What Is The Point?

Given the many causes for anxiety out there in the world, I mainly try to keep things light on this blog: a bit of photo-phluff, some personal stuff, nothing too rough or off the cuff [Oh, do stop it. Ed.]. TBH I'm mainly equipped and inclined to entertain, not to inform or educate: I'm not the BBC.

But... Six months ago I did post some thoughts on AI (Nisi Dominus Frustra...). Now, although we are still at the stage where "AI" is essentially just a catch-all term for various ways of mining vast stores of data and sticking the results together in a convincing way, it's clear there are issues here that are not going to go away, and that will become more urgent as the technology either improves or, more likely, its bubble bursts; either could be catastrophic. The main, admittedly pedestrian conclusion I came to was this:

When, I wonder, will it dawn on them [employers and investors] that the pursuit of efficiency, productivity and profits by automation and the elimination of expensive, fallible "human resources" is not the point? That people are the point, and not the problem? Not any day soon, it seems. 

As the TUC’s assistant general secretary, Kate Bell, said recently:

"AI could have transformative potential, and if developed properly, workers can benefit from the productivity gains this technology may bring." She added: "The alternative is bleak. Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced, and shareholders get richer." (Guardian, 27 August 2025) 

Cleverness unconstrained by wisdom may yet be the downfall of our species. AI might usefully be regarded as humanity's attempt to outsource our own most distinctive feature, perhaps best represented by that traditional cartoon of a man sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. Over my working life I have witnessed several waves of happily-employed, ordinary, decent people being made redundant and their lives rendered purposeless by technology; some of it, I'm ashamed to say, implemented by me. It sometimes seems that clever technologists will not rest until the last opportunity to enjoy a meaningful life through work has been eliminated.

Obviously, a "wot I fink" piece on a blog that, without exaggeration, is nothing more than a tiny slip of paper hidden under a small rock in an enormous quarry full of similar rocks is not going to be changing any tech-titan's mind, but we do what we can, don't we? Besides, I expect the collapse of the global economy will make the case more effectively than I can. However, I thought it might be worth adding a few words about my point that "people are the point".

I've been watching episodes of Digging For Britain, a BBC TV series of round-ups of the latest archaeological discoveries, presented by my second favourite professor, Alice Roberts. Fun as they are to watch, the episodes are quite formulaic. At some point, Prof Roberts will kneel, Hamlet-style, in the dirt beside an excavation and – gazing at some skeletal remains or some time-worn and rusty bling, buried by or dropped from the leaky pockets of our forebears – she will deliver some well-informed words about prominent supraorbital ridges and worn joints. But, unlike Hamlet, she can have no idea whose remains or lost property she is contemplating.

Similarly, in that graveyard scene we hear Hamlet reflect, "To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?". In imagination, yes; but archaeology instead finds a bunghole, and is unable to hazard any guess as to whose dust might be filling it. It's a roundabout, one-way trip from corpse to clay – apparently a cloud of red Saharan dust is due to pass over us in Britain this very week – and imagination is all we have to link Humpty Dumpty with the mess of eggshell unearthed among the rubble of what seems to have once been a wall. [1]

But surely few things are as poignant as the ruined skeleton of some unknown individual, interred with varying degrees of ceremony centuries or millennia ago and now exposed to view on a popular TV programme – bad teeth, characteristic syphilitic bone damage, and all – simply in order to be cleaned  up, measured, analysed, and stored in a box in an overfull warehouse somewhere. To this favour we must come...

So, as we get older, those of us prone to fits of reflection may find ourselves wondering, what is the point of all this?

Me, too! Apparently it was made by CPO, Worthing, UK (poster bottom left),

who seems to take August off

Generation upon generation of suffering humanity – and the skeletal evidence demonstrates abundantly that this is more than just a trite expression – have been comforted by stories about an afterlife to be enjoyed in assorted Happy Hunting Grounds or, for the wrong 'uns, frightened into better behaviour by the prospect of Hot Hells of Eternal Torment. The point was to ensure you got the right stamp in your eternal passport, as determined and supervised by the Belief Police. It's hard for us 21st century sophisticates to grasp, but those beliefs were real enough for, say, 16th century sophisticates to literally go to the stake over them. You? No, me neither.

