Saturday Outing

Talking of fancy brickwork...  I had an outing to the Viaduct yesterday afternoon.

The curious thing about the Viaduct is that it's actually made of solid concrete with a brick facing.  Built in the 1880s, it is one of the very first poured concrete structures.  Unless its physical decline is halted soon (talk about yer wabi sabi), it will have to be demolished.  Every time I return a new chunk of parapet is lying in the grass.

Bricks, Slight Return

For those of you who read the comments to the previous post, here is the re-pointing in question.  Quality work, or what?  Now who says standards are in decline?

That, by the way, is the very high quality brickwork of the building in which I happen to work, laid 100 years ago by true craftsmen -- men whose spirits must be falling about laughing at the spectacle of what has been done to their mighty labours by their great grandchildren.  I have spent many idle minutes gazing at it out of my office window, trying to work out the cunning patterning of longs and shorts that gives that vast cliff of red brick its springy rhythm.

Bricks

I generally try to avoid photographing brickwork.  Apart from the fact that bricks are a pretty dull subject, they inevitably bring to mind those test shots people do to assess lenses for pincushion and barrel distortions.  With the best will in the world, you can't stop yourself from checking whether the rows are straight.

Of course, modern building standards being what they are, the courses of bricks quite often haven't been laid straight, even in high profile, high prestige buildings like these.  That pointing is pretty dreadful, too.

There are other reasons for brickwork round here to be less than exemplary.  Southampton is pretty much a town built on a heap of sand and gravel.  The ground beneath our feet is riddled with shifting underground waterways that eat away at the stability of any building.  Add to that the pasting the town took from the Luftwaffe in WW2 -- three bombs fell in our street, a good mile away from the dockside action -- and any pre-1940s building is going to have cracks and crazy angles in it somewhere.

But sometimes the patterning of the brickwork can add something, as I think it does here.

Ash Wednesday

More "trees and facades".  I'm not sure how long this theme can survive, once the leaves start growing back.

I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but something about these images stirs a deep satisfaction for me, and I suspect I could go on doing them for a long time yet.  I'm certainly not giving them up for Lent.  Just talk amongst yourselves if it gets boring...

Radiation

We seem finally to have gone over the divide that separates "short, dark winter days" from "lengthening spring days".  There is a new quality of intensity to the light, that somehow makes one aware that sunlight is a form of radiation.  The colours of early spring can be a little other-wordly, newly exposed to the radiant energy beaming in onto a renewing planet.

Alarmingly for February, we are already being given a drought warning.  It's been a very dry winter in the southern half of Britain.  Looks like the car won't get washed this year, either!

Word Verification

I've had a couple of comments now, saying that the entry of two "wobbly words", rather than the previous one, is being required for a comment to be verified.  Is this the case for everyone?  I suspect this may be linked to the fact that I went over to the "new" post-creation interface this week (which is better), because of problems with losing the link to the larger view of an image when shunting it around within the post, but I just can't find where the "word verification" settings for comments are now controlled from.

Those of you who don't run a blog yourself may not realise how this works.  I myself -- being le patron -- do not need to verify my own comments, so never see the wobbly words (unless I'm commenting on someone else's blog).  I also don't choose the ones you see -- it's an entirely random process run by the Google Blogger software, joining front ends and back ends of words like a pantomime horse or a game of Consequences.  The fact that sometimes the word verifications are uncannily appropriate for the subject of the post is, well, completely accidental, unless you are hospitable to the idea that the Universe is trying to tell us something, and using Blogger word verifications as its mouthpiece.  Which, after all, is no more strange than many perfectly respectable religious beliefs.

Anyway, let me know what you are seeing, and do tell me if you have encountered and fixed the same problem in Blogger.


Added 23/2/2012:  It is now clear that this is a general change in Blogger's word verification procedure, and it was simply a coincidence that I had changed to the new editor.  Which proves something, though I'm not sure what.

Album Covers

It is a contemporary "received idea" that album art flourished during the heyday of the 12" vinyl, 33 rpm "long-playing record" (roughly, mid-1960s to mid-1980s), and went into a decline when the CD took over the mass music market.  Until my bold expedition with a torch under the dining room table this week, I thought this was so, too.

As readers of the previous post will recall, I was looking for an LP which I hoped might be in my stash of long-unlistened-to vinyl, kept in the domestic equivalent of deep storage i.e. the bottom shelf of a bookcase behind a table, down among the dust-bunnies, cobwebs and cables.  I didn't find what I was looking for, but re-emerged with a slightly random selection of albums, primarily with the intention of showing my daughter how brilliant everything was when I was her age.

But, like so many pretty pebbles twinkling on the seashore of memory, they seemed to fade when hauled into the daylight.  Not literally: actually, I was amazed at how well these 40-year-old artefacts had withstood the ravages of time.  But they seemed somehow much diminished, and that fabled cover art...  It was, in the main, rubbish.

I was looking at bad paintings, crude montages, timid typography, tacky colour combinations, poorly- reproduced photographs, and dreadful layouts -- just bad graphical design in general.  Most astonishing of all was how little use was actually made of those generous 144 square inches of real estate.  Large areas of plain, blank colour predominated, and text was either kept to a minimum -- generally no more than a list of tracks, and a few acknowlegements -- or the lyrics were spread over the entire thing, in a tiny, unreadable font.  There were pointless gatefolds, opening onto nothing much, and a surprising amount of corporate "noise" plastered over everything -- company logos, copyright notices, serial numbers, etc. -- that had once, somehow, been transparent.

