Got To Get Ourselves Back To The Garden

Periodically, I remember the massive hoard of photographs, several thousand of them, that I accumulated exploring the abandoned botanical garden on the Southampton University Highfield campus during my lunch breaks, and each time I remember I decide that, this time, I must do something with them. These pictures date from the very beginning of my transition from film to digital cameras in 2000 to my retirement in 2014, and range in size from relatively tiny 1.3 MP files (from my first digital camera, a Fujifilm FinePix 1300) to more substantial 16 MP files (a Panasonic G3). The past few weeks have seen yet another of these rounds of rediscovery, and I have once again resolved to extract the best of the best and do something with them. This time it's serious though; no, really. So here is a little text I cobbled together from various old blog posts to accompany them in any prospective book form:

The Expulsion from Eden

We were created to live in Paradise, and Paradise was designed to serve us. Our purpose has been changed: we are not told whether the same has also happened to the purpose of Paradise.
Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms, no. 84

I have had a long, losing struggle with the tidy-minded and the fixer-uppers. From 1984 to 2014 I worked in Southampton University Library, and the campus that I knew between the 1980s and the early 2000s was a rich mosaic of neglected corners. Of these the richest was the Valley Garden, a couple of acres of abandoned orchards, overgrown terraced beds (originally planted to demonstrate taxonomy to botany students), and wonderfully dilapidated glasshouses, with at its heart a secret pond where great knots of frogs gathered every February for a breeding frenzy. I loved exploring this Edenic post-human spot at lunchtime, with its little stream that flooded regularly after heavy rain, turning the valley bottom into a marsh. When my children were at the university day nursery I would take them exploring here, too, and we would gather apples from the orchard and check on the progress of the frogspawn in the pond.

Most of the year, especially in winter, I had the place to myself. After a long morning enduring the boredom of meetings, I could escape into my private hortus conclusus, and document the regular small changes that would excite my eye, at first with film, then digitally: broken panes of glass scribbled over by snails, abandoned botanical experiments, the astonishing table-sized leaves of Gunnera manicata (the giant Brazilian rhubarb) that grow by the stream, the tell-tale traces left by invasive nocturnal thrill-seekers... Every day was a fresh page.

Eventually, however, someone in the university administration noticed this "wasted" space, and decided to re-develop it into a hazard-free leisure resource for staff and students. The Gates of Eden were chained shut and, lamenting, I was expelled into the world. For a time, as a substitute I took to photographing the allotments that occupied another corner, squeezed between the ever-expanding campus and the real world. Frustratingly, though, I could never enter this alternative Eden, but only gaze down into it over the fence each morning as I parked my car. Then the university noticed and bought those allotments, too, in anticipation of some new enterprise, probably a car park, and ejected the vegetable growers with their wonderful season-by-season improvisations constructed out of cast-offs, polythene sheet, and barrier netting.

In the intervening years, I somehow kept forgetting about the garden images, as I concentrated on newer, more purposeful photographic and digital-imaging projects. Recently, though, I revisited them – several thousand digital images taken between 2000 and 2014, ranging in size from 1.3 MP to 16 MP – and it was like finding the key to a locked drawer and seeing within, almost as if for the first time, some wonderful things. In fact, in there is some of the best work I have ever done, freed for the first time from the constraints of the medium-format film cameras I has been using, whether the mere twelve or fifteen shots per roll of film, the technical limitations of those bulky cameras, or the expense and effort of having the film developed and printed every week. I think something of this spirit of liberation found its way into the pictures I was making then, not unlike the feeling of lack of constraint that has accompanied my recent move towards iPhone photography.

Interrogation Interrogated

Certain truths are so self-evidently true that – to the enquiring mind, at least – they can seem suspicious, as if there might be a more profound, secret truth hidden behind them. And, to an extent, rightly so: what is more self-evident, for example, than the fact that the sun travels around the earth, appearing at a predictable point along the eastern horizon, only to disappear beneath the equivalent point on the western horizon? The discovery that this observable fact is not quite what it seems does little to detract from its deceptively self-evident quality: it takes a certain strength of mind (and perhaps a little know-it-all perversity) to watch a sunset and see the earth revolving, rather than the sun descending. This disturbing wobble between what we see, what we believe, and what we have discovered to be the case opens an anxious space for doubt which is, we have to presume, a uniquely human experience.

In a way, the whole programme of "critique" and French philosophising is based on working this wobble. Nothing feels more clever than a counter-intuitive truth, and to the intellectual mind nothing feels better than feeling cleverer than everybody else. But such counter-intuitive truths are rare, and thinkers in the last century or two have had to strive ever more desperately for a repeat of that first exhilarating Copernican rush. In the case of Foucault, Derrida, & Cie., the counter-critique must surely be that they have merely discovered a way to generate the sensation of a paradoxical truthiness out of nothing and nowhere, and for no purpose other than the self-gratification it can afford. Why else bend such a useful tool as language itself until it breaks, revealing that – gasp! – it is just, like, some random noises we make, and is not and never can be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Kant?

Something similar happened to painting. After several centuries of refinement of representational techniques, aided by technological improvements in painting materials, it seemed suddenly to dawn on certain practitioners (who – coincidentally? – were largely French and had begun to consider themselves artists by calling, rather than artisans) that, wait, this is just paint! We're just making marks on a flat surface with paint! A fairly banal revelation, you might have thought – the sort of thing that occurs to you in the dizzy depths of intoxication, but is quickly rejected the following morning – but one which went on to energise the art of the 20th century and, via various convolutions, probably reached its end-point of usefulness with a conceptual work like Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree (1974): a glass of water on a glass shelf, installed on a gallery wall to certain precise specifications. Which is a very long way indeed from Impressionism, and a work which could equally well have been given the title, in a tip of the hat to René Magritte, "This is Not a Glass of Water". Well, yes, Sir Michael, I get it, but it is a glass of water, really, isn't it?

Which reminds me of a favourite anecdote about Picasso, which is the best non-theoretical insight into the Long Debate on "representation" I know of. Here it is:

"Just then my eye was caught by an unframed canvas standing on a shelf above Jacqueline's head and to the right. It was a portrait of a girl—Jacqueline, I would have said—in tones of green and black and white. She was shown in profile, looking off to the left, and Picasso had given the face a mildly geometrical stylization built up of triangular forms which emphasized the linear treatment but at the same time preserved the likeness. I pointed to the painting. 'How would you explain to a person whose training made him look on that as deformation, rather than formation, why you had done it that way?' I asked him.

