck".

But it made me wonder: what does the expression "how's your father" actually mean? Where does it come from?

Obviously, the essential underlying reference is to sex. "Fancy a bit of 'ow's yer farver, sweetheart?" is unambiguous, but as a direct invitation to a knee-trembler, a leg-over, a bit of the other, or some rumpy-pumpy, it is curiously circumlocutory, not to say periphrastic. I mean, never mind love, what on earth does the state of health of anyone's father have to do with it?

It seems all roads lead to Harry Tate, a popular comedian of the British music hall's glory days, now completely erased from the communal memory. The appeal of Tate's routines has gone the way of all historic humour: you really had to be there (1920, that is). But it seems some of his catchphrases entered the language, and one of these was "How's your father?" According to Wikipedia:

Several catch phrases he used became popular in Britain in the twentieth century, including "Good-bye-ee!", which inspired the popular First World War song written by Weston and Lee; "How's your father?", which Tate used as an escape clause when his character was unable to think of an answer to a question; and "I don't think", used as an ironic postscript, as in "He's a nice chap – I don't think".

It's a bit of a leap from there to a euphemism for sex, though, and even further to an expression for an all-encompassing malfunction, a complete and utter balls-up. Most examinations of the phrase I've come across conclude that the most common use of Tate's catchphrase in its day was as a neutral placeholder like "thingummy" or "wotsit". Although I suppose in the sniggering culture of innuendo that has characterised British humour for so long, any allusion to an unnamed activity or thing inevitably gravitated to, ah, down there; a man's wotsit was never going to be his nose.

My own theory, FWIW, is that the superficially innocent question "how's your father?" carries within it a concealed anagrammatic barb: who's your father? That is, are you sure you know? As the eternal wisdom has it: mater certa, pater semper incertus (mummy's baby, daddy's maybe...). Which easily short-circuits – or perhaps nudges is the better word – the receptive mind to, you know, that. And from a bit of the other on the wrong side of the blanket it's not far to the moral chaos that the churches and the authorities feared would be unleashed if sex were ever to come out from behind that prophylactic barrier of euphemism and nudging concealment.

Now that it has, though – wotsits, thingummies, and everything! – there seems to have been a tidal drift in the other direction, where "language" is concerned. The word "fuck", for example – not so long ago absolutely taboo, even partially-clad as "the F-word" – has itself become a naughty-but-neutral placeholder, declared fit for use in publicly broadcast adult entertainments, as famously demonstrated in the episode of The Wire in which detectives Moreland and McNulty examine a crime scene using variations of just the one multivalent word. In Mark Lawson's telling timeline ( in "Has swearing lost its power to shock?"):

• 1965: Kenneth Tynan says 'fuck' on TV and four motions are tabled in parliament
• 1976: the Sex Pistols use it on a teatime show and are banned from TV
• 2004: more than 10 million people watch John Lydon use the 'C' word and fewer than 100 complain.

To declare that, for example, some fuckwit knows fuck-all about fucking photography does not remotely hint at any sexual activity, and it would be weird if it did. It merely shows that the speaker is quite annoyed, and not afraid of using a little salty language to let it be known.

If you want to be genuinely offensive you need to look elsewhere today. Ethnicity has always been a minefield, of course. Stay well away, or tread very, very carefully. Some careful terminological tiptoeing is also often required now that "blended families" have become so commonplace. Father? Mother? Not so fast with your reductive tick-boxes, chum... Things are a bit more complicated than that around here! People have become quite touchy about really basic items of vocabulary, too. In some circles the use of an inappropriate pronoun – a.k.a. "misgendering" – can induce outrage, although I'm afraid at my age the idea of anyone – however vague or comprehensive their gender might be – demanding to be referred to as "they" is both strange and not a little confusing. Not least as this (presumably?) mainly happens in their absence. I had always thought I was being pretty progressive by using "they" as a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, but the world will keep moving on, won't they?

It seems there will always be new and exciting ways to set yourself up for the satisfaction of being appalled and insulted. How very dare you! I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you! It's all very confusing to anyone who grew up carefully stepping around one set of taboos, only to be tripped arse over tit by another. Flippin' 'eck! Oops, excuse my French! Um... How's your father, by the way?

Gypsy Grove

I have perhaps six to ten walks that I repeat three or four times each month; I return to these places, exposing myself to the possibility that something will happen there. There's something I'm searching for and trying to discover. If I organise my life around these walks, there is a possibility I might find this. My ideas and thinking are illuminated by the thoughts of other people, conversations, things I read or listen to. I feel I am walking with these ideas, yet also retaining a mind open enough to allow the unexpected to occur.
Gary Fabian Miller, Adore, p.204

I bought a copy of the attractive little book accompanying Gary Fabian Miller's exhibition "Adore" at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol when we visited it back in May last year (see the post Miller Light), but have only just finished reading the text, which is where I found the passage quoted above. In some ways it's a statement of the bleedin' obvious, but it does nicely encapsulate the way I feel about my own regular, if rather more urban walks.

One of these walks – the roughly 2.5 miles down into the town centre (followed by the 2.5 mile slog back uphill) – takes me past a mysterious alleyway between two buildings in a little run of suburban shops. I had always wondered where that alleyway went, but never bothered to find out. Partly because it was only halfway along my intended walk, and partly because it seemed to breathe that mix of possibility and danger that unlit, unpaved, unfrequented urban byways do: going down there would be a little adventure into the unknown.

But a few weeks ago I had reason to visit the pharmacy in that run of shops. It was a pleasant sunny day, I had nothing better to do, so thought: maybe now's the time to see where that alleyway goes? So I did.