Typically awful mid-70s cover

(comedy duo, The Tryptolites)

There were exceptions, of course.  There are alway exceptions.  From my sample, I found that Jethro Tull's Stand Up, David Bowie's Hunky Dory, Steely Dan's Katy Lied, and Weather Report's Mysterious Traveller still retained their original charm.  But a good eighty percent were either totally bland or downright offensive to contemporary eyes.

Interesting.

I then looked at my CDs.  Now, I am a fanboy of the ECM label and its products so I ignored those, as well as the ones which simply reproduced an old LP cover.  What did I see?  Mainly gorgeous design, careful typography, sympathetic layouts, quite often with a natty cardboard outer case, and an informative booklet insert containing lyrics, photographs and little essays, often in parallel languages.

Interesting.  Surprising.  Disconcerting.

On reflection, it is obvious why this is the case:  computer-aided design, digital imaging and digital typography.  Virtually anyone could do a better job nowadays.

I remember, back in my student days, spending entire nights "laying up" a little radical magazine we used to produce.  It was all done with typewriters, scissors, sticky tape, Tipp-Ex, Letraset and, at a pinch, yer actual handwriting.  The final layout sheets would be taken as "camera-ready copy" to our printer, and it all took a lot of hard work and it looked dreadful, although that authentic "fanzine" look does still have its admirers.

Nowadays, with the use of a suitable desktop publishing package and copy submitted over the internet, the whole thing could be turned round in a couple of hours, with a completely seamless, professional finish.  The time we spent typing, Tipp-Exing and taping can be used instead to give the end product a distinctive, desirable identity (or even, um, to write stuff people want to read).  I expect students still stay up all night to do it, but that's just because they can.

OTT in the last great days of vinyl...

That difficult second album

Harder to explain, is why everybody thinks the reverse is true:  that a high percentage of those LP sleeves were some kind of apotheosis of graphic design.  I can think of all sorts of reasons, but here are a few:

• Standards then were both more rigid and lower.  Just look at a typical magazine from the period, particularly the adverts, and compare with the contemporary equivalent.
• Hard to recall, but "full colour printing" was still a novelty in the 1960s, and cheap full colour printing required various technical compromises that overruled design considerations.
• The taste for surrealism has not aged well.  Particularly when in the form of poorly-painted, sub-Dali-esque fantasy, or auto-pilot psychedelia.  Little Feat's Sailin' Shoes is a personal favourite, musically, but that cover (no. 18 in Rolling Stone's top 100 covers, I see) is simply tacky.
• Nothing ages quite as badly as a fancy haircut.  'Nuff said.
• Manipulating photographs used to be much more difficult.  For every After The Gold Rush there are ten Young Americans, and 100 efforts with blunt scissors we won't even mention.
• Hipgnosis made a (largely) deserved name for themselves, and that reputation has somehow floated everyone else's boat.  How many other music packaging design teams can you name?  And how many times do you really need or want to look at the covers of Houses of the Holy or even Dark Side of the Moon?
•  Let's not talk about Roger Dean, please.  I didn't like that stuff at the time, it's just not my cup of tea.  To be honest, speaking as a big fan of illustration, I find it hard to think of any original illustrators working within the music field whose work stood out for me.  Which is odd, actually  -- compare that with children's books of the period.  I suspect it may not have paid well.
• Things tend to get better, but we prefer to think they get worse.  Otherwise, we'd just be very, very jealous of our own children's good fortune.  As if!
• I have exceptionally refined taste, which has just got better over the years.

In the end, album covers are just commercial packaging and there's no more reason to consider them an art form than cereal packets or ready-meal boxes.  Some of the best albums have the worst covers (jazz and classical records of the "golden age" are uniformly atrocious, from Brilliant Corners to Bitches Brew)  and are none the worse for that.

And that is why I have decided not to demonstrate to my daughter how things were so much better in my day.  Life is hard enough for the young folk, these days, without the added burden of realising they should have been born in 1954. Instead, I will teach her that most valuable lesson, never to judge a book by its cover.  That's if I can ever catch her for five minutes without those bloody sawn-off earphones plugged in.

1980s last gasp...

(Tryptolites farewell tour)

Some Of Our Records Are Missing

One thing leads to another.

Seeing that mysterious ghost ship trapped in the ice on the Staff Club pond the other day immediately called to mind the ballad "Lord Franklin", as rendered by Pentangle on the album Cruel Sister.  Forty-odd years ago, in that icy winter of 1970/71, that album was probably my favourite, and that track in particular -- with its wistful, understated yearning for an explorer of the heroic age, missing presumed lost among the ice-floes of the Northwest Passage -- embedded itself deep in my psyche.  I learned the chords and the words, and at Easter 1971 -- I had forgotten this -- a friend and I performed it before an audience of 100 or so.

How easy it is to forget our past selves.  Once upon a time, I was possessed by the folk music of the British Isles in the way some are possessed by football or fashion.  The revival of that music by groups like Pentangle was old news by the time my teenage interest was aroused, but its transformation by way of electrification by the likes of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span happened before my very eyes.  For me, the excitement of those first folk-rock albums such as Liege and Lief, and Hark! The Village Wait exceeded even that of acts like Led Zeppelin, exciting as they were.  This was truly my music.