'Let me tell you a story,' Picasso said. 'Right after the Liberation, lots of GIs came to my studio in Paris. I would show them my work, and some of them understood and admired more than others. Almost all of them, though, before they left, would show me pictures of their wives or girl friends. One day one of them who had made some kind of remark, as I showed him one of my paintings, about how 'It doesn't really look like that, though,' got to talking about his wife and he pulled out a tiny passport-size picture of her to show me. I said to him, 'But she's so tiny, your wife. I didn't realize from what you said that she was so small.' He looked at me very seriously. 'Oh, she's not really so small,' he said. 'It's just that this is a very small photograph. ' "

Picasso, interviewed in The Atlantic, July 1957

In the best version of the story, which is probably apocryphal as I've never managed to source it, Picasso then turns over the photo and exclaims, "My God! You poor man! She's also completely flat!"

Our beliefs – our true beliefs, I mean, not the sort of rote professions of faith that society demands of us – can be hard to identify, simply because they are the air we believe we breathe, and the solid ground on which we trust we walk. For example, it did occur to me recently that for my entire life I have held a profound but irrational belief in the idea of "tempting fate". Profound because it has directed so much of the way I have conducted my life; irrational because, well, it's a pretty insane idea, isn't it? However, recognising the irrationality of this belief is not going to stop me behaving as if it were true; that would be tempting fate.

Similarly, the idea that real art is obliged to question (or, in art-speak, "interrogate" or "challenge") our unexamined, complacent beliefs has itself become one of the unchallengeable core beliefs of contemporary art. No self-respecting contemporary artist is about to stop behaving as if this were true, even though it self-evidently isn't. That is, until some new mould-breaker gives everyone permission to drop the ridiculous pretence that art students are thinkers with greater insight into the nature of Life, the Universe, and Everything than "ordinary" people. I have no idea how and when this belief came about, but I'm pretty sure that all those artists we revere in the big public galleries did not have their fingers crossed behind their back as they delivered yet another crucifixion scene to the service door at the rear of the cathedral. Neither did Holbein, by drawing the Tudor aristocracy of England with such breathtaking realism, or John Constable, with his endless studies of clouds, intend to challenge anything more than the inability of previous painters to get things right. That  desire to get things right may in itself be quite subversive in an unfair world – the truth will set you free – but that is an idea from a rather different domain than art.

People of an artistic disposition, in my observation, tend to fall into two categories [1]. Consider the way red-headed, pale-skinned folk know, or are advised, how to dress (I recall many such conversations between my mother and sister). Essentially: if in doubt, wear dark green, and never, ever wear red. It just works, looks right, and is in accordance with some unwritten folk theory of colour. Those who value such practical wisdom are the instinctive artists, the colourists, the lovers of shape and form, often with a conservative preference for "natural" beauty. Then there are the contrarian redheads who insist on wearing whatever the hell they like, decking themselves out in red and purple stripes precisely because it's what they're not supposed to do. These are the conceptual artists, whose work is all about transgression, challenge, and rejection of norms, who tend to celebrate the urban and the artificial, and reject "natural" categories (like, say, gender) as constructed impositions on their liberty. In the past, the latter wouldn't have got much work; today, they run the show.

I think this is what can make a contemporary art gallery such a confusing place. It will quite likely be full of work that, like some deeply conflicted and angry teenager, is simultaneously demanding your love and attention while telling you to piss off. Look, I'm turning the lights on and off! Isn't that brilliantly annoying, you boring bourgeois scumbag? I hate you! I demand you give me money and prizes! Unfortunately, those of us who venture into art galleries (as opposed to the sort of people who own or fill them) generally have a craving for something visually exciting, and are not looking to get a self-righteous lecture about our complacency. However, like the parents of that angry adolescent, we sigh deeply, suspend judgement, and look for something to like, and to remind us of the dear child we once knew who used to draw those lovely pictures. After all, as I have said in these posts many times before, we should all be alert to that "Hendrix Moment" [2], when something is so new that it makes no sense yet, and seems to be all noise and no signal.

Such was certainly the case when Henri Matisse and André Derain hit the scene in 1905, earning themselves the label of fauves (wild beasts) which they immediately adopted as an ironic badge of honour. A few years ago we were in Paris, and there was an excellent show of Derain's work at the Pompidou Centre. It was fascinating to see the full span of the career of a painter who seemed, like a weathercock, to change styles depending on who he'd most recently been hanging out with: Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and a succession of others all seem to have had an instant transformative effect on his work. But there can be little doubt that those earliest "fauvist" works have now moved decisively from "all noise" (wild beasts!) to "all signal" (lovely paintings!). Who could object to having a Matisse or one of Derain's paintings of London on their wall? [3]

At the same time in the Pompidou there was an exhibition of the contenders for that year's Marcel Duchamp Prize (yes, there really is such a thing, and it is not a miniature gold urinal). Here, I found myself distinctly back in noisy territory. It's antediluvian, I know, but I much prefer my art to be two-dimensional and conveniently framed on a wall. I'd like to think I'm not one of those who find it hard to separate "art" and "interior decoration", but I do get impatient with large-scale, immersive installation work that can only be successfully experienced in a gallery setting. How is it that white-cube galleries and pitch-black projection rooms have become the only spaces where such contemporary art can exist? Do any of even the wealthiest private individuals with an interest in buying art even have their own installation space, to be filled periodically with a new assemblage of health-and-safety hazards? It just seems so elitist, and so completely reliant on institutional support and funding.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I do remember enjoying the "conceptual" work I saw back then by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige – basically some core samples drilled in Athens, Paris, and Beirut hanging from the ceiling in long glass tubes – who did, in fact, turn out to be the prizewinners. Although I would have enjoyed it equally as much if it had been a display of core samples hanging from the ceiling of a geological museum. In fact, I think I would have enjoyed it even more, because then their aesthetic qualities would have been my own discovery, and I would not have felt so insistently nudged in certain directions by the statements of the sociologically and archaeologically bleedin' obvious that accompanied them. As Keats wrote in one of his letters: "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket." [4] Which is a nice way of saying, "Give me the art, but spare me the statement." After all, telling me what I should think about your work is just tempting fate...

