Access All Areas

December 2013

I mentioned in a previous post that, following an external drive failure, I lost most of the image files I had made with a camera I had bought – second-hand, as usual, a Panasonic G3 – some time in the latter half of 2012, and which I was still using as my main camera during my Innsbruck residency in summer 2014. It was an excellent camera – still is – but shortly thereafter I made the move to Fuji, persuaded that the larger sensor would give even better results.

How much did I lose? Well, I save my files in monthly sub-directories ("folders", if you must), so there will have been something like twenty or more G3 folders on that disk, of which just four have survived, dating from October 2013 to January 2014. It was entirely my fault: instead of sending the failed drive straight to a professional recovery service, I attempted to do it myself. Duh. Luckily, some of the better photos have survived because I had saved them elsewhere; not least on the CD of exhibition-quality images I sent to Innsbruck in 2014 as a backup, just in case my box of eighty or so prints failed to arrive intact, on time, or at all. But many of the pictures you would have seen (still can see!) posted on this blog during those months from 2012 to 2014 have gone. [Sad face emoji...]

So I thought I'd take a nostalgic trawl through these surviving images, just to see what is still in there, and also what the subsequent decade-plus of experience in processing "raw" files might enable me to make of them now. At that time I was in my last year of working at the Southampton University library, and still taking more or less daily photo-excursions around the campus during my lunch hour. As so many have remarked, access is a photographer's most useful tool, and my staff ID card coupled with familiarity and curiosity were pretty much an "access all areas" pass and, if necessary, skeleton key. I doubt there were many people other than, say, the security and janitorial staff who knew the more interesting nooks and crannies of the Highfield Campus as well as I did in those days.

I'm sure I must have become a familiar curiosity on campus over the years, that bearded loony with the camera, although perhaps not on the scale of the sometime professor of mathematics who used to wander the place shouting incomprehensible greetings and occasionally losing his half-mast trousers, precariously belted with string. As a result, I rarely seemed to attract any unwanted attention when I was out and about, conducting my lunchtime photographic explorations in odd corners.

Graduation ceremony marquees, October 2013

I remember one day in April 2014, however, that was different. I was hunkered down inside my favourite telephone box one lunchtime, squinting through the viewfinder at the array of fresh tape-marks, stickers, and abrasions, all nicely backlit in the spring sunshine, when the door was pulled open. By malign coincidence, it seemed the one and only person on campus not in possession of a mobile phone wanted to use the pay-phone. "Sorry," I said, standing up, "I'll come out." "No, it's OK," he said, "I just wondered what you were doing?"

Now, I suppose it's possible that, from the outside, it may have looked a bit odd, suspicious even, to see a man squatting down inside a phone box. Phone boxes do sometimes get used for purposes other than telephonic communication, although rarely in broad daylight in the centre of a university campus. Nonetheless, it takes a certain kind of guileless curiosity actually to open a kiosk door simply in order to find out what someone who is clearly not on the phone might be doing in there. I must admit I was tempted to play the situation for laughs, but instead I waggled my camera, and said, cheerily, "Taking photographs!"  "But why? What on earth of?" he replied.

This is always a tricky one to negotiate. I could see he was genuinely baffled, and perhaps even concerned for my sanity. It's easy to forget quite how far beyond most people's conception of "normal" any photography is that does not involve close relatives, holidays, or safely-accredited subjects like sunsets, cute kittens, porn, etc. The beauty of a digital camera, however, is that you can show, not tell. "Here," I said, "Have a look", and put the camera into "chimping" mode. I showed him an image or two not unlike the ones below, taken a few months earlier.

I could see he wasn't convinced. Which was quite disappointing, and even a little insulting, so – with my best "Good day to you, sir!" expression – I firmly shut the door and carried on. There's none so blind as them as will not see, as the old folk used to say.

So, to double down on the nostalgia, this week I walked over to the campus for the first time in quite a while. I might look a bit scruffy and timeworn these days, but at least my trousers are secure. I used to go over there quite regularly as part of one of my walking circuits, but as the years passed I saw fewer and fewer familiar faces, and I began to feel like a ghost passing unseen through the lives of hundreds of young students, an ever increasing percentage of whom were now clearly Chinese.

This week I saw no one and nothing much that I recognised. "My" campus has pretty much gone: demolition and rebuilding have been non-stop during the past dozen years. The telephone boxes have gone, of course, but the whole look and feel of the place has changed, the way a house you used to live in will have changed after several subsequent inhabitants have altered and added and updated the place to their satisfaction. I remember hearing that the architects had been given a "nautical" brief (it's Southampton, geddit?) and much of the campus does now look as if various massive cruise ships have run aground. Of course, massive cruise ships actually look more like office blocks than ships, so that's perhaps not so surprising.

Oh, and my ID card no longer lets me through the library turnstiles. Do I care? I'm not sure that I do. To get in, I'd have to explain that, some twelve years ago, I was once a person of some substance hereabouts. "Cringe", is the word, I think. And besides:

Terrific... First you lose the TV remote...

Still, if you know where to look, there are still a few spots where the shop-worn pleasures of wabi sabi can be found; ageing 60s architecture, mainly – although the Faraday Building, once thought worthy of celebration on a stamp, is long gone – plus some tatty portakabins, that once served as stopgap offices, labs, and workspaces. No doubt they'll be gone soon, too. It may be some time before I come back again to find out.