Countless thousands upon thousands of bodies have been laid to rot in peace in that most secure of storage facilities, the solid ground of Britain itself. Every episode of Digging For Britain shows that, once you scrape the surface to start work on something like a new housing estate pretty much anywhere on our islands, ancient burial grounds will be revealed. Call for the archaeologists! But for all their efforts, we have little to no understanding of what beliefs were held within those empty skulls, not least those found in so-called "deviant burials" – heads ritually decapitated, and placed in the grave at the owner's feet – but we can be sure that what we're seeing is the work of the Belief Police, keeping society in check by enforcing certain useful shared fantasies about an afterlife, however bizarre.

But, to return to Hamlet, his most famous soliloquy becomes rather meaningless, once that "dread of something after death" has faded away. [2] Quite apart from a precipitous decline in religious belief, we are the first generations to know – as a matter of plausible scientific fact, not baseless belief – that our planet itself will be rendered uninhabitable in about a billion years by the sun's expansion, if not sooner, and that beyond that lies the prospect of the "heat death" of the entire universe. I mean, really, sub specie aeternitatis, and minus any belief in an afterlife, what is the fucking point? So go ahead, Hamlet, mate, pick up that knife and make your own "quietus". Why not? Even though you've never carried a fardel, whatever that is, in your entire privileged (albeit fictional) life. BTW, seen Ophelia lately?

Which is all pretty depressing. But enter humanism – hooray! – stage left, to rescue the idea of there being a point to it all, after all: people.

Alice Roberts happens to be one – a humanist, that is, as well as a striking example of a people – and is in fact a past President of Humanists UK, who define a humanist as someone who

Trusts to the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural (and is therefore an atheist or agnostic)

Makes their ethical decisions based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals

Believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.

Which is, admittedly – compared to the Nicene Creed, say – a bit on the woolly side. I mean, how are your Belief Police ever going to interrogate, torture, and execute people with that comfy chair of a catechism? Nonetheless, I suspect that considerably more of us in Britain are passive signatories to a humanist manifesto than to the stated beliefs of the Anglican Church. I mean, when you look an obviously brilliant man like former archbishop Rowan Williams, you have to think: Seriously? This is the imaginary ladder you chose to climb, all the way to the top? Idiotic hat and all?

So, look, I know you don't really expect me to divulge the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, at least free of charge (although I can reveal it's not "42"). But I will simply repeat my previous conclusion, putting it like this: the pursuit of maximum profit in the most "efficient" (i.e. people-less) way is a theology, and essentially anti-humanist in its disregard for "human wellbeing". AI is just the latest attempt to extract more profit for a few at the expense of the many under the false manifesto of "doing away with tedious, repetitive tasks", supposedly freeing us all up to be, I dunno, poets or something. And yet at the same time AI dangles distracting and supposedly time- and effort-saving baubles in front of us, saving us the tedious, repetitive chore of actually creating anything; "Hey, AI, write me a poem in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets about Rowan Williams' dark night of the soul after he met Alice Roberts". This is consumption disguised as creativity. Getting bored with that yet?

But the sort of work that 21st century sophisticates might regard as tedious and repetitive, dangerous even, is not necessarily seen that way by the people who actually do it, provided it is reasonably well-paid, comes with a pension, plus some flexibility in hours and time off. Not everybody wants to sit at home all day or in an office looking into a computer screen. As I wrote in a post, Trouble, all the way back in June 2009:

It's easy to dismiss the likes of the BNP across Europe as merely the ignorant politics of an underclass of unemployables – alienated, tattooed, violent, foul-mouthed and hedonistic – who resent the arrival of successive waves of the eminently employable; most recently, le plombier polonais. But the rise of this new underclass is really the bewildered, self-harming response of a vital stratum of our society to its perceived abandonment, and it's a shocking development to anyone who grew up in the working class of the 1950s and 60s. It didn't used to be like this.

"This" needs to be taken seriously. Very seriously. Above all, there has to be meaningful, decently-paid work (skilled and unskilled manual work, for the most part) for the legions of young, strong, not particularly bright people born in this country, or there will be trouble. Lots of trouble.

Or, as perhaps more succinctly put by Raoul Vaneigem:

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

The Revolution of Everyday Life

1. I notice many diggers on the programme wear ironic t-shirts, some bearing this definition: "Archaeologist: someone who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge".

2. I've mentioned this before, but as an ultimate example of meaninglessness, consider the fact that the words "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ..." can – improbably, unbelievably, outrageously – be arranged into an anagram: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..." (The author of this anagram has apparently been identified as Cory Scott Calhoun). Actually, it does have a meaning of sorts: get a life...

