Tranquility

Two companionable crows admire the sunset

Ah, tranquility! A state much sought after, and best achieved without the aid of tranquilisers if you can manage it; there's lots of tranquility outside, if you just go and look. But, of course, you must do whatever you need to do, in order to stabilise your boat in rough seas, walk that tightrope, keep those plates spinning, or whatever your metaphor of choice is, especially at this stressful time of year. Why do we do this to ourselves?

So do go easy on the alcohol an' that if you're no longer young and stupid: I know it can take some of us a very long time to figure out that they really don't help as much as we think in the tranquility stakes. Actually, my advice is to go easy especially if you're young and stupid. I don't know about you, but I am so grateful mobile phones with video capability were still a Sci Fi fantasy in my younger days. It really doesn't bear thinking about. It's bad enough being remembered as an idiot, but for there to be irrefutable evidence...

So, look, if you're in need of calming down just now, I think I can help. Here's one of the best Joni Mitchell covers I know, Madeleine Peyroux and K.D. Lang duetting on a very laid-back version of "River". Give it a go:

Or how about this fado-ised version of "A Case of You" by Ana Moura:

Tranquility restored, I hope, even if by means of two beautifully sad songs.

BTW, that unusual instrument doing the dulcimer fills from Mitchell's original is a "Portuguese guitar" (as opposed to a Portuguese guitar), a sort of hybrid of a 12-string guitar and a mandolin, and a descendant of the mediaeval cittern as used by troubadours, themselves the distant forebears of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell. That curious fan-like cluster of rods at the end of the fingerboard are actually the tuners for the twelve strings, an 18th century innovation known (in Britain, anyway) as Preston tuners.

OTOH, if you've overdone the tranquilising and what you're in need of is a bit of livening up, why not give this a try: OK Santa, a contender for Best Christmas Single Ever if ever there was one – admittedly never a strong pool of candidates – from someone definitely in need of a little tranquilising himself, probably with a dart gun from a safe distance, John Otway. Warning: you may not be able to get that catchy tune out of your head for days. And, yes, that is a Sinclair C5.

My annual "book club" post has been taking a break for the past few years, as I have been attempting to moderate my book-buying habit, but I've had a bit of a relapse this year. I'm not going to own up to how big a relapse, so I'll simply recommend these two:

Starlings, by Jem Southam (raft, 2025)

Longer-term readers will know that I have admired the work of Jem Southam for many years, and indeed have been on Christmas-card terms with the great man (simper...) since doing a workshop at Duckspool in 1995. I confess my heart sank a little when this volume was announced: the spectacle of so-called murmurations of starlings gathering to roost has become something of a photographic cliché in recent years, but – having seen the work collected as Four Winters when it was exhibited in Bristol's RWA in January 2023 – it seemed likely he might have something of his own to add.

Indeed, as expected, the photographs in this book, all from one dark December afternoon in 2023, share a strong family resemblance to that body of work: on the edge of darkness starlings gather, flicker over sombre reed beds, and settle for the night. Southam is not one for the jaw-dropping image, unless your jaw is dropped by subtlety of tone, mood, and composition. So, rather than yet another series of spectacular murmuration displays, this is a record of an atmosphere, that same dim, frigid light that was captured so well in Four Winters.

But a really good book is always more than its contents: it is a physical object to be held in the hands, and so its design and materials matter. This one (I have the soft-bound version) has got it just right: large, but not too large to handle (27.5 x 32.5 cm), tactile, and beautifully designed and printed. Unlike far too many photo-books these days, it demands to be held and admired as an object of delight. Highly recommended.

Selfie time! Jem Southam is the one on the right

Near Dark, by Chris Dorley-Brown (Dewi Lewis, 2025)

You may recall that back in June I was encouraging you to sign up for the Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of this book by Chris Dorley-Brown. It finally arrived in November, and was worth the wait. In a way, it's an urban version of Southam's crepuscular work: London streets caught entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) as the French say, at that in-between time when the day relaxes, darkness gathers, and the lights come on (cue Angelo Badalamenti's theme music to Twin Peaks). It has always been a favourite time of day for me, a time for waiting for buses, after-work shopping, and anticipation of the evening to come, and Dorley-Brown renders it superbly with the granular detail only a large-format camera can capture.

