The Windows of Eden

Before the Pentagonal Pool, there was the university's Valley Garden. On the same backup drive where I recently found the original "Dry Light" exhibition files I also found a directory I had called "Glass & Ice" which, among other glassy and icy subjects, contains about 100 photographs I'd taken in the early years of this century in and around the semi-derelict glasshouses in the Valley Garden.

I have described this little Eden before, and my eventual expulsion from it, and this is also not the first time I've rediscovered the photographs taken in there: some kind of "Garden" project has always been on the cards, although it has somehow proved elusive. This cache is a true goldmine, however, because it gathers together photographs that explore a single aspect: the sheer visual pleasure of neglected panes of glass as a 2D surface, whether cracked, covered in condensation, or veiling the mysteries that lie beyond. These may yet be the key that finally unlocks that much-postponed "Garden" book.

Now, anyone who follows photography will be aware what a cliché this has become. Fay Godwin's wonderful little book Glassworks & Secret Lives (Stella Press, 1998) consolidated the genre, along with John Blakemore's rather more claustrophobic still lifes in Inscape (Zelda Cheatle, 1991) and The Stilled Gaze (Zelda Cheatle, 1994), and in its own way Keith Arnatt's Rubbish and Recollections (Oriel Mostyn, 1989) defined a relevant visual language. Of course, in those essentially pre-Web days, one didn't really know what was going on in the wider world, except by stumbling across books or features in magazines. I'll never forget walking up London's Charing Cross Road in 1998 and being stopped in my tracks by the limited edition hardback of Glassworks & Secret Lives on display in the shop window of Shipley's Art Bookshop. On going inside and opening a copy, I'm pretty sure I exclaimed FUCK!! on seeing the pictures inside: I had been convinced I was working a highly original vein of imagery. Than which, of course, no greater illusion exists in the world of photography: someone, somewhere, has already done everything. Everything. Not necessarily better, though, and definitely not through your eyes: originality of subject matter is never really the point.

So, never mind: these are still satisfying photographs in their own right with which, for whatever reasons, I failed to do anything at the time, but which still possess whatever longer-term merits they had then.  All of them were taken using either an Olympus C5050 (5MP compact) or a Canon EOS 350D (8MP DSLR), and I am impressed by the quality of those 8MP Canon files, in particular. They may only be printable to A4 size at a native 300 dpi, but they are beautifully soft and clean – virtually no "noise" at all – with that subtle Canon colour fidelity I had forgotten about. Of course, the intervening 15 years of experience in processing digital images means I have been able to make a far better job of making pictures out of them, too. Maybe their time has finally come.