To my surprise it ran in a straight line for about one third of a mile between walled back gardens on either side, eventually emerging onto the noise and bustle of Shirley Road, one of the grittier thoroughfares through the city, and another of my walking routes. The entire length of the walls on either side of the uneven and muddy path were like a linear gallery of colourful and competent sprayed graffiti, not at all your casual tagging, much of it old enough to have been partially covered by ivy and other climbing plants, like the remains of some vanished civilisation in the jungle. At various spots chairs and old car seats had been placed, whether by those graffiti artists, the homeless, or by the inhabitants of the houses with garden gates that opened onto the alleyway it was impossible to say: I didn't meet a single person along the way.

Like any little urban adventure, the sense of discovery – that exciting mix of fun and apprehension – probably outweighed its actual significance, but I enjoyed myself, exploring and photographing somewhere entirely new. Looking at Google Maps later on, I discovered the path actually has a name: Gypsy Grove.

I should say, these days the "camera" that accompanies me on most walks is my iPhone 12 mini, but on this occasion I was using a sweet and petite Panasonic GM5 that has lately usurped most other cameras in my shoulder bag. I love its compactness – it has the size and build quality of the best "small black compact cameras" like the Sony RX100 series – and am impressed by its image quality and flexibility: despite its diminutive size, it's a fully-capable micro 4/3rds interchangeable lens camera. It even has an electronic viewfinder.

I'd recommend the GM5 to you, except for the fact that you'd probably never be able to find one: they're very rare beasts indeed. Launched in late 2014 as a follow-up to the even tinier GM1, Panasonic hasn't seen fit to produce an even better successor. We can hope, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Actual single-purpose cameras are no longer where it's at, sales-wise, now that most of us can get perfectly satisfactory results from a decent phone. In fact, with a bit of care and working within its limitations, you'll probably get better results from your phone than from a "proper" camera, especially if you only occasionally use one. I just wish Apple hadn't abandoned the "mini" format for its iPhones... I really don't want a phone the size of a small tablet! Some of us are not plus-sized Californian giants...

There Will Never Be Another You...

We're often told that every human being, like every snowflake, is unique. I've never been sure how either assertion has been (or even could be) verified, but I have my doubts about both. A lot of people do seem awfully reminiscent of somebody else and, although it's true my acquaintance with snow down here on the South Coast is limited, snowflakes do all seem to have an uncannily strong family resemblance. Besides, AFAIK we only have the word of pioneer snowflake photographer Wilson A. Bentley to go by, who was self-evidently bonkers. I suppose "unique" may be a question of scale: I expect all hydrogen atoms are unique, too, once you get to know them up close.

There was this song you used to hear a lot in the 1950s and 60s, "There Will Never Be Another You". It became what used to be known as a "standard", a song or tune that was covered by pretty much everybody, from Frank Sinatra on down, including any number of instrumental interpretations; I suppose its melodic structure and chord changes invited the sort of musical mucking about that the arrangers and improvisers of the time loved so much. Lyrically, however, the song is a massive disappointment: it's not a rigorous philosophical or biological investigation into the eternal uniqueness of your particular instantiation of the human genome, just some schmaltzy romantic yearnings for someone's ex. So, now that it has provided a catchy handle for this post we won't be mentioning it again.

The other day, I received a curious email. An artist – a sculptor and painter – in the USA was asking me, "Is this your work?" He had acquired a copy of a semi-abstract photograph of a figure reflected in some wet cobblestones with the title "The Radiance of Opposites, Prague C.R.", and signed "Michael Chisholm 96". Now that, as I am constantly being reminded, is my name, although I generally go by "Mike", and although I have been known to take photographs of that sort, I have never yet been to Prague, despite it being the home town of my man Franz Kafka.

Now, I think we will all, at some time, have been given cause to wonder whether we have indeed been responsible for something we had either completely forgotten about, or never actually done. The experience probably has a name ("Kafka-esque" springs to mind). I have often awoken from troubled dreams, not to discover that I have been transformed into a gigantic cockroach, thankfully, but nonetheless confused as to whether I have or have not, at some time in the past, committed a murder or some other appalling crime that had somehow slipped my memory. Only to realise with immense relief that – phew! – it was all just a dream.

So, looking at this photograph by "Michael Chisholm", I briefly experienced that troubling sensation of self-doubt: no, wait, is it one of mine? It does look eerily like some transparencies I took in northern Spain around 1990... Have I, in fact, been to Prague, and somehow forgotten? But, um, no: not mine, never been there, not guilty.

A little searching on the Web revealed that although there may never be another me, as such, there is no shortage of alternative candidates. There are actually quite a lot of Michael Chisholms out there, mainly Canadians, not a few of whom are photographers or artists. It's a little disturbing. But a bit more searching narrowed it down to one prime suspect: the late Michael Chisholm of Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose book of photographs taken in Prague, Bridging East and West, bears the exact same photograph as the one in question on its cover. Busted! Whether this is the same Canadian Michael Chisholm as the author of Around the Bend: the whimsical world of Michael Chisholm ("112 pages of Chisholm's lawn art, folk art, lawn dummies & animals") is a known unknown that I'm not inclined to investigate. I really can't be held responsible for every act of idiocy committed in my name.

It all reminds me of the Graham Greene impostor. Do you know that story? In 1954, Greene received a letter from a man who had met him at the Cannes International Film Festival. Problematically, however, Greene had never actually been to the Cannes Festival. Over the years, Greene would keep hearing stories about this other Graham Greene who was passing himself off as the novelist in various locations around the world, and getting into some very Greeneland-ish scrapes, ultimately getting arrested in Assam for gun-running and – hilariously – then trying to get money for bail from Hulton Press, publisher of many of Greene’s magazine pieces.

Eventually, Greene wrote about his troublesome shadow ("The Other … Whom Only Others Know", Daily Telegraph Magazine, Jan. 10, 1975). He tells how, after a meeting with Salvador Allende, then President of Chile, a local newspaper accused him of being his own double. "I found myself momentarily shaken with a metaphysical doubt ... Had I been the impostor all along? Was I the Other?"