But, we change.  Within a few years, other musics had exercised their charms on me, and those folk albums went to the back of the box, and went unplayed literally for decades.  Even when the mood for nostalgia hit me, it would be Countdown to Ecstasy or Black Market I would reach for.  But that frozen ship in the pond awoke an urge to listen to Pentangle, so I resolved to dig out those albums.

Easier said than done.  For many years, my small collection of vinyl has lived on a shelf at the bottom of a bookcase which is wedged against a wall behind a large oak table.  The only way to access them is to crawl under the table with a torch.  It's dirty and dusty down there, and it is booby-trapped with tangled computer cables, power-plug extensions and stacked boxes of God-knows-what.  But, like Howard Carter penetrating the tomb of Tutankhamun, I crawled through, hoping to discover "wonderful things, wonderful things".

But, it turns out, the tomb had been robbed.  Plenty of LPs remained -- my torch revealed The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Steely Dan, even a double album BBC Russian course -- but the folkie gold I was seeking had gone.  Not a single Pentangle album remained.  Both early Steeleye Span albums had gone.  Full House (first pressing with blacked out track listing) was missing.

I have no idea where they are now, but they will have gone missing thirty or more years ago.  I have my suspicions.  I suppose I may have loaned them to someone.  Or I may even have given them away or sold them in the 1980s.  It hardly matters now and, in a way, I rather enjoy not being able to scratch that particular itch: some nostalgic longings are far sweeter unfulfilled.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
    Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

And that is exactly the appeal of the story of "Lord Franklin", of course:  "The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell".  It's a tale about all tales without closure, adrift somewhere on the spectrum of mystery between the Marie Celeste and a few missing LPs.  It's an oddly unanchored song, too, neither wholly Lady Franklin's lament nor simply a sailor's dream.

One day (and it may be quite soon) the remains of the real Sir John Franklin, his ship and his crew will turn up, and the yarn will finally be fully told.  Of course, the historic expedition (as opposed to the imagined one) is already exemplary.  That is, exemplary of the magnificent folly of British self-belief.  Britain might have ruled the waves in 1845, but had more of a problem with pack-ice.

Whether the discovery of some cold, gnawed bones, a few buttons and a heap of shivered ship's timbers will capsize the song's appeal remains to be seen, but I doubt it.  It certainly won't make any difference to Lady Jane Franklin, who offered large rewards and sponsored seven expeditions to find news of her husband, refusing to the end to believe the tales of catastrophe and cannibalism that were whispered back from the Arctic wastes. Too late, too late: she died in 1875.

Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To know on earth, that my Franklin do live.

Police Quiz Blogger

Further to my mooted "Stamp Out Melisma in 1012" campaign...

I've just heard the word "melisma" used -- for the first time ever -- on the Sunday evening news on BBC Radio 4, in relation to Whitney Houston's so-far unexplained demise.  I had no idea it was fatal.

I have a watertight alibi for the last 48 hours, so don't be looking at me like that.  Hey, I liked "I Will Always Love You".

But be afraid, melisma-abusers, be very afraid.

Lord Franklin

In Baffin Bay where the whale fishes blow

The fate of Franklin no man may know

The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell

Lord Franklin alone with his sailors do dwell.

Lord Franklin (trad.)

Buying In

As well as buying more photo-books than most people would probably consider sane, last year I also bought some limited-run bookworks and other pieces from photographer Raymond Meeks. This was mainly, obviously, because I like his work. I confess it is also because I have a shrewd idea his reputation is destined to rise much higher in the long term, and his unique, hand-made books are -- for now -- relatively affordable. More magnanimously, you could say I'm doing my small bit to support him and encourage him to keep on going. As his stock rises, I may switch my photo-tithe to someone else more in need of it, who knows?

But this unnecessary expenditure is not so much an investment as the price of entry into a game in which I want to be a player. In crude terms, I don't see why I should expect anyone to buy my work, if I never buy anything myself. It's a curious thing, but buying other people's work, whether as original prints or in book form, does not seem to come naturally to many self-styled "artists", not least photographers. Sometimes this seems to be due to a cult of amateurism reminiscent of the old "gentlemen and players" distinction in sport, and sometimes to an emphasis on process ("My art is what I do, not what I produce").

I have no problem with either attitude, but an unwillingness to buy in often goes along with a narrowness of perspective. I'm always coming across photographers offering pictures for sale whose work is not just derivative, but derivative of the same few, frequently-imitated models. It seems that their exposure to contemporary photography (and their ambition) is limited to the glossy images shown in Amateur Photographer, British Journal of Photography, and the like.

I saw a craft-market stall just this week where a hopeful guy was peddling his wares. They were merely the "same old same old" you see in every little gallery and in the racks of holiday-town art shops: romantic landscapes in flattering light and photogenic weather conditions, rendered slightly hyper-real with graduated filters and some tepid post-processing, printed on watercolour paper and signed with a flourish. The sort of thing that ends up on the greetings cards that are sent to me on my birthday because I'm "into" photography. "It's what people want", he claimed, but I didn't see any evidence of a queue, and I certainly wasn't buying any.