1. Yes, yes, I know... One of my own personal revelations was delivered on a Christmas cracker motto on Boxing Day 1973: "There are two types of people in the world: those who believe there are two types of people in the world, and those that don't". For decades I believed this was a truly anonymous piece of folk wisdom, delivered to me by chance. Then I discovered it is actually Robert Benchley's Law of Distinction.

2. Yes, yes, I know... I should think of a more contemporary example than Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, FFS. Suggestions welcome. But not Harrison Birtwistle, thanks, still just noise to me.

3. I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker ("Modern Art and the Esteem Machine", by Louis Menand) which provoked the humbling thought that once we, too, would most likely have scorned Matisse – Matisse! – as did sophisticated Americans in 1913: "The general American public, in the period when modern art emerged, around the time of the First World War, had no interest in it. Wealthy Americans, the sort of people who could afford to buy art for their homes, had no taste for it. Even the art establishment was hostile. In 1913, a Matisse show at the Art Institute of Chicago instigated a near-riot. Copies of three Matisse paintings were burned and there was a mock trial, in which Matisse was convicted of, among other things, artistic murder. The demonstrators were art students."

4. I'm never sure why the hand and the pocket are singular, but I expect this was a tellingly aggressive gesture in 1818. "There, I put my hand in my pocket, and wish you good day, sir!"

Sous les pavés, la plage

I like to make a distinction – admittedly simplistic – between two sorts of photograph: those which are pictures made "of" something, and those which are pictures made "from" something. It should be pretty self-evident what I mean by this but these blog posts don't write themselves, and it does no harm to spell things out a bit.

For most people, of course, a photo is a photo, and that's all it is: a mechanical two-dimensional representation of whatever was in front of the camera; end of story. "It's just a photo" is the essence of a strong residual prejudice against photography in the art world, something I explored at length in a couple of posts I wrote around this time last year (Original Print and Original Print 2). But when it comes to those of us with a deeper interest in photography, whether as critics or as practitioners, I think we tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum which has at its extremes two camps which correspond to those two sorts of photograph. For one extreme, photography is a documentary activity, whose "indexical" relationship to visual reality is its essential feature; for the other, it's just their chosen expressive art medium, perhaps one among several. As it was put by Minor White (once so famous and influential, but now relatively unsung as a photographer): "The camera records superbly, but transforms better".

This divergence, naturally, has a strong influence on any photographer's aesthetic and technical priorities. For the documentarist, making pictures "of" things, representational fidelity is everything. Qualities like sharpness, detail, and clarity will be important, and a "good" photo is one that evidences these qualities to a high degree. At its extreme, you get the sort of obsessives who produce perfect images of the dullest clichés (what Ctein once called "perfectly-tuned pianos playing Three Blind Mice"). Less dogmatic documentarists still have strong feelings about authenticity, and a profound suspicion of manipulation of any sort, even the removal "in post" of an intrusive overhead cable or piece of windblown rubbish. By contrast, for the artist using photography to make pictures "from" things, expressive mark-making counts for much more than fidelity or authenticity, to the extent that, at the other extreme of the spectrum, pinhole devices and toy cameras with light leaks and plastic lenses are useful ways of, um, blurring the boundary between subject matter and subjective impression. Artists have no problem with digital manipulation and downright fakery, provided it delivers a novel image with a strong visual punch and an original signature "look".

Obviously, any camera is just a tool, and the same tool can be used for different ends (unless the tool is a chisel and the end is opening a can of paint, in which case my late father would have had something severe to say to you). But ends matter. If, let's say, you have been tasked with documenting an archaeological dig, it's no good using the remains in front of you as material for self-expression or experiments in ICM ("intentional camera movement" [1]). To plead "but that's how I felt about the skeleton" won't save your job. But, equally, obsessive attention to the lighting, accuracy and precision of representation of some dull, dull tabletop scenario won't get you any gallery shows (unless, of course, you're already famous for rather different work...).

As examples of what I mean, here are two postcards:

This first one, I think we can agree, is pretty dull by any standards, a real candidate for Martin Parr's Boring Postcards collection. Photographs do not get any more utilitarian than that, and its aesthetic value is close to zero. But it is nonetheless a classic photograph "of" something. To me, it is fascinating and evocative because that is the typical stage-set of my childhood, and thus a valuable keepsake simply because of what it represents; even if, like so many childhood things that once loomed so large, the scene has diminished into near absurdity. Such purpose-built rows of shops with accommodation above were scattered all over Stevenage: the creation of "neighbourhoods" was an important part of the town-planning theory of the New Town. That local retail hot-spot was where our sweets, treats, and comics were to be found. So, despite its lack of aesthetic qualities, I can vivify that particular capture of a moment in time with my lived experience, in ways that will be unavailable to a neutral viewer. I can still recall the jarring impact of jumping off an identical set of steps to those on the far right for a dare, for example, or the careful application of comparative connoisseurship and mental arithmetic when selecting a sixpenny paper bag of mixed sweets in various similar newsagents. You do have to smile, though, that – in the brave new world of the late 1950s – six random little shops would constitute a "shopping centre".

This second postcard is something quite different. I've never been to Ashridge, even though it is in God's own country, the chalk hills of Hertfordshire. The Ashridge Estate (now owned by the National Trust) does contain a grand house and an imposing monument, apparently, but you'd never know this from the photograph. This is a picture artfully made "from" what is little more than a partial view of some trees on a hill. When I look at it I get that aesthetic charge that a well-seen image can give; it wouldn't surprise me if you do, too. Also, quite apart from the picture itself, with its bold composition and subtle tonal range, I enjoy the unusual wide aspect ratio of the photo and its placement on the card, with space for the printed caption and the handwriting along the bottom. There's something compelling about it as an object in its own right. And yet it's a picture of nowhere and nothing in particular, entirely reliant on its evocative aesthetic qualities for its value.