More Mysterious Barricades

As will be obvious to anyone who has been visiting this blog for a while, I am something of a connoisseur of barrier-tapes, fences, and improvised obstacles of all kinds. I can only speculate why this is the case. Do I feel shut out or shut in in some literal or metaphorical sense? Not especially. Do I have gnostic intimations of a hidden reality beyond this one? Kinda sorta, usually on wet Mondays. Have I been blocked by circumstance, background, and prejudice – not to mention personality, preferences, and life choices – from achieving significant goals in life? Well, no more than most (which is to say: yes, of course...). We can't all be [insert your own unrealised ambition]. Although I think my problem (or saving grace?) has been more that I never could settle on which of a number of unrealised ambitions I should have pursued relentlessly and ruthlessly, with no regard to the consequences to the health and happiness of friends, family, and the world in general. You're welcome!

Many years ago now, in 2009, I made a little book I called The Mysterious Barricades, featuring photographs of various ineffective, odd, or imagined barriers I had encountered in the landscape. As I wrote then:

This series of photographs takes its name from a short keyboard piece by François Couperin (1669-1733), Les Barricades Mistérieuses. A recording by Angela Hewitt has been described as "a beautiful, undulating meditation on cycles of fifths and chord changes in B flat". No one knows to what the title refers, but I am by no means the first to borrow it, and it will resonate with anyone who has, at some time in their life, felt the frustration of unseen barriers, or encountered inexplicable or apparently pointless obstacles.

Now, I should confess that I first came across and appropriated this title after reading a description of that Couperin piece in William Wharton's novel Last Lovers. [1] It seemed a perfect fit for that series of pictures, which became one of my first Blurb books, and also one of the last uses I would make of my photographs made on film. I scanned the negatives, mainly colour medium-format film, converted them to monochrome, and imposed a circular framing onto them, in imitation of / tribute to Emmet Gowin's early work where he used a lens that was, technically speaking, too small for the 4" x 5" format, and therefore projected a circular image onto the view camera's rectangular negative.

However, my ability to convert colour images to monochrome at that time was nowhere near as good as it is now, and I was never very happy with the book, anyway, so didn't give it much exposure. Its legacy lives on, however, and I seem still to find mysterious barricades everywhere. The ones in this post are all from January and February this year.

As I have now reminded myself of that book, however, I decided to put The Mysterious Barricades onto Issuu as a PDF flipbook, which you can see by clicking the image below (as usual choose a "full screen" view, to lose the adverts, etc.).

Just for good measure, I have also added another little book of a similar vintage, which contains a mix of film images processed in the same way as those in The Mysterious Barricades and some early digital images, and which – ostensibly, at least – treats another subject that has attracted me over the years, crows. N.B. at the very end of this book there is a joke which – although long experience reveals that not many seem to find it as amusing as I do – is, in its way, a Great Teaching.

1. William Wharton, by the way, was a very fine writer whose work seems to have vanished from view. His first novel Birdy was once famous because of the film made of it by Alan Parker, but if you're looking for something new to read I'd urge you to try Dad or A Midnight Clear. Both outstanding books in my reckoning, FWIW. In fact, I'm going to dig them out and re-read them myself.

Didn't It Rain, Children...

 Despite the fact that it hasn't stopped raining for weeks – some parts of the West Country have had rain every day so far this year – we spent last weekend in our Bristol flat, really just for a change of scene. The drive on the M4 motorway was positively apocalyptic, however, both going up and coming back. At times, the intensity of the rain was astonishing: pounding on the roof of the car it sounded like gravel was being emptied over us, and even when it had slackened off the constant spray from the wheels of all the other vehicles was severely impairing visibility, with the wipers struggling to clear a view through the windscreen.

So the drive required complete concentration – there are some very bad and inconsiderate drivers out there, who have clearly never come across or understood terms like "stopping distance" or "aquaplaning" – but very occasionally I'd sneak a look sideways, and the contrast between the roiling tunnel of spray along the motorway and the placid countryside, with its intensely, um, saturated colours under a heavy downpour on either side was remarkable. Rain in a muddy field and rain on a busy motorway are radically different experiences, separated by a few yards and a fence. It would probably make a great drone shot, if drones can even fly in such weather.

