Side By Side By Somewhere

Penybont Common under fog

Moon over St. Catherine's Hill

I have a long-standing interest in presenting my photographs in combinations – diptychs, triptychs, and even lotsaptychs – going right back to my first exhibited efforts in the 1990s. This was always a partly practical and partly aesthetic undertaking. Back then, digital images (whether scanned from film or originated in early digital cameras) were either very small or of such dubious quality that they could only be printed relatively small. But putting two or more such small images together in a frame seemed to produce a result that was nearly always more than the sum of its parts as an object of visual interest. My recently revisited book Pentagonal Pool is perhaps the best example of this approach. Obviously, the quality of digital imaging has improved so dramatically over the past couple of decades that there is no longer any practical necessity to do this, but the aesthetic effect retains its impact, I think.

As (yet another) lockdown project, I have been looking through my backfiles for adjacent images, taken either deliberately or fortuitously, that might be combined into a sort-of panorama. As I explained in an earlier post (Elevation), a "proper" panoramic image merged from several photos needs to take parallax issues into account, which would ideally involve the use of a tripod and a special "nodal slider". But the sort of casually-taken photos I was looking for can never really be joined together seamlessly, even though they can look just as good simply placed next to each other. In fact, as I also said in that earlier post, I may even prefer this, and it somehow seems more honest, too. I did manage to find quite a few that combined successfully in this way, mainly as classic landscape panoramas, but in the process of searching for them I became even more interested in the non-landscape pairings that were lying waiting to be noticed in the backfiles. In particular, I was drawn to the many shots I have made over the years of 2-D surfaces like walls, hoardings, and windows.

When I say "many", I mean many. I really like flat surfaces, especially those where weather, wear and tear, graffiti, vandalism, and other mark-making human activities have transformed something as essentially bland as a painted hoarding into a multi-layered site of visual stimulation; to use the modish term, they become a palimpsest of interventions. So, when I see a good one, I photograph it, and, like anyone who photographs in public spaces, I had to learn long ago how to ignore or repel the comments and approaches of passers-by (although I did run into a spot of bother with the Metropolitan Police when snapping near Downing Street a couple of years ago during a top level terror alert; my bad, as the young people say). Most people are genuinely baffled by the sight of someone photographing what is so obviously nothing.

But it's the nothing that is now something because it has been photographed and, more to the point as far as I am concerned, photographed by me. I'm not attracted to these places because of what they are, but because of what and who I am, and how they speak to whatever it is that constitutes "me". I imagine I'm not the only artist-photographer to whom well-meaning friends send their own photos of his characteristic subject matter, misunderstanding the difference between a photograph of something and a picture made from something, especially when the "something" itself is of little or no intrinsic interest. I don't mind: it's nice to have friends who can be bothered! What does really annoy me, however, is when self-appointed commentators, confronted with the sort of abstract "street" photography that lacks any obvious human interest – of which there is a solid tradition, from Paul Strand and Harry Callahan onwards – reach for the condescending formula that, in summary, goes: "this work helps to open our eyes to the little things we fail to notice in our everyday lives".

Frankly, I could not care less whether some art-world spectator notices stuff or not: I am not a therapist for myopic critics who can only see what is in front of them when it has been pointed out by someone else. Besides, the chances are that their head is so far up their own arse that they still won't see what is really there, even when it is framed, on a wall right in front of them, labelled and price tagged, either. Because it is not the thing that reflected the light into the camera when the moment of magic happened, and has undergone many further Tempest-uous sea-changes since into something rich and strange, and is now another tiny offering dropped into the mighty river of human seeing and making that began somewhere upstream of the caves of Lascaux and Altamira.