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.