And then what about this "found" image I originally came across on the late lamented Mark Woods' blog wood s lot, reposted by him from another blog arsvitaest, in turn reposted from bal des pendus, where it was given the caption "Undated. Unlocated. Unattributed.":

Isn't that an extraordinary picture? Like so many "found" images, it has become pure, perfect photography, a moment in time captured forever, but forever divorced from its original significance. You can almost hear the muffled hoofbeats, and feel the falling snow and the bite of the frosty air. And yet there's no way of knowing who took it, of whom, where, or when, or what the relationship between the photographer and the subject matter might have been. It has migrated from being a picture made "of" an occasion to a picture made "from" it, and is a reminder of how profound the simplicity of photography can be.

Of course, we are free – almost obliged – to invest such a picture with meaning; in the academic jargon, to give an open signifier some closure. For me, it evokes the very snowy winter of 1976/77, when I was a post-graduate student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. My opinions were changing radically, as I came to see the same old things in new, confusing ways. Was the horse loose, or just being given a canter round the paddock? Is the woman with the switch in command or chasing after? That winter also saw the release of Joni Mitchell's album Hejira (up there with Blue, in my judgement). If you know it in its original vinyl version, you'll recall the inner gatefold image of Mitchell ice-skating, in semi-silhouette, flapping the black crow-like wings of a shawl, not unlike the skirts of the woman's coat in the photograph. Then perhaps you, too, looking at this photograph, hear in your mind the fluid fretless bass-lines of Jaco Pastorius, and even recall the same evocative lyrics:

Listen! Strains of Benny Goodman

Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees

But when both types of photograph come together you can end up with something really special. Here is one that combines "of" and "from" elements into a compelling image of an historically significant subject. Because this wonderfully mysterious, high-vantage viewpoint shows barricades at the Paris Commune of 1871. It was taken by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, about whom I know nothing, other than that he studied under Daguerre and did a nice line in plump Victorian nudes, too.

Quite amazing, don't you think? Both "of" and "from" in substantial measure, with enough detail for the documentarists – the stacked rifles, the cannons, those heaped cartfuls of cobblestone barricades, that single precarious ladder – and for the artists there are those ghostly smudged forms passing through the whole tonally-luscious sigmoid composition, plus what looks like some plate-development imperfection along the edges [2]. And then there's that one man at the top, perhaps more of a Baudelairean flâneur than the others, standing transfixed but transparent, hands in pockets. Might he even possibly be the very first to experience that quintessentially Parisian revolutionary revelation: "Mon Dieu! Sous les pavés, la plage!"?

1.  It always makes me smile, that one, with its solemn insistence that, no, I meant to jiggle the camera: this is an accidental-on-purpose image, made in the camera, not by using any digital jiggery-pokery! (Relax, guys, nobody cares how you made the damn picture...).

2. Modern-day practitioners of wet-plate, tin-type, and other "alt-processes" seem to regard such imperfections as a large part of the point of their work: see the work of Sally Mann, Joni Sternbach, or Alex Boyd, for example. I'm sure the original 19th-century guys would have regarded their work as unacceptably sloppy. But then they were documentarists, not artists...

The Dock of the Bay

I have lived on the south coast in Southampton for ... (opens calculator) ... Good Lord, thirty-nine years now. That's twice as long as I lived in my home town, and over four times the length of time I have lived anywhere else. And yet, despite many years of exploration in pursuit of photographs, I feel I barely know the place and would hesitate to call it "home" (as, I suspect, would our children, both actually born and raised here).

It's that sort of place, I think: a city with an out-of-focus identity, which has never really come to terms with the destruction wrought upon it during WW2 or the collapse of the work market tied to the docks and commercial shipping after the 1960s. Where once crowds of skilled manual workers would troop down every day into the dockside area to load and unload (lade and unlade?) cargo ships of every description arriving from and destined to every part of the world, containerisation has meant that now it's just crane operators, lorry drivers, and office workers who get to penetrate beyond the security gates. If it wasn't for the massive cranes on the horizon, the occasional foghorns at night, or the more frequent crackle and bang of the fireworks let off by visiting cruise-liners (not to mention the endless to and fro traffic of container lorries and car transporters) you'd never guess you were living in one of the world's major ports.

I imagine the same is true of all modern sea-cities, now security concerns mean access to anyone not employed within the port perimeter is firmly closed off. When I first arrived here, in 1984, you could still cross a footbridge over the railway and stroll around the dockside on a Sunday afternoon, peer into the massive void of the dry dock, and experience the awe-inspiring sensation of standing next to the cliff-like hulls of moored ocean-going ships; I wish I'd been carrying a camera in those days. That said, unless you're some solitary soul intending to spend the day sitting on the dock of the bay, there's not much reason to want to make the effort. Ports tend to be situated on large river estuaries, and these are messy, tidal, marshy places lacking the easy charms of sandy beaches and accessible seafronts – Southampton Water is not anywhere a sane person would want to swim – and I doubt very much than many of today's inhabitants give even a passing thought to the maritime aspect of their city.

The Southampton I know best (or "Soton" as it tends to be abbreviated) is really just a partial cross-section, a sample defined by my habitual movements around the place. Like so many long-established trading settlements, the city is divided into two substantial halves by a river, in this case the Itchen, flowing south from Winchester. The eastern half is pretty much terra incognita to me: who knows what may be going on over there? Thrust through the middle of the more familiar western half is a massive wedge of green space, the Common, that divides it again into two: a boon for walks and fresh air, but a bloody nuisance if you need to drive from one side of town to the other. Again, I'm more familiar with the western side of that divide, although the university where I used to work lies just to the east. Although the docks are the obvious focal point, geographically and economically, the city as actually inhabited is really a series of suburbs and housing estates built in the 1930s and the post-war period, identical to those in pretty much any other British town you care to name: street after street of terraced and semi-detached houses.

On the western side these streets tend to slope down towards the docks and a soulless 1960s-built pedestrianised town centre – quite close to the waterfront, but absolutely separate from it – one which is also just like those in other bomb-damaged cities like Bristol or Birmingham, where it must have seemed like a good idea at the time to bulldoze everything and build anew. The town centre does still contain within it some evidence of the pre-war world it replaced, however: a few elegant Georgian terraces, now mainly occupied by legal firms, some Victorian streets and buildings of various sizes and states of dilapidation, and some intriguing remnants of the city's former historic and commercial glory, such as sections of the original massive town wall and the Bargate, once the main gateway into the mediaeval city. Inevitably, these city-centre shops have themselves since been usurped by an even more soulless enclosed shopping mall, West Quay, that sucks traffic in from miles around, at the same time as it sucks the life out of the surrounding area. So, to that extent Southampton is a fairly typical example of any British city with a bit of a past, you might say.