Frequent spells of heavy rain do mean great clouds, though, much appreciated when I was out walking on the Downs or along the Avon Gorge. For a guy once notorious for the absence of skies in his photos, I've become something of a cloud fanatic. Unless there's something interesting going on up there, I'm less inclined to take the photo. Give me empyrean drama, please, not boringly bland blue or grey skies.

It's clear there is some sort of geothermal action going on in parts of the Gorge; I suppose the name Hotwells is a clue. It doesn't have to have been raining for large plumes of water vapour to rise up from certain spots in Leigh Woods on the far side of the Avon, opposite our fourth-floor kitchen window. When I first saw these I assumed they were the fires of people camped out in the woods, as they always seemed to come from the same places. Confusingly, smoke does also rise up from time to time, presumably from foresters' bonfires, but "steam is white, smoke is grey", I seem to recall someone, probably my father, saying at some point in my childhood. I remain puzzled, however, how even tiny individual clouds, barely more than wisps of water vapour, can be dark grey in an otherwise cloudless sky; I will have to look it up one of these days. Summink t'do wiv refraction, I expect. Maybe my old friend Science Man will intervene.

Of course, frequent outbreaks of heavy rain also mean that the few people out on the Downs – togged-up plodders with dogs, joggers, and the odd dogged blogging photog (heh, sorry, couldn't resist that) – have the entire space more or less to themselves. Even the designated viewpoints, normally busy with visiting sightseers, were deserted: you can just about make out the Clifton Suspension Bridge at the far end of the Gorge in the photo below.

But that's quite enough rain for now, thank you very much. Let's hope that those slick roads and puddled pavements don't freeze over, and some sunshine gets a chance to work its alchemy first, transmuting leaden skies into bright, beautiful cloudscapes.

Ephemeral

I was in the mood for a bit of experimentation, so I decided to combine into a single text the "two-part rant" Original Print that I referred to in a recent post, edit it a bit, and create a cheap Blurb booklet from the result. You can see it here on my Blurb bookstore, or (probably better) as an Issuu flipbook (go for "full screen" to lose the adverts, etc.):

This struck me as a neat way to highlight and preserve some of my better posts, particularly the ones that are text-heavy and argumentative; a sort of pamphleteering. With over 2,000 posts to choose from, there's plenty of scope for more of the same. It must surely be a troubling thought at the back of the mind of any blogger (or, these days, substacker) who has put serious time and energy into their efforts that they are only as permanent as the platform they're made on. As I've mentioned before, I do send a copy of everything I have self-published to my old college library, and – so far – they haven't refused to take any of them, but these 2000+ posts will sooner or later vanish, leaving not a rack behind.

Sadly, though, Blurb's high shipping charges [1] mean that even a very cheap publication becomes prohibitively expensive to buy – in the UK, at least – so I'll continue to offer free-to-view flipbook versions on Issuu of all my Blurb efforts. You lucky people! In some ways these are better than a paper copy, it's true, although how long either Blurb or the Issuu platform will continue to be available (or affordable) is anybody's guess. We live in an increasingly ephemeral world.

BTW, I added this little illustrative two-page Appendix to the Original Print text, which you may find interesting:

If nothing else, it suggests how much thought and work can go into creating a digital image from a simple starting point. Although in its final version this one is relatively simple – just five layers altering or adding to the original scraperboard image – more recent projects may have thirty or more interacting layers.

That is, assuming an image is not AI-generated, of course. I probably should have added a paragraph or two about AI image-generation to that Original Print text, but I've never used AI, don't intend to, and consequently have nothing of value to say about it, other than the well-justified fear that people who do use it will royally fuck things up for us honest hard-working digital picture-makers, simply by reinforcing the prejudice that already exists. Troublingly, I notice that in recent times ChatGPT is listed among the regular visitors to this blog. I also simply don't believe that I have had 14,800 genuine page-views in the last seven days. These surely must mainly have been robotic scrapers, spammers, and whatever other allied AI-adjacent trades there are crawling all over my "content". Similarly, it seems Chinese robots (at least, I presume that's what they are, not actual, you know ... Chinese people) can't get enough of my webpage, which I have rather neglected and has remained unchanged for quite some time: 74 visits from China in the past 30 days, for example, compared to 7 from the UK or 6 from the USA. Nothing new to see here, comrade robots, please move along.