If you get hold of a copy (which you should) you will notice my name and that of at least one reader of this blog listed in the back as Kickstarter contributors. Well done us! As my special edition "extra" I chose the print of the Regent Street angel:

Regent Street 2021, Chris Dorley-Brown

We'll soon be going away for our customary end of year procession around south-west England: Southampton to Dorset for Christmas, then Bristol for New Year. Sadly (for us), our favoured Dorset rental has now gone off the market – people may actually be living in it, which is good, really, I suppose – so we'll be trying out another one. Who knows, it might be even better! We will have wi-fi, so I might post the odd seasonal reflection or photograph, but if I get very tranquil I also might not.

So thank you for continuing to read this blog, especially those of you who take the trouble to comment, whether publicly on the blog or privately via email (although not you, you annoying fake-comment spammers, who seem to be slipping through a lot more lately), and let's hope for a better, more peaceful year in 2026! Even if that ████ Trump will want to take the credit for it... (oops, there goes my US visa!).

A reminder of spring, for those who like that sort of thing.

(our back garden, March 2025)

The Last Time I Saw Richard

Alice Neel, Richard, 1980

 Oil on canvas. 111.8 x 76.2 cm, 44 x 30 in

⁣ © The Estate of Alice Neel.

The bright white light that falls from above directly on to his face and chest, the Mediterranean blue polo shirt and the stripey seat back, are all evocative of the positive mood that pervades Neel’s magnificent image of Richard… all around his form she paints a bright blue outline, like an electric blue current, containing him, protecting him, emphasising his presence in the world.

Dr Minna Moore Ede, quoted from the publication Alice Neel: There's Still Another I See, 2022

Really? OK, Mike, take a deep breath. Count to ten. Exhale... Maybe do it once or twice more.

So... I have borrowed the painting above, and the quote, from an email sent to me by the Victoria Miro Gallery, of London and Venice, announcing their participation in an upscale art market that goes by the name Art Basel Miami Beach (now there's a confusing car-crash of locations). This painting is prominently displayed as the lead image in the mail, so is clearly intended as a statement of the gallery's values, prestige, and sophistication. Alice Neel (1900-1984) is clearly having a (very) posthumous moment.

Now, setting aside any biographical stuff about Neel's career and troubled life (read the Wikipedia page if you want to know about that), is this indeed a "magnificent image", as declared by Dr. Minna Moore Ede? Or is it even a competent painting? Perhaps what would appear to be its cartoonish distortions of anatomical proportions, and disregard for conventions of paint handling and composition are actually precisely the features that make it magnificent?

As I'm sure you know, I am a scrupulously fair-minded man, who likes to give the new and strange a chance to sink in and do its thing, but I have to say, so far, I don't get it. I admit I have never understood the late style of Philip Guston, either, who seems to lie somewhere at the the origins of this particular approach to painting, which (if my grasp of the art-historical chain of influence is correct) has also led us to the deliberately "naive" work of highly-regarded contemporary artists like Eileen Cooper, Rose Wylie, Chantal Joffe, or Humphrey Ocean, Royal Academicians all. There is clearly something going on here – a rejection of the elitism of talent and mere skill? An expression of the "female gaze"? A celebration of the primary-school art-room look? – but I don't know what it is. Call me Mr. Jones. Actually, don't: he's coming up next.

Rose Wylie exhibition "Let It Settle", Gallery at Windsor 2020.

Let it sink in...

For me, Rose Wylie is something of a test case. Here's the opening paragraph of a review of a solo exhibition of her work in 2017:

This is how Rose Wylie paints the sun. She does a big yellow circle. Then she adds straight yellow lines around it. Underneath she does a couple of palm trees that are brown sticks with dollops of green on top. On the sea, she adds an outline of a ship with black smoke puffing out of it.

The teacher gave her a gold star and pinned it on the classroom wall. His name is Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the nursery is called the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. The exhibition is called Quack Quack. Oh, and young Rose is 83.