But there is another Southampton. You wouldn't really know it was there unless you happened to be looking for the sort of meretricious nightlife that has become essential to the young, or simply rather wealthy. I certainly didn't know, until I decided that – living in a major port and all – I really ought to be taking more photographs of the waterfront. What I then discovered was that industry has retreated from down there, particularly from around the confluence of the Itchen and Southampton Water, and intensive development has been taking place. It's changed a lot since I used to drop my kids off at the Harbour Lights cinema, although not in my view for the better. There are now massive blocks of "luxury" apartments towering over what has come to be called Ocean Village, with its  numerous restaurants, clubs, and "leisure facilities", and a marina full of gleaming yachts. To me, the whole place reeks of a repellent glass-and-chrome ephemerality, like a flashy piece of 1980s hi-tech, replete with the sort of features that Alan Sugar, of Amstrad fame, used to call "the mug's eyeful". It must be like living inside an aquarium or, worse, an ultra-modern office block way up there, perched in an edifice that looms over the waterfront like some malevolent watchtower or panopticon. I suppose these must at least be some of the very few Southampton residents to have a view of the actual sea, several miles downriver. I hope they think it's worth whatever price they paid for the privilege.

So why am I telling you about this? Simply because it struck me that, despite having lived and worked and photographed here for nearly forty years, I have never really put a "Southampton" project together, or even managed to show much work locally. I have plenty of material, obviously, but it's never enough just to compile a "best of" selection of views of a location, if you want anyone to pay attention. These days, especially, some sort of thematic thread is needed, on which to string your pretty beads. I think I've come up with a good one, but I'm going to keep quiet about it for now, as nothing drains the life out of a new project quite like telling everyone all about it before you've really got started. Although if you read between the lines of what I've written above, you might get a hint of what I have in mind. For now, though, it will have to remain a case of sitting patiently on the dock of the bay, waiting for this particular ship to roll into port.

Paradoxical Post

A while back, in 2021, all Blogger users who had installed the Feedburner "widget" (which was meant to email out copies of posts to those who signed up for it, but only ever seemed to work intermittently) were notified that the facility would soon cease to operate. At the time I explored alternatives (see the posts The Curious Incident of the Vole in the Night-Time and The Dust of Your Feet), but concluded that the only realistic options were either (a) to set up a bookmark and check in periodically (which I'd kind of assumed most regular readers did, anyway), or (b) to use a blog feed of some sort, e.g. Feedly (ditto).

In the meantime, however, a zombified Feedburner seemed to stagger on regardless for a year or so, at least for some, but has now finally stopped sending out emailed posts to anyone. Now, this wouldn't be much of a problem, were it not for the fact that some of my actual real-life friends have never read this blog without the stimulus of a fresh post popping up in their email. So – not being prepared to tolerate being ignored by people who really ought to know better – I decided to act, and set up a mail group so that I can forward on to them the emailed versions of posts that I receive from Blogger myself.

I call this a paradoxical post because I had intended to invite any unknown readers who had also previously been using the Feedburner service to join this group. But – logically, captain – you are almost certainly reading this post because, as above, you have either (a) set up a bookmark and check in periodically, or (b) use a blog feed of some sort. Either of which is superior in every way to the emailed version, which is poorly formatted, lacks comments and revisions, can be intermittent, and so on. So the chances are that – if the Unknown Readers are as unconvinced of the indispensable nature of the wit and wisdom of these posts as certain of my actual real-life friends – then they are not reading this post, and consequently wouldn't have been in a position to ask to be added to the list, anyway. Paradox!

Although I'm not sure why I'm bothered. Much as I'd like to increase the number of my readers, I suppose I shouldn't complain: compared to most low-ranking blogs I probably attract a respectable number, even if that number is statistically insignificant in a world where successful bloggers, influencers, tweeters, and whoever else must weigh rather than count their readers (and most likely have their people do it for them).

For example, here are my Blogger stats for a typical recent seven-day period, analysed by country:

Those 1492 hits are pageviews over the seven days rather than individual readers, I think, and Blogger's figures have never been entirely reliable, although they have improved over the years, and do now roughly match the returns from Google Analytics. I think this is probably because the click-bait robots that used to inflate the counts dramatically have finally given up on blogs as the preserve of unfashionable, unmonetisable, status-immune oldies like me.

But, given how Anglocentric my focus is, what always surprises me is how many of my readers are based in the USA: it's usually somewhere around the 70% mark. My fantasy is that at least one or two of these readers are gallerists, and that one day I'll be invited to give an exhibition somewhere in America. They're not, of course, but it's such idle daydreams that sustain the solitary artist's morale and productivity. I could and probably should be more proactive, sending out portfolios and statements and all the rest of the self-promotional rigmarole, but at 69 just thinking about it makes me feel very tired [1]. Besides, for a late-starting, self-taught amateur I'm having a good-enough run: let those fashionable, monetisable, status-susceptible youngsters elbow their way to the trough. They'll be old, too, soon enough, and wondering what all the fuss was about.

1. Also, let's be honest, such fantasies can be more nourishing than the inevitable series of rejections and knock-backs that result from self-promotion. I was taken to task over this by Rupert Larl, the director of the Innsbruck gallery that hosted my two main solo exhibitions, which stung a bit at the time – not least because both shows had happened by his invitation, not my solicitation – and left me thinking, "Rupert, mate, have you not read my statement?". Nonetheless, he was right: if you really want to get your work out there, you've really got to make the effort. To adapt a meme, if all you do is build it, they bloody well won't come without an invitation.

No, Really

Blocked

I was, shall we say, entertained by this description of a photo-book in the photo-eye bookstore, which was recently highlighted in their newsletter:

Past Paper // Present Marks. Responding to Rauschenberg. Photographs by Jennifer Garza-Cuen & Odette England. Text by David Campany and Susan Bright.

