Impossible? No: Eschatological!

I'm sure you know the (in)famous work of art by Damien Hirst, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", even if you hadn't realised it goes by that title. It's the one with a very large shark in an even larger glass case of formaldehyde. However, if that title is meant to encapsulate the meaning of the work (and it probably isn't, he's such a big tease) then I'd suggest that a banana duct-taped to the wall would do the job just as well and at considerably less cost; I bet Damien is kicking himself over that one. By the same token "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" would be a better title for that (in)famously banana-based artwork, "Comedian". Ah, those cheeky-boy artists, how they do mock us... And how their bank managers must love their monetisation of concept-driven cock-snooking (snook-cocking?).

But, whatever anyone thinks about either actual "work", I'm interested in that title. You could leave out the word "physical" as redundant, actually, and be left with a snappier, more readily grasped expression of a certain paradoxical state of mind: the impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. Now, obviously, most of us, most of the time, don't think about death: what would be the point? It's also true that, until our mortality impresses itself upon us forcefully, most of us do not experience ourselves as a time-limited proposition: not immortal as such, but just sort of here, now, chugging along, with no end in sight. But that blithe indifference is not what that title invokes; for me, anyway.

I'm very prone to an experience that I'm sure most self-aware people have from time to time, almost as a sort of satori. You don't have to have fasted for 40 days, dropped acid, or drunk ayahuasca to be taken unawares, to be struck, suddenly and with the force of revelation, by how laughably, self-evidently absurd it is, that you – I – can exist, and yet will at some point cease to exist, when the meat-and-bone machine that sustains your – my – individual, particular consciousness stops working, and begins its irreversible breakdown into its constituent elements. At such a revelatory moment, it seems impossible to reconcile both propositions in the same brain. How can "I" be the single focal point of all this, and yet be destined to vanish? It doesn't make any sense! But then normal service is resumed, and you're just sort of here, now, chugging along, with things to do, places to go, bills to pay.

This existential flip-flop must have been troubling susceptible people for a very long time, and it's no surprise that the idea of an "afterlife" seems to have been a constant of human culture. It makes sense: the experience of being alive is so intense, so important, so all-encompassing, that the thought of it abruptly coming to an end is like... Well, it's not like a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde. You can easily imagine the speculations of some Ice Age proto-philosopher: the dead must have gone somewhere, mustn't they, and I suppose I'll be going there, too, sooner or later: I wonder what it's like? On cue, the imagination kicks in to fill the vacuum with pleasant and not so pleasant picturings, which are then seized upon by the tribal elders, who have in turn been struck, suddenly and with the force of revelation, by the realisation that these lurid imaginings can be systematised into a really effective carrot-and-stick means of policing the behaviour of "their" tribe. In other words, a religion. Do right, or else: see what lies in store for you in the unseen realm that lies beyond this rocky road... [1]

However, despite our propensity for picking up Wordsworthian intimations of immortality, I'm fairly sure that most thinking people in 2025 are at the very least agnostic, and in the main entirely atheist, with no belief in any afterlife at all, no matter what they are obliged to pretend to believe by their particular society's thought police. Surely most sane people anticipate death as a full and final personal extinction, albeit with varying degrees of equanimity, and don't tremble before elaborate Boschian eschatological fantasies in which rival post-mortem destinations await us, supervised by benign angels and malevolent demons respectively.

Doubtless, it has been very convenient for a very long time for our rulers to maintain, embroider, and inculcate such supernatural fictions, primarily to scare the bejesus out of a benighted but potentially unruly peasantry, but also to reinforce the idea of a Great Chain of Being, with kings and nobles occupying their rightful place just below the angels, but most of us just one shit-spattered step up from the farmyard. Still, by uneven fits and starts, those days have been coming to an end and – short of the resumption of visits by winged ambassadors from the Great Beyond – will never return. Although how far civil order is best maintained by the internalised surveillance of imaginary beings or by the brutality of real ones is debatable, of course.

But: just for fun, let's just imagine that it is true, that after death some portion of your essential self finds itself freed from its meat-and-bone prison and embarks on a fresh, wholly unexpected adventure. To echo that Ice Age sage: I wonder where we would find ourselves, and what it would be like?

Well, for a start, unless the hereafter is constituted as a vast theme park, divided into discrete culturally-appropriate comfort zones, heavenly havens, and happy hunting grounds, the billions who died before us and have already arrived there must surely have been surprised and not a little baffled by what they found. After all, the place has to accommodate everybody who has lived or will ever live. It must, by definition, be non-denominational, culturally neutral, very capacious indeed (unless "personal essences" are very small), and absolutely the last word in future-proofing, design-wise, although I suppose periodic makeovers are not out of the question.