Probably the most important thing I had to offer to the Arena Group last Sunday was this, my Declaration of Independence, important because it is true whether you like my work or not:

Most of my work is done in my lunch-hour, or at weekends, repeatedly visiting the same few local sites. I'm not a professional photographer or artist i.e. I don't earn a living that way. Most people work like this: even professionals have to squeeze time for "personal" work which won't pay any bills.

On balance, I think of this as a Good Thing. It's like writing poetry: if you're after fame and fortune, you're in the wrong game. You do it for its own sake, and the appreciation of a small, dedicated, statistically insignificant audience, most of whom will be practitioners themselves.

Even fame within such a small circle is effective invisibility -- Martin Parr is about as well known to the wider world as Paul Muldoon. But invisibility does have benefits: you're free from the expectations of paying audiences -- so there's no excuse for your work not to be As Serious As Your Life (or Daft As A Brush, if that's what you prefer).

I have already gone on about this, two years ago in the post Free As A Brush. It would be easy to misinterpret my words as not so much as a Declaration of Independence, as an airy dismissal of any grubby urge to buy and sell one's work. That would be dead wrong. My point is that -- with extremely rare exceptions -- no-one can make a living from art. So you might as well make a virtue of this and do what you really want, rather than try to second-guess the taste of a mythical buying public. We are our own audience, and we owe it to each other to buy in, whenever possible.

To return to Raymond Meeks, though. Ray is a great example of a category of artist that blogging professional photographer Kirk Tuck identified in a recent post, talking about the way professionals are facing a time of massive change, when the same old same old simply won't earn them a living any more:

The pathways to profit have changed and now we need to act like pioneers instead of map readers. It will take re-invention and exploration to find new ways to keep doing what you love. Ask any working professional in the arts if he or she is still doing it the way they did it ten or even five years ago and I'm sure you'll quickly find that the successful ones have learned to tack into the headwind and keep moving forward. They might be adding stuff they never thought they'd do before but that's part of the deal.

And the ones who are still doing their art exactly the way they did it ten or twenty years ago fall into two camps: 1. People who support themselves outside the construct of the working artist. Or, 2. Those whose work is so individual and so beautiful that it falls outside the run of the mill and is coveted by clients. Regardless of how anachronistic the delivery or approach. What a great spot to be in!

Kirk Tuck, The Visual Science Lab blog, 30/12/2011

That's Raymond Meeks, right there in category 2. What a great spot to be in, indeed.

Probable Cause

I received an email last week from my daughter's college. Hampshire schools, for whatever reason, do not have "sixth forms"; instead, students wishing to study A Levels and the like must attend one of a number of post-16 colleges with anything from 1,500-3,500 students each.

It can be a bit impersonal, as there are multiple large classes in the popular subjects, and it's all very different from my own long-ago sixth-form years in the last century. This impersonality puts a large premium on the quality of communication between the college, students and parents.

The subject of the mail I received is irrelevant, though I was irritated by the fact that it betrayed an oh-don't-bother-me attitude to an important matter. No, it was the spelling that got my attention. Here is the first significant sentence, with X and Y substituted for the actual items:

"The [X] and [Y] would of been sent to you seperately."

OK. "Seperately" I can accept -- I doubt my partner knows how to spell "separately", as it happens*. But "would of" always gets my goat.

Then came the next two sentences:

"The form your completed has been crossed through proberly by me and marked completed. So two things could of happened."

Proberly?? Did she mean "probably"? Do you know, in all the poorly-written job applications, memos, emails, and semi-literate scribblings that have passed before my eyes, I have never before seen that one. It's not a mistake, either, or a typo for "properly", as she repeats it later on. However, I see there are 1,400,000 hits on Google for "proberly", so I've clearly led a sheltered life, orthographically-speaking.

Now, as I think I've made clear in previous posts, I'm not by nature one of those reactionary pedants who recoil and reach for the green ink on hearing some ugly new coinage. I enjoy and employ fashionable usages and occupational argot, and have no problem at all with the fact that language changes. I'm liking it, even. But I am a bit of a spelling fascist.

Why, you might ask, would someone be tolerant in some areas of language use and yet be so intolerant in others, especially one as arbitrary (and divisive) as spelling? Good question. For me, it's like this:

Of all the causes of evil in this world, of which there are many, the two that I find bother me most often -- perhaps because I encounter them so frequently -- are ignorance and carelessness. These "minor" vices bother me because they are unnecessary and easily fixed but, unchecked, quickly turn into the major vices of stupidity and malice.

It bothers me that someone, for example, who is employed to communicate with parents from within an educational institution can pay so little attention to the written word and to her own standards of literacy that she has not noticed that she cannot spell a word that must pass in front of her careless eyes -- properly spelled and in clear, printed letters -- at least a dozen times every week. Probably more.

Obviously, standards have changed in recent times, and no one likes to be the sort of prig who bounces such errors straight back to sender. I expect Miss Proberly sails through her annual appraisal; a lovely person with just the right customer-facing attitude. But would you accept this core-level carelessness from the mechanic who services your car? OK, he left in the old spark-plugs, and didn't replace the oil -- oh, and look, he's put oily marks all over your upholstery -- but why get hung up on prissy details, when he's such a nice bloke! The car still goes, doesn't it?