So, when it comes to the urge to make something more permanent out of these blog posts, readers of long-standing may recall that back in 2020 I had begun to produce a series of "best of" publications (see the post Idiotic Hat Selections 1 & 2). However, I soon gave up on that vainglorious project, partly due to a complete lack of interest [sad face emoji], but also because I had found that it was possible to save an entire year's worth of posts, images and all, as a PDF file via various "blog to book" services; something, moreover, that I recently discovered I can easily do for myself and entirely cost free. [2]

Consequently, I began to save compilations of these PDF files onto DVD as The Idiotic Hat Annuals. See, for example, the 2018 post Ten Idiotic Years, marking this blog's 10th anniversary, with files made using a slightly unsatisfactory (but cheap!) "blog to book" service, which is now, inevitably, defunct. These DVDs will serve as a handy archive to set against the inevitable day that either Google withdraws the free Blogger service or I decide to stop blogging, whichever is the sooner. Although, in this ephemeral world, how long either DVDs or PDFs will remain readable is yet another digital "known unknown".

There's still really no long-term substitute for ink on paper, is there? How lucky we are that Shakespeare's chums decided to commit his plays to print, saving fully half – half! – of those 36 plays from oblivion: no First Folio would have meant no Macbeth, no Measure for Measure, no Tempest... By comparison, of course, a mere blog seems a little, what? Insubstantial? But then, as Dogberry says in Much Ado, comparisons are odorous, so, let's save whatever we can from the inevitable Great Digital Forgetting to come. Crank up the pamphleteering! [3]

DVD case insert (my design skills have improved since 2018...)

1. Before adding any "profit", a single copy of this 24 page, 13 x 20 cm paperback on "economy" paper costs £2.99. Excellent! But the shipping charge for a single copy is £9.99 (unless I need it urgently, in which case "priority" shipping is £23.99...). For two copies, the shipping charge is £12.23, and for five copies £18.95 (£41.92 priority), and so on. There are discounts for larger quantities – for example, to order 100 would bring the per copy price + shipping down to £3.21 – but that rather defeats the whole point of "on demand" publication: you would be back in the self-publisher's nightmare of having boxes of unsellable items under the bed, that you would have to market and "fulfil" yourself... Been there, done that: no thanks! "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity... What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" (Ecclesiastes 1). That Preacher bloke knew what he was talking about...

2. Any bloggers out there who want to know how to do this? Just send me an email and I'll explain. It's very simple, and requires no technical knowledge at all, although it probably does require the use of the Chrome browser.

3. And FFS do something about those precious photos on your phone! How ironic, if our selfie-crazed generations leave fewer images behind for posterity than their great-grandparents did...

Access All Areas

December 2013

I mentioned in a previous post that, following an external drive failure, I lost most of the image files I had made with a camera I had bought – second-hand, as usual, a Panasonic G3 – some time in the latter half of 2012, and which I was still using as my main camera during my Innsbruck residency in summer 2014. It was an excellent camera – still is – but shortly thereafter I made the move to Fuji, persuaded that the larger sensor would give even better results.

How much did I lose? Well, I save my files in monthly sub-directories ("folders", if you must), so there will have been something like twenty or more G3 folders on that disk, of which just four have survived, dating from October 2013 to January 2014. It was entirely my fault: instead of sending the failed drive straight to a professional recovery service, I attempted to do it myself. Duh. Luckily, some of the better photos have survived because I had saved them elsewhere; not least on the CD of exhibition-quality images I sent to Innsbruck in 2014 as a backup, just in case my box of eighty or so prints failed to arrive intact, on time, or at all. But many of the pictures you would have seen (still can see!) posted on this blog during those months from 2012 to 2014 have gone. [Sad face emoji...]

So I thought I'd take a nostalgic trawl through these surviving images, just to see what is still in there, and also what the subsequent decade-plus of experience in processing "raw" files might enable me to make of them now. At that time I was in my last year of working at the Southampton University library, and still taking more or less daily photo-excursions around the campus during my lunch hour. As so many have remarked, access is a photographer's most useful tool, and my staff ID card coupled with familiarity and curiosity were pretty much an "access all areas" pass and, if necessary, skeleton key. I doubt there were many people other than, say, the security and janitorial staff who knew the more interesting nooks and crannies of the Highfield Campus as well as I did in those days.

I'm sure I must have become a familiar curiosity on campus over the years, that bearded loony with the camera, although perhaps not on the scale of the sometime professor of mathematics who used to wander the place shouting incomprehensible greetings and occasionally losing his half-mast trousers, precariously belted with string. As a result, I rarely seemed to attract any unwanted attention when I was out and about, conducting my lunchtime photographic explorations in odd corners.