One immediately thinks of some ultra-anodyne version of an airport departure lounge. But that's a meat-and-bones vision: no matter how long you'll be hanging around there (eternity? until your next incarnation is called?) you probably won't be needing a snack, somewhere to sit down, or even a toilet, thankfully (I mean, just imagine the queues). Besides, is this accommodation exclusively for sentient beings from planet Earth – welcome, crows! – or must it accommodate those from every other consciousness hotspot in the universe? Maybe it's a dizzyingly complex multi-dimensional arrangement of virtual spaces? There also needs to be an inter-being, pan-galactic lingua franca, perhaps some sort of telepathic common understanding.

I'm bored... I liked being a crow.
Me, too... I was a trilobite. Been here a long time.
Not what we was led to expect, is it?
Nah... Oh, hang on, they've finally called my incarnation destination, see you later!
Not if I see you first! Heh... Have a good one!

So, picking what we might call a passing-cluster at random let's take, say, the Battle of Maldon, a Saxons vs. Vikings fixture that took place in August 991. A lot of personal essences will have been set free that day, with on the one side a pagan vision of What Happens Next, and on the other a crudely Christian take.

Now, Ragnar the Berserker has overdone the fly agaric, and charges straight onto the spear of Aethelgar, but not without first cleaving Aethelgar's skull in two with his axe: a man-on-man score draw. Ragnar has led a Good Life, by berserker standards, cleaving, biting, stabbing, and generally unleashing painful death on whatever opponents his masters pointed him at. Kill, Ragnar, kill! So, dying in battle with his weapon in hand, he knows exactly what to expect. Break out the Carlsberg! Bring on the Ikea meatballs, and then the blonde one from Abba!

Aethelgar, by contrast, is conflicted, and not at all sure what outcome to expect: it might even go to penalties, or VAR. He has a vague recollection of something called Purgatory. Aethelgar has been an obedient foot-soldier, carrying his top-of-the-range spear along to many battles. But whenever he asks himself the question, Who would Jesus stab in the guts?, he has doubts. Christianity is big on those doubts: will I, won't I make it to Heaven, or will I, won't I suffer eternal damnation in the burning mosh pit of Hell? I mean, when it says, "Thou shalt not stab people in the guts", does that mean ever, or just when you've not been explicitly ordered to do so? One for the theologians, that, and way above Aethelgar's pay-grade as spearman, first class.

Both warriors, of course, are in for the surprise of their life, so to speak. Which will be a huge disappointment for Ragnar, and an enormous relief for Aethelgar. Where the hell are we? Good question...

Ding dong! Welcome to What Happens Next! Please collect your Next Life voucher from the registration desk. You are 10¹⁰⁰⁰ᵗʰ in the queue... 

Assuming, that is, that the hereafter is not just an enormous recycling scheme for consciousness, and briefly experienced by each individual as unpleasantly like being drunk. What's so unpleasant about being drunk, you ask? Well, as Douglas Adams put it, just ask a glass of water. 

1. As an interlude, you may enjoy this post from 2010, Caedmon's Dream Part II, concerning the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity. No, really, it's fun, and not entirely irrelevant, if you've ever wondered where that thing about life being like a sparrow flying through a brightly-lit feasting-hall came from.

Enkindling

The Enkindled Spring

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,

Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,

Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between

Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze

Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,

Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among

This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed

About like a shadow buffeted in the throng

Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.

D.H. Lawrence

Three Square

So, in the end I did succumb to the temptation to buy a copy of the Topaz Gigapixel "uprezzing" software, which has inevitably caused me to delve back into the furthest reaches of my backfiles, not only for items to enlarge beyond their native size, but also to see what I might have overlooked or ignored from those earliest days of digicams; whether because the files were too small to bother with, or because my processing skills were not up to much 25 years ago, and I was unable to rescue many "good but technically challenging" photos.

I was still primarily using film back then, but from the late 1990s I had started to use a series of "digicams", starting with a 1 (one!) megapixel Fujifilm "FinePix" camera, eventually hitting my digital stride during 2002-5 with a 3 MP Olympus C3030z and then a 5 MP C5050z. That last was the camera that finally caused me to abandon film altogether. I had already given up working in an improvised darkroom at home – never my favourite thing, and inquisitive small children and trays of chemical solutions don't mix well – and the expense of paying a lab to process, proof, and print colour-negative film was no longer justifiable once I had acquired a suitable inkjet printer. I could make 20 x 15 cm (8" x 6") prints on A4 sheets at my own convenience: small, but better than any lab print and costing just a few pence to produce – essentially a tiny fraction of the price of inks and paper – and perfectly feasible to do at the same time as making an evening meal for those inquisitive small children.

I'm not going to review Gigapixel, other than to say that the resizing of files seems essentially seamless, especially if kept within modest bounds. Even just to be able to take a three megapixel image (cropped to a 13 cm square like those in my self-published book The Revenants) and double it to a 26 cm square is quite an exciting prospect: although to take it to the six-times max of 78 cm (2' 6") seems more than a little OTT to me. So here are a few of the finds among those overlooked pictures, all taken in 2003 with the 3 MP Olympus digicam. I've cropped them all square, in the spirit of The Revenants, and as was my usual practice at the time.