He wasn't the first, of course. Doppelgangers and impersonators are the stuff of legend, sensation, and gothic fiction, from Martin Guerre via the Tichborne Claimant to Tom Ripley. I have already exposed Jon Stewart's unnerving duplication as "Hugh Brownstone" (see the post Is It Jon Or Is It Hugh?; I can't believe some of you don't agree with me...), and I can't be the only one to have been spooked by my own appearance out of left field when passing an unexpected mirror. You again!

Then I suppose there's this:

When he awoke in the morning, the first thing he saw was Tigger, sitting in front of the glass and looking at himself.
"Hallo!" said Pooh.
"Hallo!" said Tigger. “I’ve found somebody just like me. I thought I was the only one of them."
A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Sorry about that. I haven't actually read that appalling effusion of whimsy, just watched the Disney version with my kids. When it comes to all things Pooh-related, I'm with Dorothy Parker:

And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

(Parker's Constant Reader column, New Yorker, October 12, 1928)

Now, there may well never be another Dorothy Parker – and if Google and Facebook are any guide, she seems to have taken a patent out on a name you would have thought fairly commonplace – but I think any confidence in one's own uniqueness is easily shaken. Certainly, when it comes to photography, it seems one Michael Chisholm's work is all too easily mistaken for another's. And how quickly might someone trawling the Web, in possession of a vague memory of some earlier draft of the one and only me, be convinced that I had relocated to Canada, gone Around the Bend, and dedicated my life to the creation of lawn art, whatever that is. Or even – noooo! – branded myself as Mike "Chizzy" Chisholm and taken to churning out sub-psychedelia in Detroit? It doesn't bear thinking about. I may yet have to change my name.

A few minutes of anagrammatic experimentation yields Mike Mohlisch... Possible? Or Michael Imholsch? Both names are as singular as stand-offish snowflakes and, until now, completely unknown to Google. The trouble is, these guys don't exist and haven't done anything. Yet... But there is something curiously enticing – liberating, even – about the idea of working under a one-off pseudonym in a world cluttered with namesakes who are busily appropriating, diluting, or polluting your nominal "own brand" with their efforts. It could be fun, and it could happen! Indeed, it may already have happened...

You again!

My Back Pages

We're in the early stages of a massive tidy-up and clear-out campaign, in advance of a painter-decorator coming into the house to repair some of the material neglect our house has suffered, partly due to the wear and tear of decades of family life, but mainly the result of our indifference towards and immunity to whatever it is that makes other people "house proud". We live here, we work here, we brought up our kids here; long-standing cracks in the plaster, peeling paint, and water-stained ceilings haven't been a problem. But there does come a point where even we think: something must be done.

Inevitably, opening up boxes and cupboards and drawers that have long been closed releases puffs of nostalgia into the air. Like many other dangerous substances, nostalgia can be safe – even beneficial – in suitably small quantities, but needs to be handled with caution. Reminders of family life with beloved small children, in particular, can be overwhelming.

So far, for me the most efficacious doses have been reminders of the days in the 1980s and 90s when film photography, including darkroom work, was my thing. Indeed, those were the years when film photography and darkroom work were a Big Thing generally, and not the niche exercise in retro hipster fantasy they are now. Like writing actual letters to one's friends – a particularly heady nostalgia hit, that one, released from several boxes – who now can really spare the time, money, and dedication that using film demands, given the digital alternative?

I excavated boxes of my own old photographs, made in the improvised darkroom that occupied the corridor of the flat I had when I first came to Southampton in 1984, shortly after taking a printing course with Mike Skipper of the Oxford Darkroom. Frankly, until you've ruined an entire box of photographic paper by accidentally leaning against a light switch, or put your foot in a tray of fixer on your way to the bathroom at night, I don't think you've really experienced photography.

Some of this work stands up surprisingly well. Mike was a good teacher and, much as I came to loathe the darkroom experience, I became a pretty competent printer. I find I can still remember the circumstances when most of these photographs were taken, thirty to forty years ago, evoking pleasant memories of holidays, outings, or just mooching about the university campus and around town with a camera slung on my shoulder.

In those days that would have been an Olympus OM-1n 35mm SLR. What a beautiful thing that camera was: all mechanical, all metal, precision-made like a watch, the way things used to be made before moulded plastic had evolved into a material suitable for even the most high-end cameras. I suppose the 1980s were the last hoorah of an era when mass manufacture and a degree of craft skill still worked hand in hand to produce objects of a certain no-nonsense utilitarian beauty. I find I do miss handling the heft, fit and finish of optical devices and precision tools made out of machined steel, and polished wood... Oops, maybe that dose of nostalgia was a little too strong. Shut that box!

But what really pushed up the photographic nostalgia levels were two bits of ephemera found in a drawer: a prospectus for the Duckspool workshops scheduled for 1997, and a couple of catalogues of second-hand photography books.

I think it's safe to say that photography in Britain was at an inflection point in the late 1990s. [1] The classic, hand-crafted monochrome print, exemplified by the work of Fay Godwin and Raymond Moore, was beginning to give way to the colour photography of Martin Parr and Paul Graham, as well as the more conceptual "project" work of art-school graduates granted permission to muck about with cameras rather than boring old paint. Exciting times, if you were into photography.

I described much of this long ago in the post Ray and Fay, but more relevantly in the post that I wrote in 2009 after hearing that Peter Goldfield, who ran the Duckspool workshop, had died. I won't repeat all that now – if you're interested, follow the links – but merely point to the outstanding quality of the workshop leaders Peter was able to persuade to spend quality time with a bunch of photo-obsessed nobodies.