Graduation ceremony marquees, October 2013

I remember one day in April 2014, however, that was different. I was hunkered down inside my favourite telephone box one lunchtime, squinting through the viewfinder at the array of fresh tape-marks, stickers, and abrasions, all nicely backlit in the spring sunshine, when the door was pulled open. By malign coincidence, it seemed the one and only person on campus not in possession of a mobile phone wanted to use the pay-phone. "Sorry," I said, standing up, "I'll come out." "No, it's OK," he said, "I just wondered what you were doing?"

Now, I suppose it's possible that, from the outside, it may have looked a bit odd, suspicious even, to see a man squatting down inside a phone box. Phone boxes do sometimes get used for purposes other than telephonic communication, although rarely in broad daylight in the centre of a university campus. Nonetheless, it takes a certain kind of guileless curiosity actually to open a kiosk door simply in order to find out what someone who is clearly not on the phone might be doing in there. I must admit I was tempted to play the situation for laughs, but instead I waggled my camera, and said, cheerily, "Taking photographs!"  "But why? What on earth of?" he replied.

This is always a tricky one to negotiate. I could see he was genuinely baffled, and perhaps even concerned for my sanity. It's easy to forget quite how far beyond most people's conception of "normal" any photography is that does not involve close relatives, holidays, or safely-accredited subjects like sunsets, cute kittens, porn, etc. The beauty of a digital camera, however, is that you can show, not tell. "Here," I said, "Have a look", and put the camera into "chimping" mode. I showed him an image or two not unlike the ones below, taken a few months earlier.

I could see he wasn't convinced. Which was quite disappointing, and even a little insulting, so – with my best "Good day to you, sir!" expression – I firmly shut the door and carried on. There's none so blind as them as will not see, as the old folk used to say.

So, to double down on the nostalgia, this week I walked over to the campus for the first time in quite a while. I might look a bit scruffy and timeworn these days, but at least my trousers are secure. I used to go over there quite regularly as part of one of my walking circuits, but as the years passed I saw fewer and fewer familiar faces, and I began to feel like a ghost passing unseen through the lives of hundreds of young students, an ever increasing percentage of whom were now clearly Chinese.

This week I saw no one and nothing much that I recognised. "My" campus has pretty much gone: demolition and rebuilding have been non-stop during the past dozen years. The telephone boxes have gone, of course, but the whole look and feel of the place has changed, the way a house you used to live in will have changed after several subsequent inhabitants have altered and added and updated the place to their satisfaction. I remember hearing that the architects had been given a "nautical" brief (it's Southampton, geddit?) and much of the campus does now look as if various massive cruise ships have run aground. Of course, massive cruise ships actually look more like office blocks than ships, so that's perhaps not so surprising.

Oh, and my ID card no longer lets me through the library turnstiles. Do I care? I'm not sure that I do. To get in, I'd have to explain that, some twelve years ago, I was once a person of some substance hereabouts. "Cringe", is the word, I think. And besides:

Terrific... First you lose the TV remote...

Still, if you know where to look, there are still a few spots where the shop-worn pleasures of wabi sabi can be found; ageing 60s architecture, mainly – although the Faraday Building, once thought worthy of celebration on a stamp, is long gone – plus some tatty portakabins, that once served as stopgap offices, labs, and workspaces. No doubt they'll be gone soon, too. It may be some time before I come back again to find out.

Right is Wrong

Self-portrait in a convex mirror

David Hockney has this thing, explored at length in his book Secret Knowledge, about the use of optics by the Old Masters. When you look at his evidence, it's obvious that he's onto something, but – when you think about the practicalities of painting in oils in the centuries before electric light – it equally clearly can't explain everything that looks a bit "lensy", such as objects that appear to be out of focus. A painting isn't a passive reproduction of what can be seen via some lens-based viewing device. But lenses and projected images have been around for a long time, and it would be an odd artist who wasn't intrigued by them or who refused to take advantage of them.

When it comes to optically-assisted art, most people probably think of something like the camera obscura, a distinctly immobile set-up really only suitable for (very) still lifes, landscapes and the like. [1] There is one permanently installed in a small room at the top of a tower near to the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol, which – unless it is an uncharacteristically sunny day – projects a dim, rather uncanny live image of whatever is going on outside – traffic on the bridge and visitors admiring the Avon Gorge, mainly – onto a large white concave disc, around which a dozen or so people can stand in the darkened room, like a sort of optical seance. It's a little underwhelming, to be honest, and impossible to photograph (don't think I haven't tried).