It's pretty clear that the novelty of the WYSIWYG screen on the digicam – postage-stamp sized though it was – took me in the direction of close-ups and pattern finding, a refreshing change after years of using various medium-format film cameras for my "serious" work. In the main the quality of these really very small image files is surprisingly good: those Olympus engineers certainly knew what they were doing. Their main shortcomings are a tendency to blow out highlights (though that may well have been my inexperience, too) and for any small specular highlights, like those on sparkling ice, to be rendered as tiny squares: inevitable, really, given the low pixel count of a three megapixel sensor. I've already enlarged and printed a few using Gigapixel, and I'm very pleased with them.

Go Large

I recently had cause to invoke Oscar Wilde's exculpatory quip concerning the artist Whistler's apparent self-contradiction: "consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative". In other words, it's OK, at least as far as OW was concerned, to say one thing but to do quite another. Which is not necessarily hypocritical so long as it's, um, imaginative.

So, look, if you have any memory at all of what I wrote in the previous post, then let's just say that this week I've been being imaginative. Here's the thing:

When I was singing the praises of the Fuji X20 a few posts ago (In and Around the Lake) I showed a 100% detail of this photograph (i.e. the area within the red box):

My intention was merely to flag up the sheer quality of that camera's image files, derived as they are from a mere 12 megapixel 2/3" sensor. But there was something about that crop... It simply grew on me as an image in its own right. Now, the whole of a 12 megapixel image file like this will print nicely at 300 "dots per inch", giving an image roughly 34 x 25.5 cm, although I'd usually prefer to print it rather smaller and at a higher resolution. So the portion within that red box is actually very small, about 10.4 x 5.6 cm at 300 dpi, and not really much use, unless you were into making bubble-gum cards.

Now, I'm sure I can't be the only one who has thought, when scrutinising an image at 100% (so-called "pixel peeping") and seen a perfect but tiny extract like this appear on their screen: now that would make a very nice picture, but what a shame it's so unprintably small... In fact, I quite often find that there is something compelling about the unexpected combinations of colours and shapes that swim into view when passing that virtual loupe over an image.

There are several obvious responses to this problem, of course. First: sure, very nice, but forget about it, it really is too small to print. Second: if you like that sort of compressed view, then why not use a telephoto lens, the longer the better? Third, of course, there's the resort to a camera which makes very large files; overkill, for most purposes, and a problem when it comes to storage, but out of which even a tiny crop is still of a printable size. And, finally: why not use some "up-rezzing" software, which can enlarge an image quite dramatically by re-interpreting its not-enough pixels into lots more pixels, and is allegedly quite effective these days?

The only one of these approaches that had ever appealed to me was the use of a telephoto lens. It seemed honest, in a "truth to materials" sort of way; no cheating, just optics. Cheating? Well, having grown up, photographically, in the days of film, the art-aristocratic attitude that a cropped image verges on fakery is ingrained and hard to shake. Hence my adventures with a Canon Zoom and a Panasonic TZ70, for example; fun, but requiring a lot of post-processing to get anything resembling a printable result. I do actually own a couple of decent telephoto lenses, but their sheer bulk does not really suit my "smart casual" approach to photography. Tripod? Bag of heavy lenses? No thanks.

However, I have a friend from my university days, now semi-retired from a medical career, who lives up in Scotland, near Inverness, and who in recent years has taken up the hobby of bird photography. Of necessity, therefore, he has a high degree of familiarity with all of the strategies mentioned above for extracting a small item of interest from a much larger context. I'm by no stretch a bird photographer, but in return for some photos he'd sent me, I sent him this tighter crop of a shot of a coot I'd taken last month (also with the Fuji X20, as it happens), saying it would only print at 20 x 13 cm, but why not? It makes a nice little picture. To which he replied: why don't I enlarge it for you using my Topaz Gigapixel software? To which I replied, Hmm... Thanks, but there's actually something else I'd much rather try...

So – to cut to the chase – I now have several up-rezzed (rezzed-up?) versions of my little X20 image crop, courtesy of my bird-watching friend, the largest of which is an extraordinary 60 cm wide, and very nearly acceptable to my admittedly fastidious eye. I'm completely sold, however, when I print it at a more modest 32 cm, which sits nicely on an A3 sheet, looks "tighter" at 580 dpi, and is a lot more photographic in feel. This is after all, I have to remind myself, in origin a 10 cm snip from a 12 MP compact camera. I'm impressed.

Yes, that's a bottle of Pschitt on the pschelf...

So is this the start of a new "project"? Will I invest in a copy of Gigapixel, or something similar? That all rather depends on whether my venerable HP desktop can handle it. Any new space- and processing-hungry software will probably have to live on my laptop, instead, which would be a little too reminiscent of shuttling files back and forth between computers on a flash-stick when I was using the terrible Lumen software that came with the ill-fated Light L16. But it could be worth it; we'll see. After all, there are a lot of interesting little pictures buried deep within my backfiles waiting to be excavated... 