I accept that some people have poor literacy skills, and probably get by without them very well (though that's questionable). After all, my bricklaying isn't up to much, or my object-oriented programming, come to that. But for a literate person in a clerical job to misspell "probably" as "proberly" shows a wilful lack of self-awareness, shading into arrogance, that is every bit as witless as the person who emerges from a shop, unwraps a sandwich, and tosses the packaging onto the pavement, right next to the bin.

Trivial, yes, and no laws other than those of grammar have been broken. But it's symptomatic of a social malaise, something that could yet slowly poison everything for everyone. "Carelessness" is dangerous because the thing is, we can't really pick and choose what to care about. A caring state of mind is indivisible. Careless spelling is on the same continuum as failing to check properly the points on a railway junction. It's one of those areas where the personal really is the political.

But did I send an email back, correcting her spelling and explaining the folly of "would of / could of"? Of course I didn't. I suppose you might say I just didn't care enough.

* Isn't it odd how people seem to think that studying English at degree level bestows full Complete Plain Words style authority (or, in these diminished times, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves style authority") on the English graduate? Do they think there are compulsory papers on "spelling really difficult words" and "speaking proper"?

Warm Wet Westerlies

Well, that was disappointing.

It was particularly cold on Friday night, and it froze our external "condensate" pipe, which meant the hot water and central heating boiler wouldn't start. Given that the forecast was for about three inches of snow to fall overnight on Saturday, I spent most of yesterday afternoon up a ladder unfreezing the pipe (top tip: use one of those microwaveable "wheat bags" intended for wrapping round painful sports injuries), then lagging it with foam.

Woke up this morning -- not even a heavy frost. Elsewhere there has been heavy snow, with the usual disruption, but here, nothing. I suppose we should be relieved and grateful (and if I hadn't managed to get the hot water back up and running it would have been a different story) but I must admit I always look forward to the first real snow of the winter.

But the classic struggle between the Warm Wet Westerly airstream from the Atlantic and the Cold Cold Cold air over continental Europe will continue, so we may still see some snow before February has gone. Living on that front line is what British weather is all about.

And, no, these pictures have nothing to do with frozen pipes, central heating or snow. Just two more "trees and facades" images taken this week.

Cold and Clear

There's a very cold NE airstream going over us at the moment, and everything is wonderfully crisp and clear first thing. The sun is rising that little bit earlier, now, and getting in amongst the plate glass and reflective surfaces, and bouncing all over the place. Both of these were taken this morning.

Looking at my files of images (which I order chronologically) it's obvious that February through March is one of my peak times of year for photographic good fortune; I'm hoping this year will be no exception.

The Ghost in the Machine

An inclination to invest inanimate objects with thoughts, feelings, and personality seems to be one of humanity's more indelible characteristics; what you might call an animistic cast of mind. It takes a far sterner rationalist than me to bin a favourite cup when its handle comes off, for example. Eventually I will do it, but there needs to be a suitable period of mourning first, while the cup lies in state on a shelf. Most young children, of course, seem to inhabit a permanently liminal world, where consciousness swirls in and out of things like a tide.

My daughter was particularly susceptible as a toddler, occasionally entering a state we referred to as "goggling", which involved holding her breath and trembling visibly in an open-mouthed, wide-eyed stare of rapture, as (we presumed) the toys arranged before her came to vivid life. She was our little living-room shaman. That animistic tide keeps going out much further as we grow, of course, until the edgy moment arrives so hilariously (and poignantly) captured by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: "Mummy, teddy's stopped breathing!"

But the idea that certain categories of thing acquire a personality in use is not just a vestige of childhood enchantment. New instruments need to be "played in" to develop their tone, and the quality of their final tone may well depend on the quality and character of their initial playing-in. What could be more full of personality than a pair of old shoes, and more devoid of personality than a pair of new ones? And who does not keep an assortment of pebbles, conkers and the like in their coat pockets, that gradually over the years acquire a deep patina and "pocket polish"? Ah, OK; just me, then.

I am convinced that cameras, too, exert some kind of influence over the pictures that emerge from them that far exceeds their mechanical functioning. You have to meet a camera half-way, get to know it, persuade it to do its best for you. Have you ever noticed how awful the first batches of images from a new camera are? You can set it on "auto everything" or on full manual, you can even use a cable release, spirit level and tripod in extremis, and still get rubbish. Blurry, over-exposed, poorly-composed rubbish. Yet, a few months later, if you've played it in nicely, you can forget to check what settings you're using, and you and your camera will still get your act together -- magic begins to happen.

I'm just about reaching that point with the used G3 I bought late last year. In some weird way, I had to exorcise the ghost in the machine installed by the previous owner, who had clearly not

liked the camera; after all, he'd sold it on "priced to sell" not long after he'd bought it. It's a bit like buying a dog from the kennels: it takes time for an abusive or unloving owner's traces to be erased. Sounds nutty, I know.

The opposite case is a disenchanted object. Sometimes, in the back of a cupboard or the depths of a drawer, you'll come across a keepsake, or a forgotten item once in everyday use -- a cigarette lighter, a pen, a postcard. You'll look at it, and remember why you kept it, but wonder where the magic went. The ghost has finally gone, and you can safely bin it.