But there is also a cunning and portable optical device known as the camera lucida which, in ordinary daylight, will display a virtual image of the subject, viewed through a prism, so that it appears to be projected onto a paper surface below, where it can be traced. I once had the opportunity to try one of these and, although it does take a bit of getting used to, it really can help to get a sketch onto paper quickly and accurately, so long as the subject doesn't move. The end result, obviously, is still entirely dependent on the user's drawing skills. There's a nice explanatory video on YouTube, made by a guy who 3D-printed his own version of a very portable camera lucida. It would be unfair to make any comment on his actual drawing skill.

I have no idea how much something like a camera lucida would actually have been used by artists – after all, the ability to draw from life was once a basic art-school discipline – but the convenience, sophistication, and simplicity of photography has clearly replaced any such optical devices, as well as, regrettably, diminishing the importance of life-drawing skill in much contemporary practice. Which has had consequences. I have to say it amuses me when I see amateurish photographic distortions – converging verticals, say – transcribed into their paintings by artists who have simply reproduced their own lens-based source material. You do have to wonder whether a certain feeling of shame about this semi-secret dependence on photographs – what, you can't draw from life? – may partly explain the ongoing prejudice in the art world against photography as an art medium (see my two-part rant Original Print).

Of course, the low angle of the rising or setting sun will cast images of a shadowy sort onto any suitable surface, most noticeably at this time of year in northern latitudes. It makes you very aware of how photography was prefigured, in principle, before anyone worked out how to preserve such evanescent projections as these, that solidify, shift, and fade with the changing mood of the sunlight. Plato's allegory of the cave might well be seen as an early imagining of the camera obscura; we might even say that our modern-day obsession with the images and dubious information laid before us on our various screens makes Plato's actual philosophical point more acutely. That is, that we mistake those pretty shadows for the Real Thing, and are deludedly happy to go on doing so.

Now, I've had the following rant before but, seeing as we're talking about optics and old masters, I think it's worth indulging in again. You may know the highly-regarded poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery, and the painting by Parmigianino on which it is based. Well, whether you do or not, I invite you to consider that poem's opening lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.

Now consider Parmigianino's painting:


Um, the right hand?? It strikes me that someone should have had a quiet word with Mr. Ashbery before the poem was published. Too late now. As a proudly left-handed man, this peculiar error has brought me to a spluttering halt every time I have attempted to read this lengthy and difficult poem. I mean, honestly! If you're going to be making clever play with mirror tropes, this would be a good one to get right, right from the start.

I know... I'm aware that this does make me sound like one of those pedants who couldn't watch the film Zulu because Lieutenant Bromhead (Michael Caine) uses a Webley Mk. VI rather than the Adams Mk. III actually used by officers at Rorke's Drift, or because so many extras are using anachronistic Lee-Enfield rifles in place of Martini-Henrys (no, not that sort of martini or that sort of Henry, idiot). Although TBH there are much better reasons for not watching that film. But these things matter... Don't they?

OK, maybe not so much in a film, where anachronisms and improbabilities abound – why is everyone always so effin' good-looking, and with such perfect teeth, for a start? – but it surely casts doubt on a major poet's powers of observation if he doesn't get something quite so elementary right (especially when it's indisputably left...). It's very strange. But the even stranger thing, though, is that I seem to be the only person ever to have noticed this, or at least thought it worthy of comment (although I'd be happy to be corrected in that regard, if you happen to know better). I have even checked by practical experiment whether, by some optical wizardry, a convex mirror reflects differently to a regular one (it doesn't, although a concave mirror is another matter altogether). [2]

Perhaps all poetry commentators and critics are right-handed, or try never to look at themselves in a mirror? It wouldn't surprise me. Or perhaps they just think, Hmm, that's odd, must be deliberate, Ashbery's no fool... I wonder what he can have meant by that?

Experimental proof: this leftie's self-portrait in a convex mirror

1. Photographer Abelardo Morell has invented a travelling camera obscura tent, with which he photographs the scene outside the tent as projected onto the ground inside. The resulting images can be very intriguing indeed.

2. One possible explanation: The poem was published in August 1974. Is it possible Ashbery saw the painting reproduced in a book in which the image had been flipped horizontally, either accidentally or on purpose? It does happen. AFAIK Parmigianino's painting was not reproduced in the early editions of Ashbery's book of the same name, whereas – tauntingly – it is now routinely put on the cover.