Meteorological Spring

Enough with the words for once: let's have a little break from my baseless bloviation and shameless over-sharing. So-called "meteorological spring" has arrived, so here are some very recent photographs, mainly from the iPhone plus a few from the Fuji X20, taken during a couple of those much-anticipated late February blasts of intense raking sunshine, revelations of warm colours, clear air, and long shadows that lift everyone's spirits after weeks of dull skies and rain.

First the X20:

Now the iPhone 12 mini [1]:

OK, so just a few more words...

These photos are all "just" twelve megapixel files, printable at 10" x 13.5" uncropped at 300 dpi. But surely that is plenty for most purposes? Apple's iPhones have been 12 MP cameras pretty much all along, and still are, really, despite the hype. In a world of ever-bigger sensor sizes I am increasingly of the view that – unless you truly intend to make huge, table-sized prints, or need to crop out the tiny bit of the image area that you really want – there is no point in filling whatever storage you have with the very large image files that result from a sensor any bigger than, say, 16 MP, or 24 MP at the most.

Indeed, some of the best photographs I've ever taken, printed, framed, exhibited, and actually sold were made using my 10 MP Panasonic LX3. [2] But, of course, virtually no gearhead with money to spare is going to buy a 12 or 16 MP camera when 40-plus megapixels are on offer – even though "bigger is better" surely stopped being true for most of us even before 24 MP became the norm not so long ago – and therefore no-one is going to be manufacturing them any longer, either. Sooner or later, we'll all be stuck with thousands of massive files that will clog up our storage for no purpose at all.

But if you think that the tiny sensor-plus-lens combo in your phone is really capable of producing 40 or more megapixels of quality data, just like a full-size camera, then I happen to have a bridge in London you may be interested in buying.

True, as a small, compact, older man, I suppose I am drawn to small, compact, older cameras with their small, compact files. Let the big guys haul their "full-frame" dumbbells around: I'm sure they've got an upcoming solo exhibition in a major gallery that needs to be filled with table-sized prints, or at least wish they did. But, when out walking on a lovely day, who wants to be burdened with anything bulkier than a pocket-sized hardback or, even better, the phone you'd probably be taking out with you anyway?

Anyone know who this is? Some NSFW Hindu deity?

(in Southampton's Hollybrook Cemetery)

1. The iPhone photos were made with the ProCamera app, which gives "raw" files as well as a choice of HEIF or JPEGs, and has a brilliantly intuitive touch-screen "focus and exposure" device, as well as various other useful features I can't be bothered to explore.

2. In fact, some of the best-received images at my first solo exhibition in 2009 in Innsbruck were made with a five MP camera, the Olympus C-5050z. So much so that this particular subset subsequently went on to be shown in Innichen / San Candido in northern Italy in 2010 (see my book The Revenants, made in 2006). Clearly, size really isn't everything...

Nothing Lasts

Man with a  mission

(plus more hair and a red beard)

When I was writing the post Ships in the Night last year, it occurred to me that it was quite possible that I or someone I knew might actually be in some of those photos from London in the late 1970s, quite by accident, especially the ones of political protest marches, most of us having been reliable members of the Left's rentamob in those years when it still seemed possible to push back the tide of Thatcherism, simply by shouting at it. However, I could see no familiar faces, not even those ships-in-the-night acquaintances encountered, to quote the dictionary definition, "in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance".

But the main thing that strikes me now on looking at those sets of work is how very different the country of my youth was from the one we inhabit now. The old, weird pre-war Britain was still hanging on in our poorer and more neglected neighbourhoods, and in particular – to pick up a thread from another earlier post – you can't help but notice how different the old were back then, almost a separate species. If you thought I was exaggerating in that post (The New Old) then take a look at those stooped, toothless, pre-NHS ancients in the photographs of Markéta Luskačová, probably not much older than I am now, their backstories already reduced to bric-a-brac on a shabby market stall, remnants of lives cruelly stunted by poverty, limited opportunities, and lived out in the back-to-back terraces and tenements then undergoing demolition.

Things move inexorably on. Incredibly (to me, anyway), two weeks ago I turned seventy-one, and my own youthful years receded yet another click beyond a half-century into the past. A past now as long ago as, say, the 1920s heyday of some 71-year-old bystander watching bemused as I tramped past in 1979, holding up the banner of our Bristol University branch of the public service trade union, NALGO. Back then, it was the old Victorian buildings that were being turned into rubble; now, even the brave new post-war world of a place like Stevenage New Town is feeling its age. The house I was born in, the primary schools I attended, and even the block of flats I lived in during my adolescence have all already been demolished.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
T.S. Eliot, from East Coker (Four Quartets)

"Ah, it's the being so cheerful as keeps me going, sir!", as Mr. Eliot liked to quip after a few pints, although he would never admit he'd stolen that one off the radio. Odd, really, given the obvious amount of "borrowing" in the lines just quoted, not least from the Byrds (sorry, I'm just being facetious).