In the Arena

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was booked to speak to the Arena Photographers group at 2:00 pm today, primarily to turn them on to (or off of) the joys and benefits of blogging for photographers. The Arena Group has been going for 25 years, and clearly has an active and distinguished membership. I must admit that, when first invited, I made the error of muddling the links on the Group's website to "photographers' websites" with the links to "members' websites", and very nearly refused the invitation, having seen what I took to be the celestial general standard of the Arena Group's work. Only when I began to wonder why Joel Meyerowitz or Lewis Baltz would be crossing the Atlantic to a village hall in Berkshire did the penny drop. Phew. Not quite that distinguished, then.

The day began with a phone call from the Chair, Graham, explaining that there had been a double-booking on the hall: could I make it for 12:00, instead? Now, the venue is an hour's drive away, it was already 10:00, and I had intended to spend the morning putting my presentation notes together, so it took a minute or two to agree, not least because I was still undressed, and at least one cup of tea short of full consciousness. But it's not every day you get to pretend to be famous, so why not?

When I arrived, I discovered it was clearly not being Graham's day. It was taking rather a long while to connect to the internet (rural West Berkshire is clearly off the grid -- my phone was struggling, too), but he stayed wonderfully calm and systematically swapped cables and dongles and eventually laptops until we had a combination that worked, everybody gathered in chairs in front of the screen -- about 25 people or so -- and I gave my piece. They seemed to enjoy it; at least, no-one fell asleep, walked out, or heckled.

Graham has an interesting line in faceted landscapes

Although I am not by nature a "joiner", I think such groups are important, and perform a vital function for artists and enthusiasts working in isolation. A large part of their session is spent showing and viewing each other's work, and there is nothing more likely to encourage and stimulate one's "growth"and persistence as an artist than sharing work with like-minded people. It's empowering, it's fun, and it's good to know you're not alone.

Although, speaking purely personally, I myself appreciate a level of ruthless honesty in a critique of my work that most people mistake for an unforgivably aggressive lack of manners, and instinctively back away from. This kind of "tough love" critique you can generally only get from a professional, puritanical curmudgeon who holds him or herself to the highest, most unforgiving standards, and cannot understand why you wouldn't want to, either. These are in short supply. I'm thinking Thomas Joshua Cooper. I don't think Tom is much of a joiner, either.

But it's a great thing, to see people taking each other seriously as photographers, and producing good work, and I enjoyed myself. Thanks to Arena for inviting me.

[N.B. For the person who asked: this post took me 90 mins to produce, with a break for a beer halfway through!]

Quick Singles

No boundaries, but a couple of quick singles today. They're always useful (are you listening, England?) because every sequence needs "filler". A sequence (especially a book sequence) in which every image is a smash hit never seems to work -- there's no rhythm, no narrative, just "Bang, Bang, Bang!"

I've been a bit quiet this week because (a) I have to earn a living, (b) I've been struggling with a cold and some botched dentistry (is there any other kind?), and (c) I've been invited to give a talk to a photographic group (emphatically not a "camera club") this weekend, and need to make sure I've got something to say. I'll tell you all about it after Sunday.

Fours and Sixes

Sportsmen talk about finding their form, and I think I've hit a certain groove recently: I find that I keep hitting boundaries. Here are a couple from this week -- I'll leave it to the umpires to decide whether they're fours or sixes.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll recognise how this recent work builds on elements in the "university windows" theme that ended up as the Curriculum book. I think of it as "trees and facades" and already have enough fours and sixes to start considering it as a new sequence. The problem, as ever, will be knowing when to stop...

Usually, there comes a point when I'm simply repeating and refining what I already have; the thrill has gone but the compulsion to go on has not. In life, continuing beyond this point is a necessary virtue, in art it's not...

Like A Falling Star

I saw this interesting configuration of elements the other morning, and it put these words into my mind:

... how he fell

From Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry Jove

Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: from Morn

To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,

A Summers day; and with the setting Sun

Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star

On Lemnos th' Ægean Ile ...

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

Ever read Paradise Lost? No? Not many people have. I probably wouldn't have myself, if it hadn't been a set text at school. It gives off a stuffy aura that is somehow off-putting, and I suppose few kids these days can manage even the most basic of the Biblical and classical references in what is a highly-allusive text. Lothlorien and Tatooine, yes; Arcadia and Scythia, not so much.

But, open it and start reading, and you'll find that it is one of the most glorious things ever written in the English language, a grandiloquent, intensely visual epic story told in the grand style; in places it resembles a sophisticated graphic novel, or screenplay. Just read that extract above, describing the fall of Mulciber, architect angel of Hell, out loud -- really out loud -- and feel the thrill it sends down your spine. There's magic there, and plenty more where that came from.

Should you feel like giving it a go, there's quite a good online version here.

The Owl of Minerva

Here's an enlightening quote, from the "Blowback" section of Doonesbury, commenting on this recent strip:

The quote in the first panel of today's strip comes from "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Ron Suskind's terrifying article in the NYT Magazine of October 17, 2004. Here's the full quote, which reveals just how delusional that administration was: "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" My guess is that the senior aide was Karl Rove, but who knows? They were all crazy.

Scary, or what? It seems post-modernism has been driving the policies of the most powerful nation on earth. On the other hand, if you think about it, is post-modernism as a creed any more scary than fundamentalist or "End Times" Christianity? And, if you think about it a little further, Rove (or whoever it was) is pretty much stating a reality. Here is Hegel, that exemplar of clearly-expressed common sense, writing in 1820:

One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: Philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after actuality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. The lesson of the concept, which necessarily is also taught by history, is that only in the ripeness of actuality does the ideal appear over against the real, and that only then does this ideal comprehend this same real world in its substance and build it up for itself into the configuration of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then a configuration of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated by this grey in grey, but only understood; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.