January 2014

Southampton University campus

Southampton University campus

Southampton University campus

A photo I took on New Year's Day on Clevedon Pier reminded me of one I had taken some years previously, featuring two women silhouetted in a bus shelter in Brighton. Seeking it out in my backfiles I finally discovered it in one of the few surviving folders of image files taken with my Panasonic G3, most of which were lost in a hard drive failure. The pictures in this post are all from that folder, dating from January 2014.

In retrospect, January 2014 was a major turning point in my life. Both of our children were away at university, I was a month away from my 60th birthday and just six months from taking early retirement in the summer, when I would also be having a second solo exhibition of my photography and a 10-day residency in Innsbruck, Austria. I think I could have been forgiven for feeling a certain cautious optimism about the coming years. I would finally have time, motive, and opportunity. The prospect of a modest late-life, alternative career didn't seem unrealistic.

Brighton bus shelter

Brighton seafront

I don't think you have to have "experimented" with psychotropic substances of any sort to have sometimes experienced a certain overwhelming feeling of impending revelation, a conviction that the veil of appearances is about to be lifted to reveal the true nature and workings of the world. Or maybe you do. Whatever, that's the sort of feeling that comes back when I look back at these photographs; you probably see them rather differently. Similar veils, screens, reflections, and Platonic shadows have always been a recurring feature in my photography. However, so far at least, what has been revealed behind them has been nothing more than pipes, wires, and scaffolding. Perhaps that's all there is, and the world is simply what it seems to be? I'm not sure whether that's comforting or deeply disappointing.

Brighton seafront

Brighton seafront

Brighton seafront

As it happens, this piled clutter of pillars and fixings is what was recovered of Brighton's West Pier, after it was destroyed in 2003 by a great storm and two arson attacks, and then carefully sorted and stashed beneath the seafront boardwalk, like skeletal remains awaiting some future resurrection. Or perhaps it's more like some enormously complex assembly kit for which the instructions have gone missing. Lots of luck with that... One fully-functioning pier is quite enough, really.

Turnstable Country

As a birthday celebration for my partner, we went up to London last weekend to see the exhibition Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals at Tate Britain with our two children and their partners. I don't know whether it's a symptom of advancing age or an impatience with the desire of our national art institutions to pack 'em in (both pictures and visitors) as often as possible, but I have to say I am not very keen on these so-called "blockbuster" exhibitions. As I wrote in the post Go Van Gogh, following a visit to the National Gallery's Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers show:

All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."

I mean, I enjoy a top-quality Constable or Turner as much as anybody, but to trudge through room after room after room of not dissimilar paintings, a good 80% of which fall somewhat short of "masterpiece" status, eventually becomes a negative experience. The first couple of rooms always feel revelatory – Good grief, Turner was sixteen when he painted that? – but thereafter most shows are bogged down by the curatorial desire to impose some thematic orchestration, in this case to construct a parallel narrative out of the lives of what were, in the end, two rather different professional painters trying to make a living in a very different world to ours. In those days you were entirely dependent on sales and patronage: there were no grants or lucrative prizes to reward your personal artistic "genius", not even for turning the lights on and off, or letting gallery visitors remove your clothes with scissors.

In the end, it can feel a bit too much like being trapped inside a catalogue raisonné, and I, at least, always find myself looking for small visual pleasures as a relief from the, um, bigger picture superimposed by the curators. Which Constable paintings show swallows skimming the water? for example. Or amusing trivia: I enjoyed the name of this particular donor, for example:

E. Farquhar Buzzard... Now there's someone who must have had some character-building experiences at school. Or, look, here's yer actual John Constable's collapsible sketching chair on a plinth:

Very nice... Don't think I wasn't tempted to hop up and give it a try.

Which is not to say that the exhibition didn't have an effect on me. On a very brief visit to Mottisfont Abbey on Saturday I seemed to be walking through a landscape of just the sort conjured up on canvas by the painters of that time. The light and the clouds were exhilarating – all four of these photographs were taken within a single 20 minute period – even though the meadows were very marshy underfoot, and almost impassable in places. What wouldn't the likes of Turner or Constable have given for a device that could sketch a view with such fidelity in just 1/200th of a second? But then, what wouldn't you give to be able to sketch like a Constable or a Turner?