But, it's true, though: nothing lasts, does it? Although it can get better. We don't live in a version of the ship of Theseus, where every part gets replaced, exactly as it was, generation after generation. Time may not be on our side, individually, but as a society we have choices over what to replace, what to add, what to remove, and the quality of the components we use. After all, even the worst new-build house (and some are pretty bad) is better than the best Iron Age hut, and is better furnished with heat, light, and appliances than some crumbling ancestral stately home, once state-of-the-art architecture built with no expense spared several hundred years ago.

Although being able to afford to pay the utility bills that fuel your heat, light, and appliances is a different matter; there are always more choices for society to make. For example, should we be putting yet more superfluous cash into a few wealthy pockets, or providing modest comfort for all? You wouldn't think that one would be such a hard choice to make, would you? But, clearly not: yet more superfluous cash flowing into a few absurdly overstuffed pockets it is! True, in return we get Facebook, X, Amazon, Netflix, and the rest of it; fine, if echo-chamber social media, effort-free shopping, and on-tap entertainment are a priority over an equitable redistribution of wealth, as they clearly seem to be. It's "bread and circuses" all the way, but with lots of circus and very little bread. As someone said, as a society we are in danger of amusing ourselves to death.

I read a conspiracy theory somewhere that the goal of a certain secret sub-set of the oligarchic few is, essentially, not just to do away with the need to pay the rest of us to continue generating their obscene wealth, but simply to do away with the rest of us, full stop. Which struck me as ridiculously OTT, until I read in the New Yorker – and you won't find many better sources of fact-checked, responsible reporting – that Elon Musk intends to replace the American equivalent of the Civil Service with AI. Follow that link, and – at the very least – be concerned, be very concerned. Nothing lasts. And things can also get worse, much worse.

But, bad as things might get, I'm afraid my protesting days are pretty much over, reduced to shouting at the radio and the occasional email to my Member of Parliament, Tory though she be (Hi, Caroline!). Any march I might want to join would have to be carefully planned to pass by several public "facilities", and any picket or protest not require too many hours of standing around in the cold. I suppose I am becoming that bemused 71-year-old bystander, whose youthful heyday was more than fifty years ago in a very different world; one where strong trade unions were unconstrained by spiteful anti-labour laws (which, shamefully, no Labour government has seen fit to reverse), and radical left-wing ideas and affiliations were commonplace – almost de rigueur – among the more thoughtful young.

Talking of which, I had a true blast from the past the other day looking through the second-hand books in a local Oxfam shop, where I saw the spine of a 1970s-vintage Oxford University Press paperback of the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed: not something I would ever have expected to encounter on Southampton's Shirley High Street in 2025. Of course, in my student and squatting days it had once seemed that everybody had a copy of that on their improvised brick-and-plank bookshelves. No doubt many of them still do.

Not me, though. I've never owned it, never read it. As I've explained before, in 1973 I was an ignorant, unserious, thrill-seeking aesthete, an introvert trying on extroversion for size (didn't fit, made me look silly), who fell among committed leftists and serious-minded politicos at university. Some of it rubbed off, but I'd have to admit that my own three-volume touchstone in those years would instead have been the first three books by Carlos Castaneda. But I doubt many thoughtful youngsters today are reading either Deutscher on the Russian revolutionary Trotsky or Castaneda on the Mexican brujo Don Juan. So 1970s, boomer... After all, despite the fact that I can state with a high degree of confidence that, unlike Don Juan, Trotsky definitely existed, both he and his ideas must seem increasingly insubstantial from this distance in time to anyone under 30. Nothing lasts, does it? [1]

1. It is a nicely symmetrical irony – perhaps only amusing to me and a handful of my old college chums – that whereas I went on to spend many years as a trade union activist, one of the more committed and indeed aggressive "Trots" of those long-ago student days, Neil Whitehead, went on to become an anthropologist studying shamanism in a perilously hands-on way. See the post Walking the Dead.

As the Crow Flies

May 2024

Like (I presume) many people entering old age, I keep getting ambushed by sudden collapses in the internal mental timeline of my life, like a landslip or sinkhole opening up as the years accumulate into an unstable mass. This can be somewhat startling. In a recent post on Mike Johnston's Online Photographer blog he remarked in passing that the film Das Boot is over 40 years old. Forty years? What? How did that happen? I can still remember as if it were... well... not exactly yesterday, but quite recently that I was glued to my 8" portable TV when the six-part mini-series of Das Boot (far better than the film, I think) was broadcast on BBC2 in 1984 – the year I moved to Southampton from Bristol to take up a new job – sitting on the sofa in the flat I had just bought. Sure, 2025 minus 1984 equals 41 but, somehow, simple arithmetic doesn't correlate with lived, felt experience until – bang! – something triggers a collapse, and you're staring across a chasm of time, wondering, where did it all go?