Preface to The Philosophy of Right

Basically, what he is saying -- trust me -- is what everyone (except experts) knows to be true about complex social events: that experts always get them wrong, until they've become history. But lack of understanding never prevented a politician from acting, and acts, however stupid, always have consequences. What those consequences are, we only discover afterwards. Sometimes, long afterwards.

In 1972 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the consequences of the French Revolution and, famously, he confused the events of 1789 with Les Événements of May 1968 and, as a consequence, delivered up an unintended but much quoted bon mot: "Too soon to tell", he replied.

Delicious. It seems that sometimes the Owl of Minerva can be knocked out of its tree prematurely, but usually only by accident...

By Candle-Light

When we got back from our walk about 4:30 this afternoon, we found the house in darkness and none of the switches would turn on a light. Our daughter was sitting bathed in the eery light of her laptop display. "Power cut", she said.

It's been a while since we had a proper power cut. This is, after all and despite appearances, one of the world's most advanced economies. I did oversleep a couple of weeks ago because we'd had one during the night, and my antiquated bedside radio alarm cannot reset itself, but that's the only one I can recall in the past year or two.

What you rediscover at such moments is how deeply you take things like electric light for granted. Turn off the power, and the darkness returns, instantly. Silence, too. The electric kettle won't work, the fridge is off, the radio is off, the computers are down, the central heating pump has stopped, there's nothing except the annoying tick of a battery-operated wall clock. It's quite fun, really, until you trip over your own carelessly-dropped backpack in the hall, going to fetch candles.

It didn't take long to return ourselves to something like 19th century conditions. We put candles and nightlights in strategic spots, and had a pan of water heating on the gas stove. We know where we keep the torches and the batteries. But once you try to actually do something more complicated than admiring your partner's hair in the candlelight you realise how difficult life must have been at night, before electricity.

Just making a pot of tea is quite tricky. Pouring boiling water in semi-darkness is not very sensible, to start with. You simply can't see inside the teapot, so it's hard to judge -- other than by weight -- when enough water has been poured in. In fact, it's hard to judge whether the water is going in the teapot at all. So the prospect of preparing a meal by candlelight was not enticing. Unless you were wearing chain-mail fire-proof gauntlets, you'd probably want to leave that until daylight.

Reading? Forget about it -- I can't imagine how anyone coped with any sort of close work, especially in the days before the widespread availability of spectacles. Evenings, for the elderly and short-sighted, must have been fraught with hazards. No wonder everything always had its allotted place, preferably inside a cupboard or drawer: you were less likely to trip over stuff or walk into it. I guess you'd probably have hunkered down by the fire with a simple meal and got to bed very early indeed. No wonder families were so large.

But, as I walked down to the corner shop to get some more matches, the streetlights suddenly came back on, and we were restored to the 21st century. You could hear muffled cheers coming from inside houses all down the street and a few chirping smoke alarms, presumably triggered by all the candle-smoke. It was a little trial run, I suppose, of how things could be going in the future.

Mild Winter

What a strange winter it's been so far. I think I'm correct in saying that this morning was only the third time I've had to scrape frost off the car. Of course, things could change radically over the next couple of months, but it's odd to look back and recall the heavy snowfall and freezes of twelve months ago. We've barely needed the central heating this year that, last year, was taken down by a frozen pipe.

Still, there was a certain glacial clarity in this week's winter sunshine that seemed to hold a promise of cold days to come.

On Wednesday I was about to back the car out of the garage after taking it in for its annual MOT test, when I saw this little tableau through the side window, including that strange reflection in the car parked next to me. The camera was on the passenger seat, so I wound down the window and grabbed the shot -- I think I still had reverse gear engaged and my foot on the clutch.

A Kiss With A Fist (Is Better Than None)

It's been a while since we had a rant, so here we go.

One of the things that strikes me as most characteristic of human society, the older I get, is our bottomless capacity for what you might call therapeutic self-delusion. We see what we want to see. This seems to be a characteristic particularly evident in those who are in love with the idea of art. Art lovers are like people trapped in an abusive relationship, staggering out of the house with a black eye, only to return later that evening for more of the same.

Artists of a modernist, post-modern or conceptual persuasion, of course, are the habitual abusers. They adore basking in the sunshine of the love of the art lovers, but are violently opposed to the idea that any sentimental little bourgeois could possibly understand what they're on about. Much art has, in essence, become little more than two fingers waved in the tear-streaked face of an incomprehending yet love-struck public. It's not a pretty sight.

Just like the victims of abuse, art lovers provide their own justifications for this appalling behaviour. The cult of "genius" has let a lot of real monsters off the hook, socially and artistically. I'm both impressed and depressed by the public's ability to take the cold, cosmic pessimism of modernist despair and turn it into something cosy, optimistic and trite. Oh, he's really saying "We should pay more attention to our everyday surroundings", or "It's the small things that matter", or "You have to work really hard to see the point of this work, its pointlessness is its point, that's why I love him it so"...

Sweet, really. Artists don't deserve it, by and large. You want to say: Listen, they mean it, these bastards: they believe in nothing, they abhor "beauty", they despise the very idea of transcendence, and want nothing more than to humiliate you for your persistent soppy belief in the "truth of feelings". And yet they also want to take your money, love and admiration as if by right. Leave him, girl, he ain't worth it!