Radius Books, Santa Fe, USA, 2021. In English. 160 pp., 70 duotone illustrations, 11".
Signed copies available!
Publisher's Description:
Photo-experiments in light and water with Robert Rauschenberg’s expired gelatin silver paper.
In 2018, photographers Jennifer Garza-Cuen (American, born 1972) and Odette England (Australian/British, born 1975) spent a week at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida, collaborating on a series of nearly 200 photograms. The images were made in Rauschenberg’s swimming pool, using expired 1970s gelatin silver paper found in his darkroom. The two artists activated the paper by piercing or slashing the bags and envelopes using pens, scissors or knives; folding the silver paper at odd angles; or layering them inside the bags. Some sank to the bottom of the pool, while others floated on top or by the filtration units. Exposures were made overnight and throughout the day, allowing different levels and intensities of sunlight, moonlight and water to penetrate the paper. This large-format volume compiles their experiments.
Hardbound [Signed] $70.00

A book well worth seventy dollars of anybody's money, wouldn't you say? No? What kind of philistine are you? Oh, that kind. Yeah, me too.

Heh... Assuming the residency went out to tender, I'd really love to see the project proposal for this one. I'm tempted to write a version myself but, like so much in these Interesting Times of ours, the reality passes beyond the bounds of parody. I've read that summary a dozen times now, and it still makes me laugh.

Now, Robert Rauschenberg was a provocateur and something of a holy clown in his art, but these two seem to have been entirely straight-faced about their "experiments", although it's possible they were actually off their faces on something or other at the time – perhaps before they found the expired 1970s photo paper they found Rauschenberg's non-expired 1970s peyote stash – and had to do something face-saving with the resultant dripping-wet chaos. Hey, we've all been there.

But... Well, what more is there to say? Other than, "Artists, innit? FFS, LOL...". Although it's true that some of the actual photograms are intriguing, they are not in the same league as the more deliberate (and exquisitely beautiful) work of Susan Derges who uses similar "camera-less" methods (apart from the hilarious stabbing and slashing part, that is). So, if you were thinking of dropping that sort of money on a book, I'd recommend instead trying to find a copy of Elemental or perhaps Woman Thinking River, or indeed anything at all by Susan Derges. It's all wonderfully original work, not in any way a tribute or "response" to anyone else, and AFAIK any knives or scissors involved have been used in an entirely conventional way.

Lifting the veil

(moths all the way down)

[Obviously(?), but for the avoidance of doubt I should say that these two illustrations are neither from the book in question, nor by Susan Derges, but mine, from the same series of digital collages as used in this year's calendar]

A Very Modern Utopia

Chauncy House flats, Stevenage (demolished 2007)

We lived on the fourth floor, 1967-80

I read this in the Guardian earlier this month:

Recent(ish) history suggests there might be an alternative: council housing with lifelong, secure tenancies. Fifty or so years ago, thanks to investment by both Labour and Conservative governments, about a third of us lived in homes like that. This was not seen as proof of an over-powerful state, or people’s failure to stand on their own two feet: it was just a mundane and reassuring reality, and the foundation of millions of lives. If we are now a stroppy little island, full of a sense that precious things have been taken away from us, the deliberate decline of this way of living seems to me to be one of the key reasons. It is out there, waiting to be revived: if it was presented to the people currently locked out of the fading dream of property ownership, it might look like the basis of a very modern utopia.
John Harris, Guardian 5/3/2023

To say it rang a bell would be an understatement. Regular readers will know that I grew up in the first of the post-war New Towns: Stevenage, about 30 miles north of London, where an entire town was constructed on precisely the lines described by John Harris, on green-field sites in the windy, chalky hills of North Hertfordshire. Without doubt, Stevenage and the other New Towns were a first, substantial attempt to build a post-war utopia for the British working classes, in particular those looking for a better life than could be found in the blitzed slums of London. They were designed from scratch to be places with good council housing at sensible rents with guaranteed long-term tenancies, green spaces, safe pedestrianised shopping centres, reliable work in light industry, and above all good schools for children, who might even – following the opening up of full secondary and higher education to all – aspire to a university place and a professional career.

It worked and was wonderful for several decades but then, after the 1970s, things took a sour turn, and places like Stevenage became – in received opinion, at least –  a punchline to cynical jokes about nowhere places. Indeed, the whole idea of "town planning" fell into disrepute, seen as little more than brutalist prole-warehousing perpetrated by pipe-smoking architects who themselves chose to live in Hampstead. But I remember coming across a passage in a book which I copied into a notebook, now long-lost. In effect, it said, "we sociologists are studying these kids growing up in new-build estates and New Towns, and we see them as dystopic places, where only alienation and inauthenticity can flourish; but, one day, there will be a generation of adults who have grown up in such places, and for them these streets will have become sites of nostalgia and authenticity". Why, yes: hello! That would be me. 

Of course, our nostalgias are mainly false-memory constructs, and "authenticity" generally a fiction. The past is not somewhere we can visit, and the identity-based relativism that has become so dominant in academia insists that "the past" was an unknowable aggregate of millions of individually-experienced parallel and intersecting realities, anyway. I have no real idea of how different it would have been to have grown up as a girl, for example, born into the same family in the same town in the same year, with the same abilities and attributes. The typical "council-estate child" does not exist, any more than the typical "public schoolboy". Those of us born at the humbler end of society do tend to get studied more intensively, but our actual identities and experiences get processed into aggregated statistics and evidence that represent everyone and no-one. Nobody is as dull as their statistics.

So, not long before I retired in 2014, I was more than a little surprised when, opening a book being discarded from our university library shelves, I saw photographs of familiar faces and scenes I hadn't seen since I was ten years old. The book (Education For Living, by J.R.C. Yglesias, published by Cory, Adams & Mackay in 1965) turned out to be a study of my very own primary school, Peartree Spring Junior, illustrated with photographs taken by Margaret Murray during school activities before and during the time I was there (1961-5). I had no idea such a book existed. Amazingly, this was my school as I remembered it, described in exactly the way I had always thought of it. It is a book about a school as a lived experience and as a beacon of good practice, about ordinary children being valued and nurtured as individuals, and about good teachers being given the chance to do a good job with proper resources. It is a book about optimism. It is also, incidentally, a classic of terrible mid-60s book design.

Miss Hendey... Worth a whole post in her own right.