The four workshops I attended there in the 1990s – with Thomas Joshua Cooper, Jem Southam, Sue Davis & Zelda Cheatle, and Paul Hill – rank high in the memories I have of those years. As Peter puts it in that prospectus: "So, while not promising to make you rich, I'll bet your time at Duckspool will stay with you the rest of your life..." Phew, another heady dose of nostalgia. I should probably go and sit down quietly somewhere and read the TLS for a bit.

These catalogues issued by Grace White are pretty crude productions by modern standards, but typical of the time before desktop publishing on a PC had become established as an unremarkable everyday resource. They are cut and paste jobs, laboriously typed, photocopied, and stapled together by hand, and the very definition of "ephemera": items meant to be used and then discarded, the record of nothing more permanent than what a book-dealer happened to have in stock. Or might still have, depending on how quickly after receipt of the catalogue you phoned or faxed (!) your order.

Grace White was married to Colin Osman, a third-generation pigeon fancier [2] and the the publisher of Creative Camera, back then pretty much the only serious "art" photography magazine in the UK. That was where your Fay Godwins, your Raymond Moores, and later your Richard Longs, Victor Burgins and even, ahem, Damien Hirsts were to be found. It was a must-read for anyone interested in photography as an art medium, rather than an expensive hobby centred on buying kit, and formed the aesthetic preferences of many impressionable young minds. Mine, certainly, and I don't suppose my tastes have changed much in the intervening decades: we are doomed to carry the mark of our formative years forever, I'm afraid, like an unwisely chosen tattoo, or a weakness for guitars and blues-based rock.

I was a regular customer of Grace's while she was in business – I got the impression she was essentially selling off their personal library – and bought some good and unusual stuff from her, such as a very rare hardback copy of Chris Killip's Isle of Man. Her descriptions of her stock were remarkably well-informed – one-liners that summarised a book's place in photographic history – and often amusing (on The Graphic Reproduction and Photography of Works of Art: "I know nothing of this subject but there must be some useful information for someone").

When it emerged that I was a fan of Markéta Luskačová she revealed that Markéta had been their childminder, and sent me some family photographs taken by Markéta along with my purchase of her book Pilgrims. However, I couldn't afford to scoop up everything that took my fancy, which is a pity. Obviously, most of those catalogue prices should be doubled to account for subsequent inflation, but that in 1996 you could have had Masahisa Fukase's Solitude of Ravens in the 1991 Bedford Arts edition for the equivalent of £48 is a lesson: if you like it and can afford it buy it now before it becomes a collector's item. The cheapest copy of Solitude of Ravens currently on Abebooks is going for £288.50...

And then there are some ephemeral bits and pieces of my own. Alongside assorted half-forgotten Christmas cards, some early attempts at making "artist's books" from photocopied cut-and-paste originals (not unlike those catalogues), and various other paper relics of my early photographic efforts, I found a sheaf of orders for prints and CDs from my first real solo exhibition, The Colour of the Water, which ran for six months in 2003 at a local National Trust property, Mottisfont Abbey. I'd completely forgotten that I'd ever sold anything from that event: in fact, I'd produced a rather neat form to submit orders, and I had even produced CDs to be sold under my own brand new Shepherd's Crown imprint. Whoosh!... Big nostalgia rush... [3]

But I think what I really miss is the innocence of setting out on an adventure into the unknown, like William Boot in Scoop, overburdened with the equivalent of cleft sticks and a collapsible canoe. I can hardly believe, now, that a mere twenty years ago – I was already fifty years old! – I was still naïvely ambitious enough to start my own imprint, register for a batch of ISBNs, and then even assign one to a CD of a small sideshow of photographs on display near the toilets of a provincial beauty spot, which also meant I had to donate copies to the six UK legal deposit libraries.

What on earth was I thinking? Clearly, the spectrum of self-belief that starts with "build it and they will come", and passes through "fake it 'til you make it", shades into the self-deceptions of "let's pretend" and then, at the far end, the innocently simple games of "make believe". But I suppose it's only in retrospect that we can tell one end from the other.

In the immortally daft words of Bob Dylan: Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. In fact, I'm at the very young age now when older selves can be looked back on with amusement, as part of a story that is "always already" becoming as ephemeral as old pieces of paper in a drawer. So fetch me that recycling box, and let's clear the decks for a make-over. It's time: something must be done.

1. Sorry, I realise "inflection point" has escaped from its technical meaning in mathematics to become a modish cliché for "when something changed", but that's language for you. See my post The Optics Thing...

2. Three interesting facts about Colin Osman. First, and remarkably, it seems he was educated at my own school, Alleynes Grammar in Stevenage, although obviously back in the pre-WW2 days when Stevenage was still just a small town on the Great North Road, and not yet the first New Town. Second, his grandfather founded The Racing Pigeon, the leading journal for the sport and still in print after 125 years. Third, during WW2 his father recruited two thousand amateur pigeon fanciers to provide birds for a Special Continental Pigeon Service, MI14(d), a branch of Military Intelligence  – spy pigeons! – code-named Columba (see this LRB review of a book about the use of pigeons in wartime, Operation Columba).

3. That exhibition was just a sample of a more ambitious project, which eventually led to the book Downward Skies, which you can see here as a free Issuu flipbook.

When This Old Hat Was New

It was not altogether a surprise, having encouraged readers to listen to Chris Foster performing "When This Old Hat Was New" (in the post Another Six Penn'orth), that some commented: "A fine tune and a rich voice, but what in the name of Cecil Sharp are the actual words he is singing?" Which is a good question. I was never entirely sure myself.

