On Brown Clee

A few years ago we had an autumn half-term break in Shropshire, partly because we needed to be near to my partner's parents, who were in a desperate state of decline. We stayed on the slopes of a hill known as Brown Clee, and I felt a tremendous affinity with the landscape.

I was still shooting a lot of film, then, and ended up with a set of images which I was pleased with, but which had no natural home in any of my other work. They stand alone, as "holiday snaps" so often do (unless, of course, holiday snaps are all the photographs you ever make). Recently I remembered them, and resolved to do something with them.

Scans of 120 negatives are enormous, even done on a flatbed: at 300 dpi, these images measure 26" x 21", roughly equivalent to a 50 megapixel camera. I have to say, for a long time I thought this was the way to go, i.e to use film in medium-format cameras, but to scan it and manipulate and print the result digitally. Laziness, a desire for instant results, and a calculation of how much the weekly "dev and contact" of several 120 films was costing me (between £750 and £1500 p.a.) meant I gave up on this, but I would still recommend it to anyone as an alternative route to quality. I used primarily a Fuji GS-645 and an old folding Agfa Isolette II. These Brown Clee pictures were all made with the Agfa.

Please excuse the deliberately "retro" look and feel... It matches the mood of that week and the location and the autumnal weather. All of the subtlety and separation in the darker tones is lost in these JPEGs, but -- on glossy Epson premium paper -- believe me, they look magnificent.

Hands On Surprise

I surprised myself this afternoon. It's been a long time since I put in any serious time hanging out on a Saturday afternoon in a camera shop just trying stuff out. I used to do this regularly -- I suppose it was a continuation by other means of teenage loitering, trying out guitars I could never afford, or simply flipping LP album covers (an extremely satisfying but harmless activity that has gone from the world). I was on good terms with the staff in the shop where I bought all my cameras and lenses, and most weeks brought in at least two or three colour 120 films for "dev and contact" and bought fresh stock, so there was never any sense that I was wasting their time. As a regular customer, I got a good discount on anything I bought, too.

With the advent of digital, all that seemed to change. Camera shops simply couldn't stock a representative range of the deluge of new models, or cope with the rapid turnover rate. They seemed to be increasingly dependent on whatever deals the company reps would offer. My favourite shop, for example, suddenly and mysteriously stopped carrying Olympus cameras. No-one would ever say why. People gradually stopped bringing in films for processing. Second-hand film cameras and lenses lost their attractions. Darkroom equipment vanished from the shelves. They also couldn't compete with the prices on the Web. With no weekly films to process, I gradually stopped visiting. My favourite shop eventually changed hands, and new staff appeared, with whom I had never spent an idle hour discussing camera movements or agitation techniques, or squinting down the street through exotic lenses neither of us could ever afford.

But this afternoon I decided I actually wanted to handle a Panasonic GF-1 and an Olympus EPL1 in order to compare their electronic viewfinders. I had an itch to scratch. You can't do that on the Web. You can read all the reviews you like, but picking things up can be a revelation -- both positive and negative. So, there I was again in a camera shop, watching an assistant unlock the glass-fronted cabinets to fetch out a selection of hi-tech jewellery to place in front of me on the felt mats lying on the glass-topped counter.

And the surprise was this. I didn't particularly like either of the electronic viewfinders -- way too small, in the case of the Panasonic, and too garishly unreal in the case of the Olympus. Worth knowing. But that cunning assistant had my measure. He then showed me an Olympus EP1 with the 17mm pancake lens and the clip-on optical viewfinder, and I was smitten. It was just right. It felt like a proper camera. Metal, solid, and elegantly purposeful. And the whole kit has been reduced to a very low price indeed, practically half the original price when this little groundbreaker first appeared just 12 months ago -- I suppose the last few are being cleared in advance of the EP2, and the absence of an electronic viewfinder plus the odd negative comment about the quality of that cute little 17mm "pancake" lens has made this combo the least sought after. I think it's a case of grab one while you can: I'm certainly going to.

Opinions

I was dithering over whether to buy a copy of Josef Koudelka's Piedmont book, and found myself reading the reviews on Amazon UK. I was very amused by this (one star) review, which I swear I haven't altered in any respect:

Having a love of Italy, and photography, and knowing little of Koudelka's work, the description of the book (and generously reduced price) encouraged me to take a blind plunge, and buy this book. What a mistake that was. The images have nothing of the quality, or style that photographers such as Edwin Smith, Horst, List, De Biasi, Erwitt, and countless others lend to the country. Sadly the photographs are reproduced in an irredeemably deep and gloomy low key, there are no highlights, or sparkle in any of the images. Further the gushing description describes the images as being "panoramic". They are nothing of the sort. A panoramic photograph conventionally encompasses an extremely wide angle of view (in excess of 100 degrees). Most of these do not. Instead they are standard photographs cropped to a letter box shape. This only serves to exclude much of the frame which would otherwise give some meaning too, or add a compositional element to the image. A handful of images are totally appropriate to this crop, but only a handful, and they are by far the better ones. At least 50% of the pages are blank, and printed a uniform black which exacerbates the gloomy appearance still further.

Sadly, though understandably, Amazon won't accept a properly ordered title as a return, otherwise this would have gone straight back. As for being beautifully bound, well, if square edged, thick, raw, cardboard, with gaffer tape on the spine, roughly cut paper and packing case graphics are `beautiful', then I happily admit to having too much taste and discernment for my own good.

Well, that's definitely helped me make up my mind -- two copies, I think.

I should point out that copies of Koudelka's Reconnaissance Wales (also bound in "raw cardboard, with gaffer tape on the spine") currently fetch £700. But photography is a broad church, and everyone is entitled to an opinion. And, after all, it's firmly-held opinions like those of this reviewer that help make books unbought, thus scarce and, ten years later, very sought after...

(Oh, and he's wrong about the Amazon returns policy, too).

Aleatory Arrangements

I've written before about the attractions of chance, and the way an "accidental" arrangement is so hard to improve on. I always return to this quotation from the photographer Frederick Sommer:

"I have five pebbles, not too different in size and weight, yet a randomness about them. If I drop them on the carpet they will scatter. Now we could run an experiment and we would find that we cannot put these pebbles in shapes that would be as elegant and as nicely related and with as great a variety as every time they fall. It is better than anything we could do. I have great respect for the way I find things. Every time something falls I look. I cannot believe the relationships. The intricacy."