There's a telling autobiographical passage in the book:

I was at school with Trevor Huddleston and Peter Pears. Neither shone in the eyes of their contemporaries half as much as did the captains of cricket and of football. Today I cannot remember the names of those athletic giants, but I follow with admiration the careers of Trevor Huddleston and Peter Pears ... At the same school there were others, equally sensitive, who took a long time to recover from an education which allowed boys to value games and 'good form' so highly and to mock at deeper human qualities. To be clever and artistic and sensitive was to be scorned and humiliated.

It's a story you often used to hear from those who had been privately-educated in single-sex environments, and that deep sense of resentment against the bullying Masters of the Universe seems often to underpin the commitment to social justice of many activists. We shouldn't knock it: without middle-class reformers, we'd still be sending our kids up chimneys. But it's not my story. I don't have those particular ghosts to lay, mainly because I had Miss Hendey, Mr. Guest, Mr. Davies, Mr. Ruston, and a whole team of other first-rate teachers whose task it was to spot and nurture those, like me, with particular talents and inclinations: we were never scorned or humiliated, but encouraged, and regularly had our work entered into national competitions which (ahem) I did actually win a couple of times. In fact, one of my paintings used to hang, framed, on the assembly hall wall, but the original school building has now been demolished, and I doubt that picture survives anywhere other than in my own memory.

So look, here is a true relic, as objective a witness of those years as one could wish for. I have owned this photograph since bringing it home from school, rolled in its tube, in 1962; it is roughly 14cm x 85cm in size.  Quite a few will have been printed, but I doubt many will have survived the last 60 years intact. It shows the entire staff and pupil complement of Peartree Spring junior school in the summer of the academic year I joined the school, 1961-2, plus the caretaker, Mr. Jarvis, and his dog.

I remember that summer well. There were refurbishments happening in several classrooms, so we had lessons and sat our end-of-year exams in a marquee on the playing field, with grass beneath our feet, hot sunlight filtered through white canvas, and the gentle clucking of the school's flock of free-ranging bantam hens outside. Those were the first exams I had ever sat – I still recall the light-blue type and shiny paper of the duplicated question sheets – and just as some children feel the bounce of a ball or the heft of a bat and realise their destiny, I knew this was something I could do well. Although, in truth, to go from that primary-school tent to the Examination Schools at Oxford University was a daydream pretty much on a par with getting a trial for Arsenal.

I have scanned this photograph and given copies to various ex-Peartree pupils, and discovered that a lot more detail can be extracted by the scanner than is visible to the unaided eye. The picture must have been made onto a huge negative by a rotating panoramic camera, and contact-printed using a rig that could include the school's name and the date. Compared to the class photographs my children brought home from school each year – mere colour snaps, with half the kids squinting or with eyes shut – it is a small masterpiece of assured, special-occasion photography. The image is proudly signed by the specialist firm Ray Studios, all the way from Braintree in Essex.

What is remarkable, I think, is the way the photographer has engaged an entire school's attention and created a "moment". Notoriously, such cameras scan from left to right across a large group gathering like this at a speed which is sufficiently slow that, if you are minded to, you can run round the back and appear at both ends of the final image; which is probably why Mr. Jarvis and his Alsatian are standing guard at the extreme right. But, somehow, every child has been persuaded to offer a characteristic expression to the lens at just the right moment, and there is hardly a single shut eye.

It's the faces, of course, that engage your attention. 1962 is a very long time ago, now. These are faces from another world; a new, interesting, and experimental world still in the process of definition, like a photograph emerging in the developing tray. Boys were leaner, their ears seemed much larger and more prominent; girls were dressed with far less attention to fashion, and their hair was cut into practical, rather middle-aged styles. These are, almost without exception, the children of the aspiring working classes from those parts of London devastated by the war, seeking a new life and a fair deal away from the city. I remember a lot of Irish surnames, too: the children of the labourers who came to build the New Town, and who decided to stay.

Ah, the names. They stay with you for life, those names. A few boys in this photo were in the same classes as me all the way through our school career but, even though I have no idea of what happened to most of this motley crew, so many of their names leap back into my mind whenever I scrutinise those faces, even after 60 years. These are all mythical beings from my personal creation story.

Of course, what you see there is nothing more than a pretty good cross-section of average humanity; what you get once you have eliminated wealth, social class, and selection by ability. There are statistical outliers, of course. At least five children of exceptional intelligence, plus another twenty or so with what counted then as university-level academic ability. There are a similar number of gifted athletes and players of various sports. There are some very tough kids in there, too, who went on to build themselves a local reputation as hard cases (and at least two hard-hitting women, to my certain knowledge); those of us of a gentler inclination had to learn early on how to keep on their good side, but bullying was rare, not least because of headmaster Anstock's free use of the cane [1]. There is also a fair smattering of what would now be referred to as "special needs" children (check some of those faces in the extract above). I count just four Black and Asian kids; racially, Stevenage was far from diverse in those days. But the majority, the 90%, are just nice, ordinary people, born into an optimistic time, as yet largely unaware of the scale of the opportunities being opened to them that had been denied, systematically, to their parents. Such very lucky people!

But then the smug bastards all went and voted for Thatcher in the 1979 elections, bought up their council houses at knock-down prices, left or failed to support their trades unions, and generally set about trashing the place and its public services, so lovingly built by the previous generation, and bought by them at such a high price. Don't you just love nice, ordinary people? Personally, I find them difficult, and have always preferred the company of "outliers" of whatever stripe, hard-hitting women and all. Sadly, there are considerably more of them than us. It's the great unmentionable, irreparable flaw in democracy, isn't it? Clearly, to be in receipt of even the very best education available in the most auspicious of settings won't necessarily do the trick.

As a result my own story has two early chapters. First, it's an optimistic story about growing up in a brief window of opportunity when Britain came as close as it ever has to becoming – in some special places at least – a semi-socialist utopia, where resources were poured into public schemes: schools, housing, libraries, swimming pools, community centres, transport. Chapter Two is about how it was all taken away after the late 1970s, just as we came into adulthood. No more public investment, no more council housing, fewer jobs, not much future. Sorry. Were you expecting more? You did vote for this, didn't you?