That song is on his album All Things in Common from 1979. I never actually owned a copy, but it was frequently on the turntable at the house my future partner shared with a handful of medics in Bristol (all "junior doctors" at local hospitals, a trade soon to be rebadged "resident doctors", apparently, a curious choice). It was in that house that I learned never, ever to open an illustrated medical journal, a stack of which were kept next to the toilet. Particularly the one that had a regular "diagnose the skin condition" competition on the cover.

Anyway, talking of illustrations, and as I noted in that earlier post, I have always felt strangely moved by that album's cover art by Mike Tycer:

Those faces – oddly leonine when they're looking one way, moustachioed men when looking the other – beneath flat caps that might also be crowns, and above interlinked hints of boots, knees, and shrouded figures... Those are our ancestors working the land, sustained by the land, generation after generation. It's an image that rewards study, and of a quality which is actually not very characteristic of the typical 1970s LP sleeve, despite the received idea that album art flourished during the heyday of the 12" vinyl, 33 rpm long-playing record – roughly, mid-1960s to mid-1980s – and went into a decline when the comparatively tiny CD took over the mass music market.

So, look out, before we get onto those lyrics, here comes a digression.

I did actually check out this commonly-held view a while ago by looking at my surviving LPs, admittedly a small and idiosyncratic sample. But I found that – rather than the brilliant cover art I was expecting to find – I was mainly looking at bad paintings, crude montages, timid typography, tacky colour combinations, and poorly-reproduced photographs. It was also surprising how little creative use had actually been made of those generous 144 square inches on either side. Large areas of plain, blank colour predominated, and text was either kept to a minimum – generally no more than a list of tracks, and a few acknowledgements – or the lyrics were spread over the entire thing, in a tiny, unreadable font, often in the eye-dazzling colour combinations made fashionable by the "underground" press at the time. There were pointless gatefolds, opening onto nothing much of interest, and a surprising amount of corporate "noise" plastered over everything – company logos, copyright notices, serial numbers, etc. – that had once, somehow, been transparent.

There are exceptions, of course; there are always exceptions. From my sample, I found that Jethro Tull's Stand Up, David Bowie's Hunky Dory, Steely Dan's Katy Lied, and Weather Report's Mysterious Traveller still retain their original charm. The parody of Sgt. Pepper by the Mothers of Invention (We're Only In It For the Money) is still convincing, even in its original semi-censored version. The sleeves of jazz and classical label ECM have always been satisfying, of course, with their cool Nordic look and stylish use of photographs and typography; so much so, two entire books have been published of ECM's best designs. But by far the majority were either totally bland or downright offensive to my 21st-century eyes.

So it is hard to explain why everybody seems to think the opposite is true: that a high percentage of those LP sleeves were some kind of apotheosis of graphic design. But here are just a few reasons why that is not the case:

• If you can, just look at a typical magazine from the period, particularly the adverts, and compare with the current-day equivalent. The acceptable standard of commercial art was simply lower.
• "Full colour printing" was still a novelty in the 1960s, and cheap full colour printing required various technical compromises that overruled design considerations.
• The taste for surrealism has not aged well. Particularly when in the form of poorly-painted, sub-Dali-esque fantasy or psychedelia. Little Feat's Sailin' Shoes is a personal favourite, musically, but that cover (no. 18 in Rolling Stone's top 100 covers, I see) is simply tacky.
• Manipulating photographs used to be much more difficult. For every After The Gold Rush there are 100 horrible cut and paste jobs made with blunt scissors: see Disraeli Gears.
• Hipgnosis made a (probably) deserved name for themselves, and that reputation has somehow floated everyone else's boat. But how many other music packaging design teams can you name? And how many times do you really need or want to look at the sleeves of Houses of the Holy (tacky) or even Dark Side of the Moon (elegant but dull)?
•  As a fan of illustration, I find it hard to think of many illustrators working within the music field whose work stands out for me. Some people rate Klaus Voormann? Maybe. Peter Blake, I suppose. But let's not talk about Roger Dean or Mati Klarwein, please: I didn't like their stuff at the time, and it hasn't improved. I suspect that as a routine gig album-cover work may not have paid well.
• Things tend to get better, but we prefer to think they get worse. Otherwise, we'd just be very, very jealous of our own children's good fortune. As if!

In the end, album covers are just commercial packaging, and there's no more reason to consider them an art form than we do cereal packets or ready-meal boxes. After all, some of the best albums have the worst covers and are none the worse for that. Stop staring at the cardboard and put the round black vinyl thing inside on the turntable so we can listen to it!

OK, then. End of digression.

So, to get back to "When This Old Hat Was New"... On the back cover of All Things In Common Chris Foster noted:

This song is traceable back to a piece called Times Alteration written around 1630. The theme of old people looking nostalgically back at their earlier years is a well worn one, but in 1630 England was in the throes of an economic and political upheaval that probably gives this song a little more justification than usual. Looking nostalgically back to a golden past before the Norman Conquest was something that was popular at the time. Many people laid the blame for their troubles at the door of the Norman tyrant even though he had been dead for well over 500 years. But the Romans being a charitable institution really stretches credibility to the limit.

But you'll be wanting to see the actual lyrics. In his version the song goes like this: 

I am a poor old man, come listen to my song,
Provisions now are twice as dear as when that I was young.
It was when this old hat was new and stood above my brow,
O, what a happy youth was I when this old hat was new.

It is but four score years ago the truth I do declare,
When men they took each other’s words, they thought it very fair,
No oaths or bonds they did require, men’s words were so true,
This was in my youthful days when this old hat was new.

When the time of harvest came and we went out to shear,
How often we were merry made with brandy, ale and beer.
And when the corn it was brought home and put upon the mow,
The workers paunches was well filled when this old hat was new.

The farmer at the board head stood, the table for to grace,
And greets all as they came in, all took their proper place.
His wife she at the table stood to give each man his due,
And O! what plenty did abound when this old hat was new.