Pointless. We see what we want to see. That human gift for therapeutic self-delusion will labour as hard as is necessary to re-read work of deliberate in-your-face meaninglessness as work of revelatory significance, to the point where a room with the lights going on and off, or a blank sheet of A4 crumpled into a ball (both actual works by Martin Creed) are prime candidates for the most prestigious art prizes and exhibition spaces in the land.

Ah, but that is precisely the point, say the art lovers, squinting painfully through two swollen black eyes.

Meanwhile, dear old David Hockney is offering us shelter from the storm. He's everywhere at the moment, putting the case for painting and the pleasure and discipline of looking. I particularly enjoyed the slogan on the poster for his recent exhibition, "All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally". It reminds me of the reassurances of purity printed all over my morning box of muesli, or on the old Levi's jeans label ("bar-tacked at points of strain"). He may deny that this is a dig at the likes of Damien Hirst, but I don't believe him.

And that other thing he has been slyly slipping into public consciousness -- a Chinese saying that "to paint you need the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won't do" -- may well end up doing a lot for the health of contemporary art and art-lovers. Having the words that help you to say "No" is a big step out of any abusive relationship.

Don't see what you want to see, see what is truly there. If you don't like it, leave it alone. But be open to surprise. Admire and support the ones who help you see what is there, not those who play on your worst fear, that there is nothing there. Do you know the song "Simple" by K.D. Lang, on her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel? It's one of my favourites, and always seems to hit the right note:

I worship this tenacity
And the beautiful struggle we're in
Love will not elude us
Love is simple

Amen, sister.

Beercans On The Moon

It is one of the truths revealed by photography that the moon is far smaller in the sky, objectively, than we perceive it. I think it's generally said to be "half a degree of arc", which sounds as tiny as it looks in this photo. Yet, it appeared so enormous and clear to my brain that I could practically see the astronauts' footsteps, and the "beercans on the moon" (a song by the beat combo The Fugs, m'lud; I see Ed Sanders has got an autobiography out).

Getting closer doesn't seem to make it much bigger, either. But it does make for a more satisfying photograph. So much for "context"...

The Dark Side of the Viaduct

Not being at work this week, I've been setting up little adventures for myself. Today, after I had dropped my daughter off to catch her bus to college at 07:50, I headed straight on up the motorway for St. Catherine's Hill and the Hockley Viaduct. I wanted to see what the place would look like in an early morning light, rather than the customary late afternoon light. It was still dark and it was raining, but I like being outdoors at times and in weathers when others usually are not and, besides, the chances were that it would clear up as it got light.

It didn't; at least not straight away. In fact, it got worse. Halfway up the south end of the hill near the viaduct, overlooking the motorway cutting, I had to shelter in the trees from heavy rain driven horizontally by a very strong, gusting westerly wind. The trees were creaking and rattling so much it sounded like some weird musical performance was taking place around me. But it blew over, and around 09:00 the sun came up over Twyford Down, and there was a beautiful strong south-easterly light for about an hour. I went back down the hill and photographed "the dark side of the viaduct" for a bit.

Then it rained again, and I drove home for a nice hot cup of tea.

Two Houses, Both Alike

Here you go, two pictures from yesterday afternoon, taken in difficult late afternoon winter sunshine, one taken with a Panasonic G3, the other with an iPhone 4s. But which is which?




Obviously, the iPhone image is half the resolution of the 16 Mpixel G3, but with a degree of Photoshop and with both downsized as JPEG files, I think you'll agree the, um, phone does a creditable job as a camera. The camera, on the other hand, wouldn't work as a phone, no matter in which direction I pointed it, or how loud I shouted into it. Nor would it let me look at my email, or check the traffic situation on the M3 going home from Winchester.

I think if your main interest was in simply recording what things looked like, and sharing small images with other phone and computer users, then the iPhone 4s is actually pretty remarkable. Though it does cost rather more than many decent cameras, of course...

On the other hand, I am very pleased indeed with the used G3 I bought a couple of months ago (having looked at the specs of the GX1, and thought, why not go for the same sensor with a built-in viewfinder?) and am perfectly happy with the free LG P500 Android smartphone that came with the cheapest pay monthly contract on Orange. The camera on that phone really is a POS, but everything else is fine.

Until someone comes up with something compellingly new -- say, the sort of array of linked multiple smartphone imagers that several people have proposed as a potential portable digital view camera (now wouldn't that be something?) -- I can't see serious photographers abandoning cameras any time soon, except as an equivalent to the "toy camera" work that some people do with Holgas, Dianas, and the like. And the iPhone is already too good for that, I'd say. But "convergence" is clearly the name of the game, and it can't be long before smart-ness starts being built into cameras. It would be handy to save backups of one's files in the Cloud, for example, or to email them to the News Desk, or to receive firmware updates directly.

I think I'd feel an idiot holding a camera to my ear, though.

New Year's Day 2012

I like to get out on New Year's Day and take a photo or two, however perfunctory. I left it a bit late today, so all I managed was a stroll round the neighbourhood. It was pouring with rain, so I had the LX3 under my coat, and was the only pedestrian on the streets.



There you go, "context". One resolution down. It's a start, anyway.