So this is where my ghosts live. I'm 69 now, a graduate of three universities and retired from a rewarding (and, I hope, useful) professional career working in university libraries with a sideline as a trades union activist, and yet I still haven't really come to terms with the fact that Chapter One of that story was abandoned so easily and might never happen again. It's hard not to interpolate that national failure of nerve into a personal failure. Could I, could we – my generation – have done more to prevent this mass self-expulsion from Eden? Did we (as the accusation goes) enjoy the fruits of the post-war settlement without bothering to plan or plant for the future? I'm not sure. True, despite strong political views I have never belonged to any political party and, certainly, too many of the best of us were unwilling to make the uncongenial compromises required to take part in real-life politics, leaving the field open to the worst of us and the mediocrities. But, whatever the reasons, the failure of Britain to secure and build upon the social progress made in the 1950s and 60s is a remarkable and historic act of self-harm, not even matched by Brexit. We seem to have decided that we simply couldn't afford that Big Story any more. Despite an excellent start, we finally managed to become a nation as dull as our statistics, or – to adapt Oscar Wilde's formulation – a cynical society that knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

So, yes, John Harris, for what it's worth I applaud what you say about reviving the idea of mass social rented housing. It would be an excellent starting point, assuming all the legislative obstacles put in place precisely to prevent local authorities from building more council housing could be reversed. Clearly, "affordable housing" is not at all the same thing, and too much of the private rented sector is a swamp badly in need of draining. And let's not forget schools, libraries, swimming pools, community centres, transport, and the rest of the package while we're at it. But there is a wisdom in the Stevenage town motto: The heart of a town lies in its people. The real task ahead is to work on changing the minds of those nice, ordinary people so that they feel inclined to vote for changes that may not be in their own direct interest, the next time they're on offer. How, and how long this will take, I have no idea: I wish the current and future generations of activists lots of luck with that. You'll be needing it. I won't refer you to those over-quoted words of Antonio Gramsci, "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" (although I suppose I just have). Instead, remember these words quoted by saxophonist Charles Lloyd towards the end of his video, Arrows into Infinity [2]: "The winds of grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sails higher". Oh, and please don't live in Hampstead.

Stevenage Town Centre under construction

(image: Stevenage Museum)

1. I know those who did not see things the approved Anstock Way and were in regular receipt of a caning have very different memories of the school. What was that about "an aggregate of individually-experienced parallel and intersecting realities"?

2. Apparently adapted from the 19th century guru Ramakrishna.

[Apologies to long-time readers: you're not going mad, parts of this post were recycled from a couple of earlier ones, one of which has been getting a lot of views lately, presumably from ex-Peartree pupils (such as Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton).]

A Change in the Weather

I was going through the photographs I took during my exhibition and residency in Innsbruck back in summer 2014, when I came across this previously overlooked snap of an old, slightly skeletonic weathercock leaning against a wall. It's a nice enough photo, if slightly oddly framed – it must have been stashed in an awkward corner – but, looking at it nearly nine years later, I thought it had potential to become something a little bolder.

I'm still mucking about with it, but this is the current state of play:

A change in the weather

If nothing else, it's an interesting illustration of the two contrasting creative personalities that seem to co-habit quite happily within me, one in the guise of a photographer, the other a digital artist. The first is an inquisitive introvert, drawn to noticing the odd, the strange, and the overlooked, and the second a show-off with a liking for over-the-top effects and showmanship.

I can't deny that this reflects aspects of my broader personality, too, although the show-off doesn't get out to play in real life these days as much as he used to, but that's probably just as well: he can be pretty intolerable when he gets going. Psychologically, I believe this is not an uncommon combination where performers of various sorts are concerned, and I read somewhere that even Elton John is really just a shy kid behind those ridiculous glasses. Thank goodness I never learned to play the piano. But, offer me a stage, and I will do my best to entertain you...

The Little Camera That Could

Spring is just around the corner [1], and this not-so-young / almost-old man's thoughts turn not to love or even to pilgrimages, but to the pressing matter of what unnecessary household clutter to hold on to, and what to sell on, dump, or give away on Freecycle. Which explains why I found myself in Southampton Old Cemetery on a sunny afternoon this week with a shoulder-bag full of "small black cameras", taking comparative test pictures in one of the few places both packed with visual interest and where absolute stillness can be guaranteed between shots.

I won't bore you with my conclusions – this isn't Gearhead Corner – but I will show you a few pictures taken with my Fujifilm X20, the little camera that could. Obviously, under the circumstances, any decent camera could have delivered these shots, but I'm not aware of any other that is so small, so solid, and with a focal-length range from 28mm-112mm (35mm equivalent) at a fast-enough f/2.0-2.8, all packed into a manually-operated pancake zoom. Should you be lucky enough to come across one, pick it up, and I'm pretty sure you'll be smitten, too, despite its age (released 2013) and its sensor size (12 MP 2/3"-type). As I've said before, it's a real shame Fuji didn't continue this line of development, and it's no surprise that used examples of the X20 and its slightly-improved successor the X30 command prices north of £300. Needless to say, it's a keeper.

On the way back, though, with all the small black cameras safely back in the bag, I resorted to the iPhone's convenience and capabilities. Which, as I keep discovering, are also remarkable. The well-equipped sports ground of King Edward VI School, one of Southampton's very few private schools, always offers a nicely complex interplay of elements, especially in late afternoon sun, and what I like about small sensors is the effortless rendering of deep focus, front to back; the pursuit of blurred backgrounds (a.k.a. "bokeh") is not of any great interest to me.

No, that's not an aviary, by the way: those are "cricket nets", where batting and bowling can be practised without offering any threat to the windows of the houses just across the road, or even to the traffic on nearby Hill Lane. Cricket balls are very hard and can do serious damage, especially when given a solid whack on the sweet spot of a cricket bat, as anyone who has played the game as a close fielder will attest (in our school team I used to play regularly in the semi-suicidal position known appropriately as "silly mid-on"). Ouch! Needless to say I haven't played cricket since, or any team games, come to that. Despite a willingness to join in compulsory sports at school with a certain degree of enthusiasm, I am not by nature what managerial types like to call a "real team player", and abandoned them ASAP. Besides, chasing balls around like an idiot is a pastime best suited to dogs, isn't it?

1. I refuse, absolutely refuse, ever to say or write "spring has sprung", as if this were the most witty seasonal coinage since Geoffrey Chaucer smiled quietly to himself, as he drafted the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales.