As will be obvious to anyone who has been visiting this blog for a while, I am something of a connoisseur of barrier-tapes, fences, and improvised obstacles of all kinds. I can only speculate why this is the case. Do I feel shut out or shut in in some literal or metaphorical sense? Not especially. Do I have gnostic intimations of a hidden reality beyond this one? Kinda sorta, usually on wet Mondays. Have I been blocked by circumstance, background, and prejudice – not to mention personality, preferences, and life choices – from achieving significant goals in life? Well, no more than most (which is to say: yes, of course...). We can't all be [insert your own unrealised ambition]. Although I think my problem (or saving grace?) has been more that I never could settle on which of a number of unrealised ambitions I should have pursued relentlessly and ruthlessly, with no regard to the consequences to the health and happiness of friends, family, and the world in general. You're welcome!
Many years ago now, in 2009, I made a little book I called The Mysterious Barricades, featuring photographs of various ineffective, odd, or imagined barriers I had encountered in the landscape. As I wrote then:
This series of photographs takes its name from a short keyboard piece by François Couperin (1669-1733), Les Barricades Mistérieuses. A recording by Angela Hewitt has been described as "a beautiful, undulating meditation on cycles of fifths and chord changes in B flat". No one knows to what the title refers, but I am by no means the first to borrow it, and it will resonate with anyone who has, at some time in their life, felt the frustration of unseen barriers, or encountered inexplicable or apparently pointless obstacles.
Now, I should confess that I first came across and appropriated this title after reading a description of that Couperin piece in William Wharton's novel Last Lovers. [1] It seemed a perfect fit for that series of pictures, which became one of my first Blurb books, and also one of the last uses I would make of my photographs made on film. I scanned the negatives, mainly colour medium-format film, converted them to monochrome, and imposed a circular framing onto them, in imitation of / tribute to Emmet Gowin's early work where he used a lens that was, technically speaking, too small for the 4" x 5" format, and therefore projected a circular image onto the view camera's rectangular negative.
However, my ability to convert colour images to monochrome at that time was nowhere near as good as it is now, and I was never very happy with the book, anyway, so didn't give it much exposure. Its legacy lives on, however, and I seem still to find mysterious barricades everywhere. The ones in this post are all from January and February this year.
As I have now reminded myself of that book, however, I decided to put The Mysterious Barricades onto Issuu as a PDF flipbook, which you can see by clicking the image below (as usual choose a "full screen" view, to lose the adverts, etc.).
Just for good measure, I have also added another little book of a similar vintage, which contains a mix of film images processed in the same way as those in The Mysterious Barricades and some early digital images, and which – ostensibly, at least – treats another subject that has attracted me over the years, crows. N.B. at the very end of this book there is a joke which – although long experience reveals that not many seem to find it as amusing as I do – is, in its way, a Great Teaching.
1. William Wharton, by the way, was a very fine writer whose work seems to have vanished from view. His first novel Birdy was once famous because of the film made of it by Alan Parker, but if you're looking for something new to read I'd urge you to try Dad or A Midnight Clear. Both outstanding books in my reckoning, FWIW. In fact, I'm going to dig them out and re-read them myself.
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