But now the times are altered, the poor are quite done o’er,
They give to them their wages like beggars at the door.
Into the house we must not go, although we are but few,
It was not so when Bess did reign and this old hat was new.

The commons they are taken in and cottages pulled down,
Moll has got no wool to spin her linsey-wolsey gown;
The weather’s cold and clothing thin and blankets are but few,
But we were clothed both back and skin when this old hat was new.

When Romans in this land did reign, the commons they did give,
Unto the poor in charity to help them for to live;
But now the poor is quite done o’er, we know it to be true,
It was not so when Bess did reign and this old hat was new.

As the saying goes, nostalgia is not what it was... Even, it seems, in the seventeenth century. After all,  what did the Romans ever do for us?

It is not inevitably the case that things always get better, but somehow they do seem to, despite our best efforts to make things worse. It's salutary to remind ourselves of little things like the plague, witch hunts, religious wars lasting decades, gruesome public executions, surgery without anaesthetics, mass illiteracy, and, yes, even the quality of the graphic design of LP record sleeves, back when this old hat was new.

Besides, you could always get yourself a new hat, you miserable old git.

Typically awful 1970s LP sleeve for comedy folk duo The Tryptolites

(I wonder whatever happened to them?)

Somewhere in the Dolomites

This painting of the view from a mountain pass in the Dolomites was made by my partner's great-aunt, Mary Creighton McDowall, and hangs in the bedroom of our Bristol flat. It was done either during or, more likely, on return from a motor tour of northern Italy [1] in the 1920s, as documented in the book written by her husband, Arthur McDowall, Peaks & Frescoes: a study of the Dolomites (OUP, 1928), and illustrated with a number of her own coloured linocuts. It looks rather more finished in this photograph than it actually is: the oil paint is thinly applied on board and has a brushy, sketchy feel to it.

But here's a question: where exactly is this? It does have something of a resemblance to one of the more famous peaks in the Dolomites (Langkofel in German, Sassolungo in Italian), but it's hard to establish the same viewpoint. We've tried using Google Maps and various other approaches, with mixed results. A certain amount of artistic license may be at work, of course, especially if the painting was worked up from sketches made on the spot, or even from several different spots. But if you're familiar with the area and recognise where it is, then we'd be very glad to hear from you.

They were an interesting couple. Mary was one of the children of Mandell Creighton, historian and Bishop of London. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art, 1903-06, where her contemporaries included Dora Carrington, and was a founder member of Vanessa Bell's Friday Club, alongside the likes of Gwen Raverat, Clive Bell, Henry Lamb, Bernard Leach, Saxon Sydney Turner, Duncan Grant, and Mark Gertler. Which, with the notable exception of Gertler, was quite an assembly of the artistic wing of the upper reaches of London society. However, Mary seems to have been at the more conservative end of this proto-Bloomsbury spectrum, both artistically and socially, and apparently quarrelled with Vanessa Bell following the famous artistic watershed of Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. Her husband Arthur was a fellow of All Souls in Oxford and a prolific writer and journalist, notably giving positive reviews in the Times Literary Supplement of Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, the early "experimental" work of Vanessa Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf. I suppose you could say they were Bloomsbury-adjacent, but too conventional in their views and behaviour ever to belong to those circles.

As well as a few of those "peaks and frescoes" linocuts, we have another of Mary's paintings in our house, probably unfinished, as seen in the background of the photograph I used for my Christmas card in 2010. Apparently dozens of her oils on board were stacked in the garage of another elderly Creighton relative, all slowly going mouldy, and this one, painted on a stout piece of softboard somewhat abraded at the edges, was given to my partner, selected more or less at random. It stands propped against the wall, opposite the downstairs toilet in Southampton.

In the relative warmth and dryness of our house, a superficial milky bloom that originally covered the paint gradually disappeared, and as the colours strengthened more details emerged. It has been like watching the painting paint itself, day by day, month by month, year by year. In itself, the picture is not anything that would have grabbed my attention in a gallery, but it has inevitably become the object of intense scrutiny and speculation during my daily seated meditations. Enough to make me question that tired old cliché "like watching paint dry" as the epitome of tedium; after all, what could be more engaging, given the right circumstances?

But just to return to that painting of the Dolomites: if you do know your way around those mountains and recognise the scene, then do please weigh in with an opinion. Even if just to confirm that, yes, that does look kinda-sorta how Langkofel / Sassolungo must have looked in the 1920s, when standing near a certain calvary by a particular rocky roadside. Although it is probably now a major tourist traffic route, with car park, toilets, and a restaurant... (But probably not with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hotspot).

1. The area had only just become part of Italy, of course, following its annexation after WW1. To this day, the majority language of Südtirol aka Alto Adige is German. As it happens, in 2010 I had an exhibition (see The Italian Job) in the town known as Innichen to German speakers, and San Candido to Italians, not very far from Langkofel / Sassolungo.

The Revenge of Art

I don't usually want to get into unanswerable questions like "What is Art?"; it's not something most of us give a second thought to, even if art interests us a great deal. After all, what sports fan needs to ask "What is sport?" (although someone should probably be asking this about "breaking" and skateboarding, recently included in the Olympics). You know it when you see it. But here are two extracts from some things I read recently that, in their different ways, together offer an interesting perspective on the nature of the artistic enterprise:

It’s not that I don’t want to be understood, but I can’t, like Spielberg, say, make a film for the general public—I’d be mortified if I discovered I could. If you want to reach a general audience, you have to make films like Star Wars and Superman which have nothing to do with art. This doesn’t mean I treat the public like idiots, but I certainly don’t take pains to please them.  Andrei Tarkovsky (Sight and Sound, Winter 1982-1983)

I love literary fiction, but there are ways and means of getting away with a mediocre literary fiction book where there isn’t a way of getting away with a mediocre mainstream book.  Richard Osman, from a conversation between Lee Child and Richard Osman (Guardian, 14 September 2024)

Put another way, not all pictures are "art", but – certainly on the evidence of most recent exhibitions – it is a lot easier to get away with poorly-crafted pictures when they are touted as art. In fact, an affectation of artlessness seems to have become a desirable characteristic of art. [1] Which has also had implications for photography, I think. Be patient, and we'll get there eventually.

