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.