It just seems to be the case that "found" arrangements have more going for them than "constructed" arrangements -- it's why a lot of us are photographers, after all, rather than painters or sculptors. Our eyes seems to have an innate hunger for construing relationships of weight, colour, line, shade and positioning out of the raw materials of reality, an interpretive joy that is rarely matched by the pleasures of construction.

As well as working away at a substantial sequence of photographs, I thought it might be fun to put together something quicker, less laborious, less constructed. The idea of compiling all the "spare" square images I've made since starting this blog suggested itself. What would happen if I relied on judgements made at the time, and simply brought them all together?

I arrange my RAW files by camera, then month/year, with a further "converted" sub-directory for images that have been worked on (e.g. Canon450\Jun10\Converted). I don't know why, but I prefer to have them sorted first by month rather than year. When I start a new book project, like this one, I create a new directory, copy relevant files into it, then create a subdirectory "Select", and beneath it one called "Bookjpgs".

So, using Breezebrowser, I went through all the directories since late 2008, copying any square images into a new "Squares" directory. I looked through these, and copied the good stuff into "Select". I then set up a bulk edit in Photoshop Elements to resize them all to 15 cm at 300 dpi, and resave them as JPEGs at highest quality to the "Bookjpgs" directory. I sorted the resulting Bookjpgs directory by "date originally created". There were over 170 images in there.

I then set up a new book in Blurb's BookSmart software. I chose the small 7" square size, and for the sake of simplicity chose the same photo page format throughout. I tried autoflowing the images into the book, ordered by date, but discovered that Booksmart only sees the latest date, not the original date -- no use. So, having loaded the Squares\Select\Bookjpgs directory into BookSmart, I dragged them in one at a time on facing pages, using Breezebrowser's sorted display as a guide. Tedious, but I have an affinity with such work; I think I believe it's good for me.

What was immediately obvious was how satisfying so many of the random pairings were. Weirdly so. A chronological sequence is -- visually -- as subject to chance as a truly random order. Now, I work very hard at sequencing photographs. Judging what goes with what, and in what order, and why, is a real skill, which gets honed over time. But -- as with Sommer's random pebbles -- it would have been hard to improve on very many of these.

With a bit of a cull, the book came down to 160 pages. I decided to get it down to a ruthless 120 pages, but always retaining the chronological order. In my experience, the pain of editing always pays off. Sometimes, it's the very pictures that stimulated the idea of the sequence in the first place that need to go. It's rather like taking down the scaffolding.

This is still a work in progress, but here are a few of those unplanned pairings.







Obviously, there is an inherent coherence in these images, in that they are all made by the same person, in the same way, and during a period of eighteen months when my preoccupations would have been similar. But it does make you realise that all that work put into sequencing is only worthwhile when there is a conscious underlying program to develop, like the theme of a piece of music, or the plot of a story.

Otherwise, your mind seems perfectly happy to construct relationships with whatever comes to hand. It's an interesting question whether these relationships are in any way different or less meaningful -- to the viewer -- than the ones so carefully constructed and offered up by an "artist". Somehow I doubt it: that, as I say, is one good reason why we like photography in the first place.

Mappa Mundi

Of Darkrooms

I wasn't going to own up to this, but why not? I was reading Mike Johnston's post "Life is too short for Alexander Pope" on TOP yesterday, and felt like having a little fun, so wrote the following bit of verse while the rice was cooking, and left it as a comment under the name "Alexander Pope".

Of darkrooms, dev and stop and fix, I'll sing!
A little burning is a dangerous thing,
Black skies as never were beneath the sun!
And dodging, too, tho' it be carefully done,
Creates those ghostly halo'd heads that shine
Like beacons in the murky fog of grain,
And dust! Fell dust! Tho' negatives be stored
And puff'd, the darkroom worker's quickly bored
With spotting spotty spots, and longs
For cloning; No, Johnston! Put down thy tongs,
The dreadful night of hypo is now past,
And DIGITAL's bright day has dawned, at last!

Mike was suitably amused, I'm happy to report. I wonder if it's too late to consider a career as an Alexander Pope tribute act?

John Wilson

I mentioned a while ago that an old friend was struggling with a brain tumour -- an optimistic portrayal of what was in reality a much bleaker situation. Today, after a rapid decline which by all accounts he bore with a relentless, unreasonable and inappropriate cheerfulness, John Wilson died.

You almost certainly never knew John, never bought anything from his bike shop in Walton Street in Oxford, or played cricket against Eynsham Cricket Club, where he was Player of the Year as recently as 2007 . But, if you were lucky, you too will once have had friends who now inhabit your personal Dream Time; no matter how much time passes or how infrequently you meet, such people have shaped you in ways that make them your true family. The loss of one of these mythical beings is an enormous sadness.

I last met John last year, when I took my son up to Oxford to the university open days. While he was off being given the scholastic sales pitch, John and I had our sandwiches in the quadrangle of Balliol College, where we had been undergraduates together. We amused ourselves watching college life carrying on, as if 30 years had not passed. More than ever, he seemed like a force of nature in shorts and fingerless cycling gloves; impossible to imagine that within a year he would be laid so low.

These lines are from what is allegedly the only good poem ever written about cricket, a game I never understood but which John loved. Its sentimentality (and the fact that its author was an opium addict who couldn't get it together actually to attend the famous Lancashire v. Middlesex match he describes) would have made him roar with laughter.

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

At Lord's, Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

Game Changer

I'm currently working on a substantial sequence of photographs and a book, to be called In Darkness Let Me Dwell, which is the name of a song by John Dowland (1563-1626). Dowland was a lute player and composer, and an exemplar of the Elizabethan cult of melancholy. He wrote a piece with the title "Semper Dowland, semper dolans" (ever Dowland, ever doleful), which was clearly a calculated and self-conscious branding strategy. Other titles ("Flow My Tears", "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares", etc.) underline the themes of tears, tombs, sweet sadness and fetching black clothes. The Goth sensibility is nothing new.