Yup. That's about it. The reviewer, Jonathan Jones, should probably also have mentioned that her paintings are not "dolloped" onto a sheet of sugar paper, but fill enormous wall-sized canvases. But wait, here are two of his final paragraphs: 

Wylie is in no danger of the workhouse as her paintings are highly collectable. Several works here have been lent by wealthy Russians. Is it all a bit of a scam? She is not genuinely naive, let alone a child. She went to art college. Is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?

Anywhere but Britain, I might think so. Yet the sad truth is that we still need the shit kicking out of our staid, conservative artistic tradition. For all the Turner prizes and the Grayson Perry TV shows, when it comes to painting we still queue up to admire the correctly painted swimming pools of Mr Hockney. We still expect painters to do a proper, hard-working job.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian 29/11/17

I'm not a fan of the shit-kicking Mr. Jones, who strikes me as one of those commentators who thrive on a rather superficial and bitchy contrarianism. I'm not sure why he dislikes Hockney so much – lately more than willing to resort to this primary-school aesthetic himself – and I note that he's also a major fanboy of Tracey Emin (not sure whether he has reviewed the tea-towels?). So let's take another deep breath and have a closer look at all this.

You can see his point about the suspicion that it's all "a terribly sophisticated put-on", even if he doesn't think it is. It bears mentioning that Wylie's husband, Roy Oxlade, was also a painter in much the same slap-dash faux-naive style. As it says in Oxlade's obituary, "apparently wild, spontaneous brushwork, bold colour and improvised images characterise his distinctive style". Note the way that the writer has attached "apparently" to "wild, spontaneous" there. Perhaps to be taken seriously as Art, rather than just therapeutic fun, such mark-making has to be seen as intentional, and not really as wild and spontaneous as it might appear? How you can tell the difference I don't know, but admirers of this style seem to value precisely the contrast between a child-like spontaneity (or at least the appearance of it) and the more painstaking, more obviously accomplished sort of painting admired by those ignorant saps, the general public. Jonathan Jones again:

Painting is a wonderful, magic thing. That is why young children love doing it. Wylie has rediscovered in maturity the freedom with which we painted when we were kids.

Well, maybe. The "spontaneous wonderfulness of children's art" thing can be overdone. I admit I failed to learn to love the freedom with which our kids would make apparently wild and spontaneous crayon marks on the wallpaper, but it is also true that, like any proud parents of such self-evidently immensely talented children, we were sufficiently impressed by some of the work that came home from school that we framed several undoubted masterpieces:

In fact that last spontaneous effusion came home from nursery with its three-year-old maker and was taped to the back of the living-room door, thirty years ago, where it has remained to this day. But, let's be honest, fun as it might have been to make, and much as we love it, no wealthy Russian is going to be offering us thousands of pounds for it. There's more to "art" than uninhibited freedom of expression.

Besides, Alice Neel's portrait is hardly wild and free. If anything it's constipated, laboured over, as unfree as any Sunday painter's most painstakingly dull effort. Is it really pervaded by a "positive mood", as Minna Moore Ede claims? To my eye "Richard" exudes the sadness, repression, and anxiety of both artist and subject (her own son, I believe). In the words of Joni Mitchell's song "Edith and the Kingpin":

His left hand holds his right
What does that hand desire
That he grips it so tight?

Perhaps that's the whole point, but psychological insight in itself doesn't make for a magnificent, or even a good painting, any more than mere uninhibited freedom of expression does. I mean, take that peculiar seat. It appears to be constructed out of some sort of thick grey spaghetti, incapable of bearing any weight at all, and has been squashed awkwardly into the constraints of the canvas. Of course, this and all the other "defects" one might point to – that scumbled white area around the head and that blue outline, for example, and what the hell is is he hiding under that shirt? – may be, and probably are, a deliberate provocation. But to what end? If this is meant to be, in Jonathan Jones' words, an exercise in "kicking the shit" out of something, then it's a pretty feeble kick.

Now, call me ignorant, a typical untutored member of the British gallery-going public, but surely this is what a magnificent painting of an anxious man keeping a tight grip on something looks like, not to mention being, again in Jonathan Jones' curiously dismissive words, "a proper hard-working job":

Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527)

Look closer:

Wow. And compare:

Seriously? And here's a detail from Rose Wylie's "Cuban Scene":

So has the shit been kicked out of us and our staid, conservative expectations? If so, I think we can take it. Spontaneous the Holbein certainly isn't – there will have been many hours of sittings, taking up the time and patience of an important and busy man – but it is supremely accomplished, deeply insightful and, well, truly magnificent. Sadly, but not surprisingly, no child will ever bring something like that home from school. The other two, though? Well, yes, I can imagine that quite easily. Which, I assume, is the intention.

So is it the case that we can't, or that we won't make work of that stature any more? No more heroes, no more Shakespearoes, perhaps? Maybe the refusal of technical refinement is a cry of pain in a world increasingly running out of control? The Hopi have a word for it: koyaanisqatsi. But any comparison between a typical Holbein and the self-inflicted wound of this particular contemporary painting style surely seems to speak not just of different artistic priorities after 500 years, but of decline; desperation, even. What does it say about us, in the 21st century, that a painting like "Richard" is the centrepiece of a prestigious gallery's tempting offer to well-heeled collectors of art? Or, indeed, that wealthy Russians are collecting the work of Rose Wylie? It says quite a lot, I think, although my layperson's ears still can't seem to make out what it is, exactly, that is being said.

Obviously, skilful technique and realism can't guarantee a good picture, either. Few things are as tedious or as complacent as those photo-realistic pencil portrait drawings you see all over the Web, or yet another bohemian breakfast table rendered in tasteful post-impressionist dabs, or indeed any art whose ambition has stalled at the level of a greetings card [1]. It would be silly to assert otherwise. But surely the remedy for witless skill-for-skill's-sake or oh-so-tasteful retro-cliché is not pretending to paint like a mentally-disturbed six-year-old? Or maybe it was, for a while, but has now become just another off-the-peg style which happens to be in fashion with wealthy collectors, and is therefore peddled to them as "magnificent" by prestigious galleries and art influencers?

A lot of questions there, all going unanswered. So, to repeat Mr. Jones' own key question: "is this a terribly sophisticated put-on?" Well, as I'm sure those who prize spontaneity above all else would agree: first thought, best thought, Jonathan. When talented, highly-trained artists are producing simulacra of the work of untalented, untrained children, however sincerely, you know something resembling a terribly sophisticated dressing-up game is going on. Is this game the best, most representative, most expressive art of our times? I suppose, as always, only time and the cultural gatekeepers of the future will tell.

Anyway, rant over. And, yes, I do feel better now, thanks very much. And exhale...

And yet, like any choice of style, when it works, it works...

(Ben Hartley, "Woman and chickens")

1. I confess that I particularly dislike anything featuring hares. Hares are threadbare glove-puppets that say, "I'm a bit of a pagan, in touch with folkways, and the feel and flow of the land and its seasons. I'm earthy and yet spiritual, and my kitchen is filled with the smell of baking bread..." I mean, what could be more annoying?

Jaws

 Going through my backfiles looking for something completely different I noticed some overlooked pictures with a common theme. Which reminds me: I should probably arrange my six-monthly dental check-up.

Martin Parr

At 71, I am prepared for a generation of heroes, generally a decade or so older, to start dying out. Farewell, Sir Tom! Hold on, Joni! Not yet, Bob! But the swish of the Reaper's scythe can seem to be getting increasingly and uncomfortably close at times. Martin Parr has just died, at the ridiculously early age of 73. If you've already watched the film released earlier this year, I Am Martin Parr (it's on both Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer), you'll have realised he was unwell: not many street photographers use a walking frame. Even fewer manage to look so grimly cheerful about it. Probably just him, in fact.

If you don't know who Martin Parr is then I really don't know why you are reading this blog. There will be plenty of obituaries, so I won't go over the obvious biographical ground. Let's stick to what Martin has done for me!

On London's Charing Cross Road, once known for its many bookshops, there used to be a famous art and photography bookshop known as Zwemmer's. In the days before the internet, the best way – really, the only way – to discover new publications and new artists was to visit such a specialist shop, and browse the stock. In the 1980s and 90s, whenever I was "in town", as we say, I would make a point of visiting Zwemmer's, hoping to find something special to add to my growing photobook collection.

Art bookshop browsers are a grubby, inky-fingered bunch, so Zwemmer's used to wrap the books on display in clear film, which meant that you at least stood a chance of buying an unblemished copy. Now that books generally arrive in the post in a pristine, shrink-wrapped state, it's easy to forget how "shop-worn" a substantial volume might get on the shelves before anyone actually bought it. As it happened, Zwemmer's also published a few books itself, and one of these was Bad Weather, which contained a series of wryly-observed black and white photographs of people in "bad weather" scenarios, some of them hilarious, by an up and coming photographer named Martin Parr, who had used an underwater camera to make them. There was a stack of them, unwrapped and in mint condition, so I bought one.

I became something of a fan, and bought everything of his that was published. I might even blame Martin for igniting my passion for collecting photobooks. although, unlike Martin himself, I am a collector and completist who knows when to stop. I mean, honestly, Saddam Hussein watches... Why, Martin, why? So, although I bought all his books of breakthrough colour work like The Last Resort when they appeared, I stopped after Small World, as it seemed he was repeating himself. Besides, flash photography of plates of baked beans and garish cakes were really not my thing; I preferred the hunt for abandoned Morris Minors in Irish fields (A Fair Day). I think the only subsequent volumes of his I ever bought were the magisterial three-volume The Photobook: a History, compiled with Gerry Badger.

In those days I was still only in the early stages of becoming a photographer myself. I had recently bought my first SLR – an Olympus OM-1n – and was feeling my way past the glossy honeytraps and gearhead porn of Amateur Photographer to the more austere monochrome art uplands of Creative Camera. As I have mentioned before, while starting our working lives in Bristol we happened to occupy the flat above some guy called Paul Graham, and I was still sufficiently photographically illiterate that the only reason I bought a copy of his first self-published book, A1: the Great North Road, when it appeared in a nearby bookshop on Whiteladies Road, was because it amused me that the address of the publisher, Grey Editions, was also mine.

But by the 1990s I felt I was finally getting somewhere as a photographer, but was in need of some direction and validation; I began signing up for workshops at Peter Goldfield's Duckspool establishment in Somerset, one of the best decisions I have ever made. So in September 1992 I attended a four-day residential workshop with Martin Parr.

Although I already knew that his style of "street" documentary would never be mine I was still an admirer of his work; my most recent Parr purchase had been One Day Trip, his photographs of "booze cruise" Channel ferry crossings, commissioned by the Mission photographique transmanche of the Centre régional de la photographie Nord-Pas-de-Calais. However, unlike the workshop I'd done with Thomas Joshua Cooper the previous year, this one was going to be an interesting but not transformative experience.

I think it's fair to say that Martin was not a great teacher. Great teachers who are also first rank practitioners are very rare. True, he was a very incisive speaker about his own work, and the work of others working in a similar documentary vein, but had little to say about other approaches to photography, or even about simply poor, derivative work, which is after all what mainly turns up at workshops. Where Cooper (also not a great teacher, but a very charismatic individual), confronted by shabby or complacent photo-club work, would reach for the verbal stiletto, drive it between the culprit's ribs and give it a twist, Parr was simply lost for words. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... I think he was basically too kind, too English perhaps, to criticise work that he didn't like or understand.

Coincidentally, Duane Michals was receiving an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society during the workshop, so Martin arranged for us all to travel over to Bath to hear him speak, which surprised and pissed off a number of participants – "not what we've paid for!" – but I suspect that I, at least, derived more memorable "takeaways" from that very entertaining hour than from the entire Parr workshop. I also had my one and only ride ever on the luxurious leather seats of an upscale Jaguar (is there any other kind?) belonging to another participant.

As it turned out, I had to leave a day early, having received an urgent SOS message from my workplace – by then I was the Systems Librarian at Southampton University – so I missed out on the intensive group "critique" of my own portfolio. Which was probably just as well. I don't think Martin would have found much to connect with in what I had brought along. Um, I don't really know what to say about this... Although I do treasure the memory of Peter Goldfield's comment – he had taken a preliminary peek at our portfolios – that the person who would really like my work was Fay Godwin, and that I should keep an eye out for the new direction her photography had taken. A few years later I spotted the gorgeous little Stella Press hardback issue of Glassworks & Secret Lives in the window of another Charing Cross Road bookshop, just published, and pounced on one of the signed copies inside.