So now it seems that it was exactly ten years ago – impossible! – that it was my partner's turn to make a move in the employment-and-property game: she took up a post as a professor in the University of Bristol, and bought a rather pleasant flat overlooking the Avon Gorge as a place to stay during the week. However, after a few years she became disenchanted with that job, left Bristol, and returned to work in London's University College. But she kept the flat as a handy bolthole in a city we had enjoyed together as young adults in the "punk and reggae" years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and where we still have friends and family.

February 2025

Ever since, that flat has been something of a Happy Place for both of us. The spectacular view, especially, has been a constant source of enchantment. The best part of half a mile of airy void lies between our fourth-floor kitchen window and the matching elevation on the far side of the Gorge, a crow's flight that crosses over some woods that lie below our block of flats, then the busy Portway, the tidal rise and fall of the river Avon in its muddy bed, the Portishead railway branch line, and ends in Leigh Woods opposite. That window faces roughly SSW, so the sun passes from left to right during the day, sometimes creating spectacular lighting effects at dawn, especially if the Gorge is misty, and igniting dramatic sunsets when low in the west. Naturally, I keep a camera on the kitchen table, and open a window to take a photograph or two whenever something interesting is going on, often before getting dressed in the morning or while cooking in the evening. Most often, though, I simply sit at the table and gaze out at the sort of view you'd be happy to walk many miles to find.

October 2015

We were there last weekend, and it was very cold and very foggy most of the time. On Saturday morning I rolled up the kitchen blind and the far side of the Gorge had vanished behind a bank of impenetrable mist. At the edge of the woods below us, just across a lawn, there is a venerable oak tree that often acts as the focus of my leisurely picture-making. It, too, was barely visible. But as the mist started to thin, its gnarly, truncated shape was silhouetted against the faint background, and a crow was sitting at the very top, having just seen off two magpies from this desirable perch. Perhaps it, too, was contemplating the misty void as a perfect metaphor for the passage of time. Or, more likely, it was wondering which side of the Gorge was most likely to provide a decent breakfast on such a chilly morning. Crows are smart, opportunistic, and adaptable, but haven't yet figured out the advantages of double glazing and central heating. Although they'd probably reply that them two-legged wasters of perfectly good food would be better off figuring out the advantages of feathers, wings, and a decent beak. 'S all I need, mate. Though some pockets would be nice, it's true...

February 2025

February 2025

Night Light

Cathedral Close, Winchester

We had a family meal in Winchester's Brasserie Blanc on Sunday, in anticipation of my birthday this week (I had poulet à la moutarde, very nice, thanks!). Afterwards, we went for a stroll through the centre of town, before our dining companions had to catch their train back to London. It was a cold day, and a drizzly rain had started to fall, but passing the entrance of Winchester College – one of the country's most prominent public (i.e. private) schools, fees a mere £60K p.a. for boarders – my son noticed there was free entry to some kind of museum within the grounds, so we decided to take a look.

Winchester College was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, a sort of mediaeval prototype of that Tudor mover and shaker, Thomas Cromwell, with a similar c.v. but a happier outcome. William had also put his trust in princes, contrary to biblical advice (Psalm 146), but got away with it, handsomely, dying as one of the most influential and richest men in the country. Over the centuries Old Wykehamists have donated all manner of stuff to the school, which mainly seems to have ended up as teaching aids or stashed away out of sight in various lofts. So a few years ago the old Treasury building was made into a museum, open to the public, where displays of the school's treasures, curiosities, and knick-knacks can be seen. (But if you think this will justify your charitable status, chaps, think again... Come on, Starmer, FFS just do it!).

It's very professionally and tastefully done, in the universal "modern museum" style, using honey-coloured wood and plate glass. On Sunday afternoon we were the only visitors the entire time we were there. We enjoyed ourselves: it was like having our own private Wunderkammer. How often, for example, do you get the chance to get up close to a set of casts of the Parthenon frieze (a.k.a. the Elgin Marbles)? Or gaze at early editions of Paradise Lost, Lyrical Ballads, or Blake's illustrated edition of Young's Night Thoughts? Apparently the displays are regularly refreshed, and the inevitable Jane Austen 250th birthday tribute is upcoming later in 2025. Who knows, I might even read one this year, although not ever having read any Austen probably gives me more pleasure, and is certainly easier to achieve.

For me, though, there was one truly stand-out item, lurking in a cabinet of Chinese porcelain. Which was this:

I have often fantasised about a spontaneous smash-and-grab raid in various museums and galleries, but this was particularly tempting. Apparently, it is a night light, an early ancestor of the softly illuminated bedside lamps you can get today. A candle would have been placed inside (there's a hole in the top), and the cat's eyes would glow (there are holes in the eyes surrounded by thinner, white porcelain). Allegedly such night lights had a dual purpose: to comfort children who were afraid of the dark, and to scare off rats. Hopefully not both at the same time in the same room. Never mind rats, though, I imagine the thing could be equally unsettling to any nervous child, waking up in the night to meet the unblinking gaze of this glimmering goggle-eyed guardian: miaaow! It's hardly Hello Kitty, is it?