I don't think it's controversial to suggest that at some point in the history of the West (as in, the inheritors of the legacy of European culture) "art" levanted [2] from its long-term partnership with "craft" and set up shop as a separate category of endeavour in its own right. The point of departure is generally located by art historians somewhere in the eighteenth century, but the parting of the ways only really got going in the nineteenth and early twentieth, when artists – it's often said in reaction to the invention of photography – began to ascribe to themselves and their work various intangible properties, formerly the preserve of religion, and sought to raise their efforts to a level above those of former partner, craft, as well as the mere verisimilitude of that upstart contender, photography.

The creative life has always been a gamble, but making paint-marks on a piece of canvas came to be regarded by some as a quasi-sacramental act, worth enduring poverty and hunger, and which required total commitment to a life outside conventional society – even conventional artistic society – like the desert hermits of the early Christian centuries. See Van Gogh; see Gauguin. Others were able to monetize this mystification of the act of painting – see Monet; see Picasso – and lived the comfortable life of bohemian aristocrats.

Since then, the art that excites the auction halls and attracts deep-pocketed art-abductors [3] has become the equivalent of a share certificate: worthless in itself – just some paint on a canvas – but a token promising a potentially enormous monetary return (or loss...) to its possessor. Or perhaps it's more like a cheque (remember those?) drawn on a bank with a famous name but which may or may not already have gone out of business. That bank being wherever those self-ascribed, intangible, quasi-religious properties are kept; the woo-woo reserves of art, you might say.

So bad it's art?

So good it's craft?

But I went over this ground fairly thoroughly a few years ago in the post Reformation (still worth a read, I think). What I really wanted to say is that art seems to have been having its belated revenge on photography. How? Well, let's start by stating the obvious, the "why". Whatever did photography do to painting in the first place?

So somewhere around 1840, the painter Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype, and is alleged to have exclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" (although in French, obviously: «La peinture est morte, à dater de ce jour!»). If you've ever seen a good daguerreotype – they really are far more impressive than any photograph on paper – you'll understand how he felt. They are spellbinding, like little magic windows onto an exquisitely precise re-rendering of reality, far beyond what anyone could achieve with traditional art materials and techniques, no matter how talented. Which is why there has been no painting at all ever since, and why artists have been spoiling for revenge.

Well, not exactly. But something major did happen. Very few painters since then have bothered to acquire the complex set of skills, passed down from master to apprentice for centuries, that were needed to become even a third-rate painter of the sort of work that fills the most boring rooms in every major gallery. How far photography was responsible for this is debatable; the invention of paint in portable tubes around the same time also played a big part in this change. Not to mention the rise of the bourgeoisie, the decline of the church and aristocracy as patrons of the arts, blah, blah, blah... But you already know all this.

But let's blame photography. Upshot: painting was transformed from the painstaking reproduction of the way things and people look (when painted, anyway) into the extravagantly colourful and free making of marks. Bold self-expression was elevated over the careful disciplines of craft, which was not necessarily a good thing (ask any conservator) or a pretty sight; some delved selves are downright unpleasant. Suddenly, massive deposits were being paid into those woo-woo reserves of art, in the form of competing manifestos and declarations of artistic intent and independence. And how we have all loved those Fauvists, Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Whatever-else-ists, ever since! They are the benchmark of what most of us regard as art. But when we want reliable, indexical representations of how the world actually looked at any given moment, unadorned and uninterpreted, then we turn to photography, not "art".

A photograph of some photographs

But wait... Quite early in the twentieth century certain anarchic spoilsports had spotted that something essentially fake was going on here: surely those reserves of art woo-woo were as imaginary as any other woo-woo? Did artists really have a hotline to whoever / whatever they imagined was picking up the phone at the other end? In fact, it seemed obvious that the "art-ness" of art lay precisely in this con-trick that artists were pulling – that they alone had access to such a hotline – and did not reside in the actual end products of their labours. Cue Dada, Duchamp, and all that. "Art" was an idea, an act, a process, not a thing. In fact, it was whatever artists said it was, from the original urinal to the more recent Work No. 227: the lights going on and off. Anything else was just interior decoration, mere craft.

At some point in the later twentieth century this lively orgy of impish bubble-bursting had cooled into an austere, black-polo-necked orthodoxy that disapproved of displays of self-expression and craft skill as reactionary hand-waving, a view which found a congenial home in many of the art schools. As with atonal music, the more baffling the general public found their art, the better the polo-neck crowd liked it. Like Tarkovsky's quotation above, this didn’t mean they were treating the public like idiots, but they certainly weren’t taking any pains to please us. Any appeal to popularity such as the creation of colourful confections relying on the deeply suspect appeal of "beauty" was just plain embarrassing. What, you still want to paint like the Expressionists? Puh-lease! Didn't you get the memo?

Ideas were the thing, not craft or self-expression. Life-drawing and other venerable survivals of the painterly skill-set were banished, and conceptual art, installations, video, and – yes! – photography took their place. But this photography was not photography as understood by, um, photographers.