It should go without saying that Martin Parr was a very admirable man, whose photographic style and chosen subject matter have exerted an enormous influence on documentary photography, and who also dedicated his considerable energies to the generous advocacy of the work of others and of photography in general, not least through the Martin Parr Foundation that he established in Bristol. But he is also much misunderstood, as people often mistake his wry critique – highlighting those visual incongruities that can illuminate society's contradictions as well as people's pretensions and well-meaning idiocies – for a kind of cruelty. But where someone like Bruce Gilden is in-yer-face cruel, Martin Parr was more like a fearless, clear-sighted stand-up comedian. [1]

If he had a superpower, I think it was a variation of that essential delusion of the "street" photographer: that is, he believed he was invisible, and yet able to emerge at will into a disarming display of avuncular affability, once he'd spotted a likely subject. He wasn't invisible – far from it – but that belief in his ability to pop in and out of awareness is surely what enabled him to point a flash gun at drunken booze-cruisers, and causes him to look so cheerful, plodding along the seafront with his walking frame in I Am Martin Parr. Heh, they can't see me! They don't know what I'm up to. Yet...

For what it's worth, I think it will be established that his very best work was done quite early on and that he never quite developed a "late style" that is the equal of his truly ground-breaking work in The Last Resort, say, or Small World. His very early monochrome work is gathering admirers, too, since the publication of Early Works in 2019 (I see copies are already going for silly prices). In the end, as a photographer he seemed to have become the prisoner of his own signature stylistic moves. But, what moves! Few photographers have created and inhabited such a distinctive style, palette, and subject matter, used to such consistent effect. It may not appeal to you, but you know it when you see it. As my partner (not a photographer) so often exclaims when we are out and about, "Oh, look! There's a real Martin Parr!" And, for a photographer, what better tribute is there than that?

1. OK, there is a certain cruelty about the one of a woman in Bad Weather, smiling shyly at the photographer, about to get soaked by the water thrown up from a puddle by a bus approaching from behind... But OTOH it's making me laugh just thinking about it. Thanks, Martin!

Duskier

Not an abandoned vehicle, just rarely moved...

Leaf or tree?

Another little gallery of some recent photographs from my daily late-afternoon walks in the neighbourhood, plus one from the kitchen window and another from a visit to Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey. For some reason it is mostly trees and leaves that are getting my attention recently; I suppose it's hard to ignore them, really, at this time of year.

View from the kitchen

The enormous plane tree at Mottisfont

Outdoor Sports Ground

Illuminations, University Highfield Campus

Twyford Down

What, December already? For one reason or another, this year I've ended up stalled on a number of projects that were intended to end up as Blurb books (angels, lost gloves, chairs in odd places, Twyford Down, etc., etc.). Partly because I keep adding photographs – people will keep dropping gloves (230 so far), and abandoning chairs (just 95 to date) – but also because the bookmaking and picture editing urge that has usually delivered two or three books or magazines a year just didn't seem to get up a sufficient head of steam to get things rolling. But I thought I'd better not let 2025 go by without putting something new on the shelf, so I have quickly put together a magazine of some of the photographs of Twyford Down I've accumulated over many years of walks there. 

This is not so much a carefully designed and sequenced book as a portfolio of thirty-two images selected out of 300 or so. I really like these Blurb magazines, as the quality is the same as the photo-books but they are much cheaper (I'm charging £10.50 for the magazine, and £5.99 for a PDF download). I don't actually expect anyone to buy one – no-one ever does – but it's easily the best way to preserve something of one's work for posterity to stumble across and wonder, did this man have nothing better to do with his life?

So here is a mini preview of the magazine, with a link to my Blurb bookstore:

Twyford Down

Mike Chisholm

I have also put it as a PDF flipbook onto Issuu, which is much the best way to see it, and here is a mini preview of that. To go to the full-screen view, click the four-arrow device in the centre:

As always, any comments are welcome, not least as this magazine will probably become the basis of a more extensive selection in book form. I'm already having second thoughts about that brown cover, for a start...