Despite its melancholy turn, his music is often melodically and dynamically interesting, and has attracted a number of subsequent composers and musicians, especially those looking for a strong, English tradition of composition. I particularly like the recording of "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" by countertenor Andreas Scholl, and there is an interesting Dowland interpretive project on ECM Records involving tenor John Potter of the Hilliard Ensemble and saxophonist John Surman. We won't mention the Dowland recordings of Sting or Elvis Costello.

In recent times I've been having a lot to do with that early 17th century period, one way or another, and all the time I've been aware of a constant tickle of memory at the back of my mind. Something wanted to be remembered. But what? If I picked up my Clarendon Press edition of Shakespeare's sonnets (a lovely book, published in 1985) the itch became particularly strong. As it did if I thought of my sixth-form days studying English or, oddly, a concert in 1972 at Southwark Cathedral where the Third Ear Band performed their music for Polanski's film of Macbeth. Tantalizing.

This week the memory finally emerged. Yesterday I had a strong urge to read John Donne, and knew it had to be in the Herbert Grierson anthology we had used at school. That is, "Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler", published by the Clarendon Press in 1921, and much reprinted since. Working in a university library, of course, this was an easy urge to satisfy.

As soon as I picked it up, I knew I had re-connected with something. Everything about this book is just right, in ways that are clear to me now, but were only obscurely felt by my teenage self in 1971/2. The original spellings of the poems are retained, for a start, which lends an incantatory, antiquarian charm ("Goe, and catche a falling starre..."). The book is printed on laid paper, crisp as banknotes, and impressed with proper letterpress type, in places as proud of the page as braille. It is sweetly sized -- a "crown octavo" (5" x 7.5") -- and discreetly and durably bound in smooth, dark blue buckram with a gold-blocked spine. But, above all, the poems are laid out on the page in an act of pure typography that approaches a "type facsimile", i.e. they are printed with modern type but using some of the typographic conventions of the 17th century.



Look at those page numbers, so large and so airily enclosed in parentheses! And those bold rules that divide off each poem, like an account book. Never mind the contents, the mere appearance of this little book is an open invitation to mental time travel.

It has historical significance, too: before it appeared in 1921 practically no-one read Donne. Afterwards, everyone did. In terms of literary taste, it was a real game-changer. It's the sort of thing that used to populate school English department cupboards in the days when "textbooks" were intended to last for several generations, and to introduce neophytes to the look and feel of scholarship.

I'm off to the Web straight away to buy myself the best condition example of this little classic I can find.

Snails in Outer Space

"Originality" is a much prized but highly-questionable property (or, if you prefer, it is a highly-contested category). In art, the relationship between "originality" and "quality" is especially difficult in times like these, when the former trumps the latter in the really high-stakes games of aesthetic judgement. Indeed, Originality may even be said to have successfully launched a hostile takeover bid for Quality, with the confusing result that the two are now trading under the same name; let's call it Novelty.

The cult of Novelty means that "value" attaches more easily to new things than to good things, not least because no-one can agree which the good things are. It's a hell of a lot easier to agree which are the novelties, and slap a price ticket on them. I'm sure you can think of your own examples.

The awkward twin of Originality is, of course, Imitation, a.k.a. Influence, Admiration, Appropriation, Plagiarism, and Downright Copyright Theft. I think it was Victor Lewis-Smith who declared that "Imitation is the sincerest form of being an unoriginal thieving bastard". Few things make the art world more unhappy (and its lawyers more jubilant) than to accuse a well-regarded artist of "unacknowledged appropriation" -- it's regarded as the height of bad manners. It's all very well for Picasso to say that "good artists borrow, great artists steal" but, as someone else said, "show me a hit tune and I'll show you a copyright infringement lawsuit". Hey, ask Richard Prince or Shepard Fairey...

I only mention this because I came across some work on the web that, in another universe, might have me speed-dialling my lawyer (needless to say I neither have a lawyer nor any speed-dial settings on my phone). A long time ago, when the Recording Angel's camera still used film, I started experimenting with circular imagery. I would scan film, and play about with masks, layers and selections in Photoshop to produce imagery that resembled (OK, ripped off) the "look and feel" of the work done by Emmet Gowin in the 1960s, when he put a lens for a 5" x 4" camera onto the lensboard of an 8" x 10" camera, capturing the whole image circle on the negative, edge distortion and all. I would produce this sort of thing:



Very Emmet Gowin, wouldn't you say? Those who know my Mysterious Barricades series will see the family resemblance. Anyway, as I proceeded in the direction of Originality from Influence, m'Lud, I began to make a series of images I conceived of as "planets": round sections of natural patterns floating in black space. Like these:


I especially like the polar cap on the second one, which you'll notice is actually a photograph of those wiggly trails that snails rasp away as they snack on algae. But in the end I thought they were a bit gimmicky and just simple-minded novelties, so after showing a few at a local gallery in a group exhibition in 2004 I just used the odd one here and there to liven up a sequence. Again, you may recognize them from my White Crow Telescope book.

But then last week I stumbled over this website. I was astonished. I am pretty sure I have never heard of Elaine Duigenan, though she's clearly working up a bit of a career for herself, and I'm even more certain she's never heard of me, or visited the ArtSway Gallery. The resemblance is more than a little striking. But, all paranoia aside, it has to be a clear case of parallel evolution, or a convergence on what, in retrospect, is an obvious idea. Though I do wonder what sort of meal m'learned friends might have made of it?

She's welcome to them. I still think it's a gimmicky and simple-minded idea. And, frankly, flying one of your "planet" pictures into space on the Space Shuttle Atlantis and having it photographed by an astronaut, as Elaine Duigenan has done, is beyond gimmicky, though it does show good use of contacts at a level most of us cannot even aspire to and, above all, an eye for that all important Novelty factor.

Elaine asserts that "The round images encourage the viewer to consider Earth and the implications of our existence." Well, maybe yes, maybe no. I get the impression that originality of thought may not be her strong suit, though some of her other sequences, for example "Bottle", are visually very striking and strong.* Just don't ever tell me how much her pictures sell for at the aptly-named Kerching Klompching Gallery in New York.