Ah, photographers... How badly so many of us want our work to be acknowledged not just as photography, but as art. And yet so few of us follow any medium other than photography, or inform ourselves about actual contemporary art practices and concerns, or even visit exhibitions or buy books of photography that is acknowledged as art. But the thing is, the attraction of the camera for academy-trained "artists using photography" is that it is a mechanical tool which enables them to pull off the cake-and-eat-it trick of deploying "indexical" representation, but without those embarrassingly démodé taints of craft skill or – yuk – "beauty" (unless self-evidently ironic). So the more drably hands-off and uncompromised by any suspect expressive baggage their photographs are the better. Which, obviously, is precisely the opposite of what is valued and vaunted by self-declared, craft-worshipping "fine art" photographers, with their calendar-ready landscapes, "painterly" abstracts, and overcooked "surrealism". So last century... Do keep up, guys!

Now, the fact is that most wannabe artists, whether academy-trained or amateur, are not brainiac intellectuals, endowed with the capacity for original thought, much less era-defining artistic talents, but simply dedicated followers of fashion. So when those affectless, bleak, and faux-naïve photographs started to seep out of the art schools, mainly in the form of expensive books from prestigious publishers, certain ambitious photographers took note – so that's where it's at now! – and followed suit. Advanced skills, personal style, beauty? No thanks! We get it now: the world is sad and disenchanted and we're all doomed, so grey is the colour, and prosaic is the word. These may look like barely competent, humdrum snapshots, but that's because they are art, see? There is no craft, no self-expression, none of that "beauty" nonsense here, but that's all on purpose... Which makes all the difference. And where they led, others followed. So that's where it's at now!

And Art laughed in triumph. The long game had paid off: revenge at last... Now, where did I hide those brushes and paints?

Nice, but is it art?

(Constable's "The Hay Wain" on loan to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery)

1. See, for example, the work of Rose Wylie or Humphrey Ocean, both Royal Academicians.

2. My favourite new word, acquired from Language Hat (no relation).

3. What we should call those who buy artworks and imprison them in vaults, never to be seen in public again.

Curriculum, Elevation, England & Nowhere

I was looking back through some of the older books in my Blurb "bookstore", and I was struck by several things (apart from quite how many of the things I've made). Seeing them again with fresh eyes, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the photographs, for example, most notably those I had been producing in my exploratory lunchtime strolls around the university campus where I used to work. If nothing else, they demonstrate the creative benefits of working within tight constraints of time and place. But the most striking thing was the effort I had been putting into the design, sequencing, and intent of the books I was making then. I suppose I was still full of the energy and enthusiasm generated by the feeling that I might be on the brink of a new and fulfilling late-life career. Hey, don't laugh, it could have happened.

Of these books, Curriculum and Elevation are the stand-outs for me. It's hard to believe that they were created as long ago as 2011 and 2013, in the final few years before I retired at age 60 in 2014.

Curriculum in particular is still one of the peaks of my photographic and bookmaking efforts, and although as far as I recall no copies at all were ever sold, I did give away a few and, as always, I deposited a copy in the library of my old college [1] , so it may yet find its way to posterity. I also still remember the enjoyable investigative labour of finding and verifying some suitable quotations, which were inserted at intervals to put a little graphic-design "air" into the three visual sequences of photographs.

I think both books deserve another outing, so have decided to make them available as free Issuu flipbooks (click the central device for a full-screen view):

Just for good measure, I have also added another of these older Blurb books to Issuu: England and Nowhere, a book made in 2016, in the early years of retirement and following the boost to my energy and enthusiasm given by my second exhibition and residency in Innsbruck, Austria.

I remember sending this one out as a book "dummy" to various publishers, galleries, book competitions, and so on, only to be met by an enigmatic and unreadable silence. It was disappointing at the time, but I know now that this is simply the (unbelievably arrogant) default mode of the art and publishing world: we're just too busy, too important, and too fastidiously up ourselves even to acknowledge receipt of "unsolicited" material. So, welcome to the slush pile, Mr. Nobody, or in that venerable brush-off: don't call us, we'll call you.

I like to think a sense of that early creative buzz can still be felt in the tight editing and sequencing of these relatively old books: they are solidly crafted bits of work, well-constructed display cabinets for the photographic curiosities within. I confess I also like to think that something of it persists in the work I am producing a decade or so later, although I'm less inclined now to put quite so much effort into sequencing my photographs and digital images.

Why not? Because I have come to realise that people will always make their own personal connections and associations with visual art, no matter what hints and signposts a book's compiler has placed along the road. It no longer surprises me, for example, that someone will invariably pick an image I had intended as sequence "filler" as their favourite in the entire book. [2]

In the end, I think, you could pretty much arrange your pictures randomly, and some sort of "meaning" would emerge, perhaps even something better (and certainly something more personal to the individual reader) than anything you had intended. We are meaning-making creatures, and can't help ourselves. I'm reminded of these words from photographer Frederick Sommer:

I have five pebbles, not too different in size and weight, yet a randomness about them. If I drop them on the carpet they will scatter. Now we could run an experiment and we would find that we cannot put these pebbles in shapes that would be as elegant and as nicely related and with as great a variety as every time they fall. It is better than anything we could do. I have great respect for the way I find things. Every time something falls I look. I cannot believe the relationships. The intricacy. You hear a noise and you say “What is that?” Respect for the affirmation of the unexpected.

So, here you go, feel free to make whatever you like out of England and Nowhere. I did my best with it, but now it's over to you:

1. An institution that has endured from 1263 into the present day seems a reasonably good bet for posterity, I think. As a result of my self-interested generosity quite a collection of my stuff has been accumulating there; thirty-one books, in fact. So far, that is... I think I've still got a few more in me. Any fellow Balliol readers may enjoy page 39 of Curriculum, btw.

2. Actually, "all killer, no filler" is never a good formula for a photo-book (quite apart from the difficulty of creating 40+ images of "killer" quality). The good stuff needs to be set within and spaced out by at least the same amount of OK stuff, both to highlight it and to create a sense of rhythm. Although, as I say, most readers will ignore all that editorial effort anyway...