It seems these Chinese porcelain cat night lights were once a Thing, and – disappointingly – I see actual originals go for thousands at auction. If I were the entrepreneurial type I'd immediately knock up a battery-operated prototype and join the queue outside the Dragons' Den, confident I was about to become extremely wealthy. But I'm not, and I won't, and therefore never will be. Extremely wealthy, that is. But, seriously, wouldn't you love to have one of these on your bedside table?

Really?

Self portrait (one of many similar), by Celia Paul

I noticed this forthcoming item from MACK books, from which the dreary smeary painting above – like Anselm Kiefer's sad little sister in a hospital gown – seems fairly typical of the works collected within:

Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025. The prolific British painter’s body of work is collected in a luxurious and authoritative volume, alongside new texts by writers including Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hilton Als, Clare Carlisle, Edmund de Waal, as well as Paul herself.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's contribution to the volume was published recently in the New Yorker ("The World-Changing Gaze of Celia Paul"), an account of a couple of meetings between these two dedicated self-obsessives. It's a curious read, I have to say. The encounter of two such people has a sort of self-cancelling chemistry of tepid mutual admiration that is actually quite funny. True, I've never read any Knausgaard: there's been so much written about him that it has always seemed superfluous actually to read him talking about himself, and I'm pretty sure that Scandinavian "autofiction" is not my thing. Yeah, right, hilarious, you might say, coming from a guy who blogs; but there's one of those irregular verbs in there, isn't there? You know the sort of thing: I blog; you over-share; he navel-gazes... 

I have to say that my reaction to painting like this is one of baffled amusement. I think I will never understand the criteria by which alleged excellence in contemporary art is judged. I mean, really? I keep coming across top-rated work that – to my admittedly untutored eye – seems little better than the sort of thing you'd see at the open day of a sixth-form college: well-intended, heartfelt – full marks for sincerity, youngster! – but short of real skill and with most of its pictorial appeal deriving from the accidental effects of a slapdash lack of control. But this much-lauded stuff is not the result of juvenile enthusiasm, but the deliberately faux-naïve, calculatedly cack-handed work of successful, fully-trained and competent artists who, it seems to me, are essentially faking the "authenticity" of outsider art (now there's irony for you), presumably to evade the charge of using shallow sophistication, facility and – yuk! – "beauty" in order to con us art-rubes and civilians into... Well, I'm never sure what it is we're being shielded from by this solicitous self-censorship. But, really, guys, there's no need! We couldn't afford your stuff even if we liked it.

But MACK is a prestigious photography and art publisher, Paul is a Big Name painter – not only (?) because of her former relationship with Lucian Freud – and that's a fairly A-list roster of contributors. Although admittedly they are also fans of Alice Neel, another painter currently in vogue whose faux-naïve daubings I simply do not "get". I am sufficiently humble, however, not to mention magnanimous and open-minded – I am a saint of self-deprecation, though I do say so myself – to concede that the problem may be mine, not theirs. After all, I do enjoy the work of Pierre Bonnard and his present-day admirers, like Andrew Cranston, which might well be seen to be open to the same criticisms. Oh well, as Oscar Wilde wrote to excuse the contradiction between Whistler's written theorising and his actual painted work: consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative...

It may be that I was irreversibly formed, aesthetically, by an early and enduring love for comics and commercial graphic art. I suppose you can't spend your impressionable years poring over the revved-up box art of plastic model kits, copies of War Picture Library, Mad, and then LP record sleeves, and not absorb something of their made-to-please values, shallow as they may be. So I tend to prefer art that takes reality, hypes it up a bit, even to the point of decorative abstraction, and makes you feel something positive on the spectrum from "Wow!" to "Interesting..." I'm not a fan of art that takes reality and distresses it, or depresses your mood, intentionally or not (apparently, Rothko's declared intention with his notorious paintings commissioned for the Seagram Building's Four Seasons restaurant was to "ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room"). But, in particular, I avoid obsessively self-therapeutic work that wants me to empathise with some heroically sad or damaged individual. But then I suppose that may just be the incorrigible and annoying white male in me speaking: "Come on, sad sack, never mind all that, let's play!".

Sports Ground, Southampton

Talking of commercial graphic art, recently I came across the remarkable fact that just one man was responsible for nearly all of the most striking and memorable movie posters of the 1970s and 80s. Seriously: if you can remember it – let's see... how about Chinatown, or [deep breath] The Last Picture Show, The Last Tycoon, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Murder on the Orient Express, Nashville, Papillon, The Shootist, The Sting, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark? – then he most likely painted it. It seems Richard Amsel was something of a graphic-art genius, but died of AIDS at the age of just 37 in 1985. It is incalculable, really, how much creativity the worst years of AIDS will have removed from the world.

Of his own work, Amsel said:

Commercial art can be and sometimes is art, but if someone hangs a poster, it is still a poster pretending to be something it's not. My work is basically for the printed page, and not for hanging in living rooms.

Well, that's as maybe ("consistency..."), but – resale value and insurance premiums aside – between an original Celia Paul painting and a Richard Amsel poster I know which I'd rather have hanging in my living room. Apparently a feature documentary is being made about Amsel, and I'll be interested to see it. I just hope it's more about the work (wow!) rather than the life (sad...).

One of my Top Ten favourite films...

NOTE 1: I have recently updated my website. Nothing dramatic, just added some recent work and tidied up some loose ends. If you haven't visited it for a while – I confess I have rather neglected it – why not take a look? It's here. Feel free to give it a drubbing, Celia!

NOTE 2: If you have ever been a reader of Thomas McGuane, Richard Brautigan, or Jim Harrison, you'll probably enjoy this documentary video, All That Is Sacred, from the outdoorsy people at Yeti Films (as featured recently on Daniel Milnor's Shifter blog). It rather reminds me of the film about the "outlaw country" music scene around Guy Clark, Heartworn Highways, also worth a watch. What was that about "scenius"?

In and Around the Lake

After weeks of drab and stormy weather, we finally had one of those afternoons illuminated by low raking sunshine that start to pop up after the dark dip of the solstice is behind us and the days first start to lengthen noticeably, so I headed out for a walk on Southampton Common.

I decided to take along my Fuji X20. This is a small "compact" camera that I had formerly only really used on holidays, but I had been closely examining some comparative image files (mainly in order to decide which of my, um, several cameras really ought to be sold on) and came to the surprising conclusion that in most respects and under most conditions this camera may actually be the best all-rounder I have. Portability and its unique "fast" built-in collapsible zoom aside, and despite its small sensor and vintage processing (the camera was first marketed in 2013), there is a unique quality to the images it produces that I really enjoy.

For example, here is a 100% detail of the photo above: taken hand-held, just before 16:00 on a late January afternoon, standing behind one tree, looking towards another stand about 75 yards away. The depth of focus, detail, and contrast are just right, I think, and give the "dry", semi-graphical style I prefer. 

But what about bokeh, you say? (a.k.a. "the out-of-focus backgrounds that everyone seems to love and will pay silly money to achieve")? Sorry, that's not for me, if I can avoid it... I'm OK with a bit of softness, but my preference is for front to back focus wherever possible. That's where small sensors win, every time. [1]

Out on the Common, the warm, steeply-angled light falling on the so-called Ornamental Lake was particularly eye-catching: pale reeds, dark reflective water, blue skies... For once, it was living up to its name.

Then, at the southern end of the Common and towards the end of the usable afternoon light, I entered the Old Cemetery, an inexhaustible source of picturesque combinations of weather-worn stone, thick undergrowth, and venerable trees. Well-worn territory for photographers, it's true, but who cares? You could waste a lifetime looking for something that nobody else has photographed. Besides, it's the way I tell 'em...

But there's an underlying reason why I've picked up the X20 again, which is actually a question: what is the purpose of making these photographs? Given the end uses I make of them, is there really any advantage in carrying around a larger, theoretically "better" camera just to get a little more resolution, or a slightly bigger file? The chances are slim that I will ever have another solo exhibition, and even if I did, I'd never print larger than "A4 image on A3 paper", tops. Besides, there comes a point where you don't even need to use a camera to "take pictures". I'm doing it all the time, now, after so many years: just by looking and composing the world into satisfying, occasionally revelatory or amusing shapes and juxtapositions. [2] There are times I do regret not having a camera with me to record and share something, but the essential 80% of the work has been done in my head: look at that!

Like a musician practising scales or idly improvising, the habit of creative looking, if we can call it that, will eventually school your eyes and give you the pleasure of seeing something pretty much anywhere, any time. So when I share my photographs, either here on the blog or as prints, a calendar, or a book, it's really only to say: look at that! Isn't that something? With the hope that someone else's eyes will in turn give them at least a decent fraction of the pleasure I took in seeing that particular something, and framing it in its rectangle.

That's it; anything else is whatever you have brought to the party. Photography has other, more important uses, but that's what I am doing; nothing more, nothing less. And a little camera like the X20 – or, more often than not, these days, my phone – is perfectly matched to the task.

1. I suffer extreme gear lust whenever I look at the Hasselblad X1D – what a beauty! – but know that I'd never get on with the shallow depth of field physics imposes on such a large sensor. I also know that spending that much money on a camera is bloody ridiculous...

2. This often involves shutting one eye to get the full 2D effect, which can sometimes look rather too much like a wink. So far, this has not yet got me into any trouble. Luckily, people are not often the subject of my "creative looking"...