*Though whether the Keith Arnatt of "Canned Sunsets" might have a view on the originality of their striking-ness is another question.

A Miracle of Deliverance

Seventy years ago, my father was rescued from the beach at Dunkirk. In his words:

At high tide there were bodies being washed ashore so I gave a hand to drag them above the high tide mark. There were some explosions on the beach even when there was no air attack in progress - they must have been artillery or mortar shells. Again most of the time all they did was scatter the sand around.

Two torpedoes suddenly hurtled up the beach, clear of the water, their propellers sending up cascades of sand and water, several of us stood and watched for a while until somebody said "Perhaps their explosives are on timers!" - we backed well away until I suppose the compressed air in their motors ran out, then they just lay there, like a couple of stranded fish.

A rumour went round that we should make our way to the East Mole at dusk, so I thought I'd give it a try. It was dark when I got to the Mole and we were marshalled by a group of sailors into single file and then told to move along, there seemed to be hundreds of French soldiers just standing there watching, it was very eerie. Once on the mole we realised why we were in single file, great holes had been blown in the concrete and these had been bridged by planks about two feet wide and we could hear the waves about twenty feet below. When we got on a solid piece of mole we were told "wait, make way for wounded". Some were on foot others on stretchers, when they passed we moved on again. Finally some more sailors helped us on to a slide made from planks and we slid down quite a distance and landed on the deck of a ship, we were told to spread ourselves round the ship. I got my back against a rail of some sort and sat down. I woke up to the fact that we were moving so dozed off again. I vaguely remember hearing a machine gun on the ship firing, and thought that everything must be under control, so went back to sleep.

At dawn I got up and had a look round and realised that although it was a civvy ship it was manned entirely by the Navy, then I was amazed to find that it was the ship in which I had sailed from Southampton to Le Havre - the "Tynwald". I think we docked at Dover and were surprised to see flags and banners waving and women offering us tea and sandwiches. We were hustled quickly on to a train waiting in the docks (we were not a pretty sight!), and off we went. If we went slowly through a station people ran alongside the train offering food and cups of tea, we were puzzled by all the flag waving and cheering, having just been chased out of France. We arrived at Winchester station and were lorried to the Kings Royal Rifles barracks, given two blankets, shown into a barrack hut where I got down on the floor and sank into a peaceful sleep.

At this distance in time, and with my father now dead, I can both look back at our family's spear-carrying role in a famous national drama with some pride, but also with a sense of the way "history" swallows up human-scale reality, like a vast whale gulping down tiny krill to no more purpose than to make yet more whale.

The men in the pictures on this page from my father's photo album are visibly having quite an adventure, I would say. These citizen soldiers had recently been rescued from great peril, and now find themselves on a glorified scout camp and motorbike scrambling trials in Yorkshire. The captions on the reverse of the photos say things like "Lovely Grub!" and "Wot, no bath?" They have no idea that their unit is shortly to ship out for the deserts of North Africa, and then to the hills and jungles of India and Burma, where they will do whatever they are asked to do, grumpily but unquestioningly, and if necessary die in the process. Several do.

After Dunkirk
uniforms not designed by Hugo Boss

My parents, after they realised they were getting too old to look after themselves, moved from Hertfordshire to Norfolk, to live in a mobile home in my sister's back garden. For the sake of some company, Dad joined the local branch of the Dunkirk Association, where men of like age and with a shared, unique experience could swing the lamp a bit over a cup of tea (men in their eighties tend not to drink pints).

He found himself at the epicentre of one of the darkest chapters in the Dunkirk story, the massacre of captured British troops of the Royal Norfolk Regiment by the SS at Le Paradis. The terrible story can be read here. Talking with these men, I think, shifted something in his perception of his own wartime experiences, rather like realising -- 50 years after the event -- what a close-run thing it had been at times, not just nationally, but personally.

For the first time, he began reading accounts of the war and attending Remembrance Day parades in chilly churchyards in Norfolk. And he asked me to find him a copy of this painting by Charles Cundall, which he'd seen on TV:

The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, by Charles Cundall

I bought a print of it from the Imperial War Museum, which he framed and hung over his bed. Shortly before he died, he said to me, "You know that painting of the beach at Dunkirk? It's not quite right, you know. Those great big clouds of black smoke? They were blowing the other way."

Caedmon's Hymn, Slight Return

If there is such a construct as "the curve", and assuming that getting ahead of it (to become a stray, outlying dot on a graph) is a desirable thing, then I have evidence that I may have pulled a nose clear of it. Here is Exhibit A, the photo-finish:



That, my friends, is page 4 of this week's TLS. Does something about that illustration look familiar? And if I tell you that the subject matter of the article by Tom Shippey is the Old English translations of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae, and that it includes some amused and ironic comments on the Anglo-Saxon character, as betrayed in certain telling mistranslations, do you have a certain feeling of déjà vu? Well, suit yourself, but I certainly did.

Here is my favourite bit:

"Wisdom is the highest virtue", says one of the OE version's additions, and the view conforms to both what Asser says of Alfred and to Anglo-Saxon preoccupations generally. But they had their own views about wisdom, and sometimes failed to recognize other people's. There is an OE version of The Distichs of Cato [...] but the translator repeatedly failed to understand his Latin text, or rejected its counsels as evidently unwise. For example, he reacts oddly to the familiar advice to "seize Occasion by the forelock, for she is bald behind". Perhaps unable to grasp the image, he writes, truthfully but inappositely, "many a man has plenty of hair but goes bald suddenly".

OK, I'm not really claiming that the TLS represents the cutting edge of contemporary thought, and I accept that, on one level, this is rather like saying, "Last week I was whistling Beethoven's 5th and I'm damned if this week Radio 3 didn't play Beethoven's 7th! Call me Mr. Zeitgeist!" But, even so...

Archaeology

Unsolicited Testimonial

I was surprised and delighted to see one of my Blurb books (Mirrors, Windows, Walls) featured on the estimable Wood s Lot site this morning, plus a link to this blog. Within the diminishing circle of bookish, black-clad malcontents, flâneurs and flim-flam artists like myself that is a kind of fame (or, "fame"). I've been unusually approachable all day, despite the weather.

The only thing that would make me more content today would be taking the phone call from Manfred Eicher this evening begging me to prostitute my art for ECM Records. Hah! As if! (I'm in all evening, sir).

Five leaves left... *

* It has been pointed out to me that younger readers may not get this reference. Once upon a time, the makers of Rizla hand-rolling cigarette papers used to insert a little printed sheet of paper that emerged as you got towards the end of the packet: it read "Five leaves left". Towards the middle of the 1970s, this was replaced by the more literal instruction "Time to buy another packet". A little bit of poetry had gone from the world.

Needless to say, Nick Drake's album of that name (yes, that's right, the yearningly beautiful Time To Buy Another Packet) is yet another of those nudging references to Reefer Culture that were so prevalent at the time. It is always astonishing to me that so few people worked out that the attractively typographic name "Rizla" placed alongside a rather large cross was, in fact, a play on the name of the manufacturers, La Croix (Riz La Croix? Rizla + ?).

Something Fine

I recently felt the urge to listen to Jackson Browne again. It's funny, how much the relationships we make with music are like the friendships we make, especially those we made in our youth. They seem so much a part of who we are that -- whether we cultivate them, abandon them, take them for granted, or simply forget about them -- it is a shock one day to discover that they are no longer what we thought they were, and have been utterly transformed by the simple passage of time. Even though not a note or word has changed, songs that once seemed as profound and as beautifully wrought as a Shakespeare sonnet have become clunkingly adolescent, amusingly maudlin, or simply plain bad. They have not changed, but you have.

So, at first I dismissed that urge to listen to Jackson Browne. After all, it had been so long since I listened to those albums -- perhaps 30 years -- that I only had them on vinyl. It was obvious this would be an error of judgement similar to attending a school reunion or trying to squeeze into an old pair of jeans. I don't need more ways to feel middle-aged.

But then one of my work colleagues said she was going to Morocco, which made me smile, and the song "Something Fine" flooded back into my mind. I got a strong feeling that, in the words of the song, there might still be something there for me. Given I now have access to Spotify, there seemed no harm in it. So I gave in, and did it.

Once I'd got over the instant rush of nostalgia -- 30 years is a long time, after all, and it was rather like opening a long-forgotten photo album -- I was struck by several things. The first thing was how intimately I could recall these songs, as soon as the opening notes of each sounded. Once upon a time, it quickly became apparent, these songs had been more important to me than I now realised. Like a favourite coat I used to wear in all weathers, or my tobacco tin. My, how I used to love to smoke!

The second thing was what a good guitarist Browne is, in an understated but effective way -- if I'd paid more attention back then, I might be a better guitarist now. And what a clever wordsmith: "The world outside is tugging like a beggar at my sleeve / Ah, that's much too old a story to believe". That's good writing.

But what really struck me was how world-weary, how glum some of the best songs on Browne's first two albums are. Obviously, he'd packed a lot of living into his second decade, but he was only 25 when For Everyman came out, and at times he sounds at least 60. Or, at least, he does to my 56-year-old ears; to my 18-year-old ears he sounded plangent, worldly and wise. It's an odd feeling, revisiting a youthful enthusiasm, only to find middle-aged regrets were lying in wait for you all along. "So, you finally showed up. Where have you been all this time?"

But "Something Fine" is a stand-out song. Its mood of wistful, vicarious pleasure is the mood of a parent seeing a child off on a big adventure. To hear it in the live, solo acoustic version recorded in 2005 is best. Browne's age finally matches the age of the song, his voice has matured, his timing is impeccable, and I'd love to know where I can get one of those guitars. Of course, in 1971 in Britain you couldn't name Morocco without invoking "Moroccan", that ubiquitous khaki-yellow cannabis resin that must have been smuggled into the country daily by the ton. "Something fine"? Well, hardly. But by 2005 the knowing smirk has gone, and the innocence of the song shines through.

But you said "Morocco" and you made me smile
And it hasn't been that easy for a long, long while
And looking back into your eyes I saw them really shine
Giving me a taste of something fine.

They've just had a taste of something fine
(Blenheim Palace 1974; photo: Fiona Thompson)

White Crow Telescope

I have been putting together several new Blurb books. They are in the small, square 7" x 7" format, which I rather like. In recent times I've fallen out of love with the over large, sumptuous, limited edition photographic books that publishers have been producing. I own several that are simply too big for any bookshelf in our house -- preposterous items that lounge around collecting dust and dints and waiting to be damaged by the hoover (not a huge risk in our house, it's true).

A curious thing has been happening in the photo-book world, that sort of parallels the bubble in the financial world. Now, it is a fact that some photo-books published in the 1970s and 1980s have become both highly desirable and extremely scarce. This makes them valuable in the only meaningful sense, i.e. that someone, somewhere is desperate to get hold of them and will pay good money to do so. Several books that I acquired for rather less than £20 in the days before the bubble are now listed at over £500, and a couple at over £1000. Virtually none is worth less than twice what I paid for it. Compared to my savings account, that's one hell of an interest rate.

The curious thing that has happened, though, is that the "scarcity + desirability = value" equation has had the tacit "time" element in "scarcity" and "desirability" artificially removed. In other words, it can now take just weeks for a new book to become unobtainable, and its desirability will by then have been so hyped by the Web as to make the Emperor's New Clothes look positively undersold.

Take the case of Paul Graham. I have mentioned before that I used to live in the flat above Paul Graham, and bought his earliest self-published books when I came across them mainly out of a sense of amusement that the publisher's address was also mine. Only later did I realise how ground-breaking they were, and how lucky I was to have them. I think the cover price of A1: the Great North Road in 1983 was £14.95. I see that today there are 20-odd copies listed on AddALL Rare Books, ranging from £450 for an ex-library paperback copy to £7000 (yes, seven thousand pounds) for a fine signed hardback. Well, OK, it's a good and important book and quite scarce, though who would actually pay that much for a copy I simply don't know.

Paul Graham's mid-career books have been less sought-after. Copies of Empty Heaven or End of an Age -- both remarkable books -- go for £30 or less, for example, though New Europe is quite highly-priced for an edition of "only" 3000 copies. But in 2007 the publishing house Steidl put out a fancy multi-volumed slip-cased Graham publication, A Shimmer of Possibility, which was trailed by so much overexcited hype that it was almost instantly out of print in its original "limited" 1000 copy edition, and is now already only obtainable at prices over £1000. Whether these prices will be sustained (along with Paul Graham's reputation) is anybody's guess.

The Steidl / Nazraeli approach is to produce books by fashionable names with high production values yet low print runs at a price that is high enough to discourage most buyers, but low enough to attract the buyers who see these books as a form of investment. The whole run sells out quickly, and copies instantly reappear on the market at inflated prices. Don't believe me? Check out Ebay. "Buy short, sell long" is the only rule that seems to apply to these items, most of which have really not been published long enough to have established a solid reputation. Todd Hido, Michael Kenna, Pentti Sammallahti, John Gossage, Stephen Gill, Alec Soth ... There is a long list of good photographers whose new but unweighed books are being traded like dodgy financial instruments.

So... Feel like a punt? Who knows what my latest efforts will be worth ten years from now! Maybe nothing, maybe a new car... Typically, I sell fewer than 20 copies of my books -- talk about a limited edition! Here is a first public version of one, which may yet see some more revision. I wanted to make something small, interesting and inexpensive out of some of the "crow" pictures I've been accumulating. This is it (so far):

WHITE CROW TELESCOPE by MIKE CHISHOLM

Do try the full screen view, by the way -- it makes quite a difference.

Bunker Mentality

Despite a quarter century of trudging around the Campus, yesterday for the first time I stumbled across one of those forgotten corners that is only visited by those with an urge to remain unseen (or curious photographers). From the graffiti, I suspect an infestation of nocturnal teens.




Isn't it odd, though, how the swastika is still the symbol of choice for a moron with a spraycan? And how such morons rarely notice they've got the thing the wrong way round? At least, I think this was meant to be a swastika. And I hope it's paint.




Interestingly, perhaps ominously, the entrance to this particular Nazi bunker is also presided over by a suspiciously pagan-looking green torso, resembling something by the artist Leonard Baskin.



As you may have noticed, I've got a "white wall" theme building at the moment. Whether it will go anywhere is hard to say at this stage.

New Heights

I knew that, on the way to do the weekly grocery shop today, I would pass that oddly Japanese field of bamboo canes, and that more than likely it would be even fuller than last week. Having long ago learned that chance favours the prepared, I fitted my 70-300 telephoto lens to the Canon 450D, and had it next to me on the car passenger seat.

I was right. The spectacle of hundreds of bamboo teepees receding into the distance on a sea of polythene was quite something. I knew that the telephoto would compress the perspective nicely. But what I also needed to come away with a decent image was height. Several large format photographers have shared their trade secret with me -- a ridiculously large tripod and a portable ladder. That bit of elevation will separate out the elements of a landscape better than any lens.

So, I stayed on the roadside bank and climbed a little way into a convenient tree, ignoring the impudent car horns passing by at speed. Et voilà!



Obviously, you don't want to take a tripod up a tree, but with an image-stabilized zoom who needs one anyway? Having got exactly what I had hoped for, I went back to the car and carried on to the supermarket. Job done!

Pillars and Trunks

For some reason I've been favouring the Panasonic LX3 almost exclusively in recent weeks. I'm hoping to receive a Clearviewer soon, and will report on its usefulness as an aid to composition and also perhaps, hopefully, steadying the camera. I still feel slightly foolish holding a camera out in front of me, and always worry about camera shake. It will be good to be able to bring the camera up to my eye, and I'm curious whether the Clearviewer will be robust enough to let me brace it against my face.

Actually, the combination of the inbuilt anti-shake mechanism and the very high shutter speeds these cameras select in "Program" mode (I don't think I've ever chosen to shoot at a speed over 1/125th second in manual mode!) means that softness due to shake is actually quite rare. I generally like a deep focus in my pictures, so have usually preferred smaller apertures, but an advantage of these small sensor cameras is that quite large apertures still give good depth of focus. According to the EXIF data, the white pillar below was shot at 1/800 at f/4.5, but both the face of the pillar and the wall a few feet behind it are acceptably focussed. Of course, if you're a fan of blurry bokeh, this must be quite frustrating.

Lichened Trunk and Blue Netting

Lichened Pillar & Repaired Stonework

Plain White Pillar

Junction Box

OK, that last one is trunk-ing but...

Normal Service

I presume from the recent baffled silence that the Anglo-Saxon excursion wore a bit thin for some, though, oddly, my viewing figures do seem to have gone up -- probably desperate students looking for a quick essay fix. I wonder if any of my half-baked factoids and ironies will escape into the wild and even make it into the world's knowledge base? Hopefully not -- please do your research properly, guys, and stop scraping information out of blogs!

Anyway, normal service has been resumed, though be warned that more swords'n'sorcery fakery is in the pipeline.

Behind the scenes at Mottisfont Abbey

Bluebells near Timsbury

Red Skip through Green Screen Barrier

I am adjusting to the idea of a ruling Conservative / Lib Dem coalition, and also to the idea of being governed by people (actually, almost entirely men) who are rather younger than me. This may take a while. Regardless of the scale of the ensuing, world-historical disappointment (and, for some, betrayal) that was New Labour, I will never forget the exhilaration of 2nd May 1997. I had to drive to a photographic workshop at Duckspool on that sunny day, and the smile never left my face.

The bemusement of the last week, I am sure, will also be memorable, but it doesn't hold any of the promise of change for the better that 1997 did. A measure of the changes since -- in the world, and in me -- is that now I find Michael Portillo a fairly sympathetic fellow, whereas then I, too, exulted in his downfall and humiliation. How many Tories are thirsting for revenge in their turn and how far the Lib Dems will be able to displace or restrain them, will probably be the story of the next few years.

That, and massive, massive cuts in public service spending, carried out with the moral authority endowed by the scale of the goverment's borrowing, and with higher education standing first in line for a spanking. After all, nobody likes a smart-arse...

Caedmon's Dream, Part III

From the series "Ring Hoard"

This whole Saxon revival thing was sparked up, initially, when I stumbled across the story of Caedmon and his dream. The source, once again, is Bede's Ecclesiastical History (Book IV, chapter xxiv) but it's a story that has fascinated many people, and -- like the tale of the sparrow flying through the hall -- you come across it all over the place. Poets, particularly, are drawn to Caedmon: he is, after all, the first named English poet. You might say that this is nothing less than the foundation myth of English literature.

"Caedmon's Hymn" is, in itself, one of the lesser items in the less than mighty Old English corpus. It sits alongside some "Mercian Hymns" and "Kentish Charters" in an unenticing section of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader entitled "Examples of non-West-Saxon dialects". It is unremarkable, in other words, until you attach the story told by Bede to it. The story goes like this:

Caedmon was a stable hand in the employ of the abbey at Whitby, which was run by a converted Saxon noblewoman called Hilda (I'm pretty sure this was not considered an intrinsically amusing name in the 7th century). Now, in those days people had to make their own entertainment and so the possession of a party piece was more or less de rigueur. Obviously, the bar was not set high for the party piece of a cowherd, but nonetheless the ability to pipe up with an amusing song while your companions drank themselves insensible was not considered an unreasonable expectation.

This Caedmon, however, had somehow never got the hang of singing, and would always slope off home to the stable whenever it came round to his turn to sing. Bede does not record whether this coincided with his turn to buy a round, but you might wonder. Anyway, one night after he had made his customary retreat from the merry-making back to his hayloft Caedmon had one of those curious Saxon-style dreams, in which a mysterious being appears by your bed and starts issuing instructions, commands, and prophesies. Clearly, there were more angels out and about at that time than we encounter nowadays, or perhaps there were more nocturnal intruders with a good line in exculpatory improvisation.

Whatever, this one got straight down to business and -- rather spitefully for an angel -- went directly for our man's vulnerable spot. He/she/it spake thusly: "Caedmon, sing me a song".

In Bede's words:

He answered, "I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and retired to this place, because I could not sing." The other who talked to him, replied, "However, you shall sing." ­ "What shall I sing?" rejoined he. "Sing the beginning of created beings," said the other.

So he did, and very good it was, too. When he woke up he could remember it all, and it wasn't just nonsense about scrambled eggs, so he added some new bits as well. "Caedmon's Hymn" had arrived.

From the series "Ring Hoard"

Now, it's fairly obvious that a hymn of praise to the Lord of Creation was not going to raise the roof at the next cowherd's bash. Moreover, any talk of angels visiting stable lads in the night was going to raise eyebrows in the monastery, so Caedmon was brushed off, scrubbed up and wheeled in to see the Abbess Hilda herself.

Abbess Hilda (that's Saint Hilda to you) was no innocent. She had been part of the same extended, incestously intertwined pagan royal family that gave us King Edwin of Northumbria, about whom we heard in Part II. Persuaded to convert in her thirties by the same missionary, Paulinus, she went on to an illustrious career as a sort of monastic trouble-shooter, stamping out any funny stuff, imposing discipline, encouraging learning, and eventually setting up a veritable bishop-factory at her own abbey at Whitby. She died amid an appropriate son et lumière of piety, with various susceptible nuns seeing simultaneous visions of Hilda's soul ascending to heaven.

OK, so Caedmon is brought before that Hilda. Perhaps suspecting that her pious leg was being pulled, but impressed nonetheless, she sets a test. In Bede's words:

They expounded to him a passage in holy writ, either historical or doctrinal, ordering him, if he could, to put the same into verse. Having undertaken it, he went away and, returning the next morning, gave it to them composed in most excellent verse; whereupon the abbess, embracing the grace of God in the man, instructed him to quit the secular habit, and take upon him the monastic life; which being accordingly done, she associated him to the rest of the brethren in her monastery, and ordered that he should be taught the whole series of sacred history.

Nice move, Caedmon! Say goodbye, draughty stable, and get belly-up to the top table -- talk about singing for your supper! No wonder poets have found him such an inspiration over the years.

The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me — light effacing my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.

from Caedmon, by Denise Levertov *

Caedmon lived out his life as a devout monk, turning out religious verse like, Bede says, a cow chewing on the cud of the sacred history he was fed. Of course, once you get used to the regular meals and the dry bedding, the monastic life is not to everyone's taste. Here is an extract from a poem by the excellent Ian Duhig which puts it in perspective:

Lord I know, and I know you know I know
this is a drudge's penance. Only dull scholars
or cowherds maddened with cow-watching
will ever read The Grey Psalter of Antrim.
I have copied it these thirteen years
waiting for the good bits -- High King of the Roads,
are there any good bits in The Grey Psalter of Antrim?

(text illegible here because of teeth-marks.)

from: Margin Prayer from an Ancient Psalter, by Ian Duhig

Don't you love those teeth-marks? "Hey, brother Caedmon, chew me a song out of this!"

Next:  Caedmon's Hymn (finally).

From the series "Ring Hoard"

* The Biblically-minded among you may see a reference to Isaiah 6 here, where the angel touches a hot coal from the altar to Isaiah's lips to purify him for prophesy. Isaiah 6:4 is one of my favorite bits of Biblical language: "And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke". Boom!

Kenna You Tell The Difference?

236 sticks

Why, it's almost unkenny uncanny! Just for fun, at the other end of the monochrome spectrum, here is Thomas Joshua Cooper going for a walk in the bluebell wood:

Ritual Indication: message for TJC

Just in case it's not obvious, I deeply admire [most of] the work of these two supreme practitioners of the black & white image. Cooper, especially, is a big favourite of mine (I own all his books, and once attended one of his life-changing workshops) -- he amply repays the effort required to get past the immediate response, "But they're so dark, and they're all so similar!". True. And your point is?

Sticks

I'm not quite ready to finish off the "Caedmon's Dream" set of posts, yet. Having spent a couple of days in bed, I was feeling in need of some fresh air, so headed out in the direction of Mottisfont. In particular, I had an appointment with these sticks, which I'd spotted passing by in the car last weekend. They have been extraordinarily carefully and elegantly arranged around the poly-cloches I photographed the other week.



The light was incredibly soft, but eminently useable for photography, so I headed over to the Abbey, which I haven't visited for a while. Mooching about in one of those corners the staff don't expect visitors to explore, I found this luxuriously gift-wrapped log:



The diffuse light and a slight breeze brought an agreeable softness to a lot of the pictures, such as this one of the famous Mottisfont Great Plane ("probably the largest plane tree in Britain"), putting out a new batch of leaves for something like the 200th time:



Then, on the way home, I pulled into a layby to photograph a rookery near Timsbury I had kept meaning to visit before the leaves get too dense to see the birds. As I stepped into the trees, I was surprised by the spectacle of a classic bluebell wood, one of the great spectacles of spring. I recall reading somewhere the observation that -- from the point of view of native flora -- spring goes first through a white, then a yellow, then a blue phase, and this certainly seems to be true, as small blue speedwells were also growing in the lawns at Mottisfont.



No "keepers", probably, from the point of view of any existing or potential projects, but a record of a pleasant afternoon.

The People Have Spoken

I love the way our politicians have latched onto the idea that "the people have spoken, and we must listen to what they have said". Yes, but conveniently the people all spoke at the same time. Who knows what we're saying?

So now it's Sooty & Sweep Time ("What did you say, Electorate? You want those big Tory cuts anyway? What about you, Sweep? You, too? No, you shut up, Sue, no-one likes you, anyway")

Sigh. Rarely do those those wise but futile words ring so true as in the aftermath of an election: "Don't vote, it only encourages them". Or maybe, "If voting really changed anything, they'd make it illegal".

N.B. has anyone else spotted the new phrase: "deals done in smoke-free rooms"? I can't decide whether it's ironic or a mindless update of a well-worn (but once meaningful) cliché. Probably both: a politician's joke that's already unfunny.

I've been in bed, unwell, while all this was happening. Listening to it half-awake on the radio has been surreal. I'm not sure it's any less so now I'm back on my feet.

On the bright side: just look what happened to the BNP in Barking (and did you hear that spot on the Today Programme about the Labour campaign there? Inspirational!), and we have our first Green MP.

Caedmon's Dream, Part II

From the series "Ring Hoard"

When people reflect on the Anglo-Saxon worldview they sometimes invoke an image which has passed into the general fund of anecdote: this life is like a sparrow which flies into the Great Hall in winter -- it passes from the dark and cold through a splendid warmth and brightness, briefly, then flies back out into the dark and cold again.

Setting aside the utter unlikeliness of this scenario -- a sparrow flying straight through the hall, rather than perching gratefully in the rafters and shitting in your mead? -- it does have a certain resonance, and casts a spiritual light onto a people generally characterised by a stoic grumpiness, a love of strong drink and garish jewellery, and an inexplicable urge to die in battle (which may explain the subsequent reputation of the British abroad).

The source of this little parable is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), written around 730 AD by the Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk. In Book II, chapter xiii, to be precise (read it yourself -- link here). Read in context, however, the tale of the allegorical sparrow is actually more poignant, and more comic, than it might seem.

The context is Bede's account of the conversion to Christianity of the pagan Edwin, King of Northumbria, around 625 AD.

Previously on Bede's Ecclesiastical History:

Following an encounter with a mysterious tall, dark stranger in a dream and a foiled assassination attempt when in exile with King Raedwald, Edwin has been predisposed to conversion at the hands of Paulinus, a Roman missionary who is said to have borne a striking resemblance to the tall, dark stranger in Edwin's dream, and who miraculously turns out to know the secret hand gesture revealed to Edwin in the dream.

Being a good Anglo-Saxon, however, Edwin cannot convert his people without at least a pretence of consultation (plus ça change...). So he gathers the council of wise men -- in Anglo-Saxon, a moot, or possibly a thing. The main item on the agenda -- after taking apologies, minutes of the last moot, and moot points arising -- is:

1. So, what do we make of this Christianity business? Any objections?

First up is the Top Pagan Priest. Surprisingly (at least in Bede's account) he's all for it. Indeed, he says, I knew the pagan thing was rubbish all along -- look, if it wasn't rubbish, why aren't I richer and more powerful? "I move: let's convert to Christianity immediately. Hey, I've seen the jewellery these Roman boys wear! And check that big curly stick!"

Next up is wise old warrior man, Sitting Bull with a gigantic sword and a snowy white beard. He utters the immortal parable of the sparrow. Very cool, wise old Geordie warrior. But, if you actually read it, what he is saying is this:

"There is an infinity of unknowable darkness before and after the brief span of a human life. Getafix over there has never had anything useful whatsoever to say about those dark bits fore and aft. If the new priestly boy does have something useful to offer -- and especially if it stops my Missus gibbering about timor mortis in the small hours -- then, hey, WTF?"

[A grunted chorus of "WTF! WTF!" applauds these words]

Boss Priest is back on his feet. "Through the Chair! Through the Chair!! I totally agree with my scary warrior friend from Sunderland. In fact, the old ways were such rubbish, that I'm going to ride over to the shrine ... right now ... on a stallion ... with a SPEAR and a SWORD ..."

[sharp intake of communal breath at this heresy]

"... and totally TRASH the place! Anyone else up for it? I reckon this Christianity is going to be fun!"

["Yeah! WTF!! WTF!!" Stamping of feet. They saddle up and ride out.]

As Bede wrote:

The multitude, beholding it, concluded he was distracted; but he lost no time, for as soon as he drew near the temple he profaned the same, casting into it the spear which he held; and rejoicing in the knowledge of the worship of the true God, he commanded his companions to destroy the temple, with all its enclosures, by fire. This place where the idols were is still shown, not far from York, to the eastward, beyond the river Derwent, and is now called Godmundingham, where the high priest, by the inspiration of the true God, profaned and destroyed the altars which he had himself consecrated.

Bede does not record whether item 2 on the agenda -- the Mead Fund -- ever got discussed.

From the series "Ring Hoard"

So, if nothing else, you can perhaps see the thinking behind my Ring Hoard -- the battered remnants of a sacred cache of rings, perhaps hidden in a remote corner of North Herts near the Saxon settlement of Stithenaece, just inside the Danelaw, within the lands once dominated by the Iceni...

Next: A Song for Hilda