Flags for Sunrise

Two views of the sunrise this week. Nothing but grey this morning, and some feeble snow in the bitterly cold NE wind, and it surely can't be long before we join the rest of the country in the chaos induced by this early onset of wintry weather.

Far away in the Australian sunshine: 517 for one. Five hundred and seventeen runs for the loss of one wicket. Extraordinary. I used to open the batting for my school team when I was very young, and know just a little of how that must feel. I won't be the only one today who finds himself thinking of John Wilson, and I send my love and warmest best wishes to any of you who are reading this. Cue up "When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease..."






Talking of long ago, when I padded up and carried my bat out to the crease, today is St.Andrew's Day, and I'm remembering how we used to be allowed to wear our Cubs and Brownie uniforms to school on the national saints' days. I don't know how widespread that was, or whether it was peculiar to our junior school. It seems as quaint now as playing the National Anthem at the end of a performance in the theatre or even, improbably, the cinema. I remember the rush to get out before the drum roll and those dreary chords struck up...

Google Me

We bloggers flatter ourselves that people visit our sites for one reason only; that is, to drink deep at the well of our wit, wisdom and learning. That , or (in the case of the more, um, self-revelatory blogs) to gawp at the pageant of our bleeding hearts, as Matthew Arnold said of Byron, probably the first celebrity blogger.

Google Analytics is there to prove us wrong. It is humbling, and sometimes alarming, to see some of the Google searches that have brought enquirers to my door. Here are a few from the last month:

bantam chickens in severe weather
"barn owl" ancestral star
being fine with something
benefits of corporal punishment in british schools
highly reflective glass walls
is me and my shadow public domain?
kd lang photos by raymond meeks
oxford chinese hat marquee
red light district mental space
what does the conversation of king edwin and the story of caedmon tell you about saint bede's spiritual views?
how to make black swan hat
jackson browne morocco explanation
why are songs like tattoos?

These range from "Uh Oh" (Edwin and Caedmon) through "Glad to be of service" (Jackson Browne) to "Well, I never" (Raymond Meeks and K.D. Lang -- must follow that one up).

The one thing I discover consistently from my statistics is that, by some margin, my most frequent source of visitors is a link to one post from one website dedicated to corporal punishment. I have been assured by the proprietor that this is in no way a forum for spankers. It is evident from the number of visitors that there is a healthy and entirely academic interest out there in tales of sound beatings at school.

Oh, and if you're reading this, David Gepp, someone out there is very interested in your Venice pinhole work at the moment. If that someone wants to get in touch with David, drop me an email and I can arrange something.

And if anyone knows how to make a black swan hat, I can pass that on, too. Glad to be of service. This is the nearest I can manage, perhaps the original Idiotic Hat:

"It shall be called Bottom's Dream,
because it hath no bottom"

The Idiotic Hat Guide to Unleashing Your Creativity

There is a minor industry in self-improvement books, encouraging you to get in touch with your frustrated inner tax exile, and to unleash the creative dynamo that is the Real You. The underlying dodgy thesis (there's always an underlying dodgy thesis) is nearly always the same one, and it's this:

Kids are born creative and free, and this innate joy is squeezed out of them by a sequence of grim, grey tyrants, of whom the most egregious and grimly grey is the schoolteacher. "Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!"

This is such bollocks, it's hard to know where to begin. It's as if the writers of these books had never been to primary school, had never encountered other children, and had been cruelly denied those most enticing of toys -- pencils, paints, and paper -- at home.

I can feel a potential Christmas stocking-filler blockbuster coming on here ("Is It Just Me, Or Are Most Kids Tedious?" or perhaps "Ignore Your Creativity And Get Back To Work!") so I'll keep this brief. It is my observation that most children are born vicious dullards who, without schooling, would torment each other into an early grave. The few exceptions -- the bright, the creative, the open-minded, the talented -- quickly learn to go to ground until it's safe to come out again later in life.

Trust me, I know. As a moderately talented child, I watched in horror as less wary contemporaries had their "show-off" tendencies relentlessly hacked down to playground level, not by our wonderful and encouraging teachers but by our predatory peers, whose "creativity" expressed itself in ensuring that everyone who was not "normal" was policed into dull, watchful conformity. Few of these monsters went on to become teachers, though some do seem to have gone on to careers as stand up comedians.

So, here is my ten point path to fulfilment through creativity:

1. Stop being so dull. Take a walk on the wild side, and see whether it's for you. Ideally, why not try being gay, or left-handed? It seems to work for a lot of artists.

2. Stop worrying about what people might think about you. Instead, find out what they actually do think about you -- probably nothing -- then work ceaselessly at giving them scandalous new things to think about you. See (1).

3. Self-reinvention is the name of the game. Don't like who you are? Neither do we. Stop it. Become someone more interesting. It's easier than you think, see (2).

4. Wear an idiotic hat.

5. Follow your dream. Find out where it goes during the day. Be there waiting for it next time, introduce yourself, and buy it a drink.

6. Think outside the box. Think inside the box. Think round the back of the box. Imagine you are a box. Make a box, and put it inside a box. Learn to box on Boxing Day. When the word "box" finally becomes absurd through repetition, you will have escaped the prison-house of language, and will briefly be outside the word "box", if not the actual box. Does that feel good, or bad?

7. Steal other people's work and ideas shamelessly. Try them on for size. Art is a charity shop.

8. Remember that it is easier to buy a book about creativity, and fund someone else's lifestyle, than it is to read that book. And it is easier to read about writing, than actually to write oneself. A writer is a person who writes. But preferably not a book about how to write.

9. Be positive. Work hard. Stick at it. Work 9 to 5, every weekday. Bring as much of yourself to it as you can. Society depends on your contribution: be proud of that. This is your proper job I'm talking about, dreamer, not some idle fantasy of becoming an artist.

10. Be nice to your kids, and give them plenty of paints, pencils and paper. Be unstinting in your praise and encouragement of their efforts, no matter how dull. Then, just maybe, they'll stop bullying that funny little kid who is so good at drawing, and realise just how freakin' awesome he or she really is. And, one day, maybe they'll even buy one of his pictures to hang on their wall!

Colour Limbo

There were some particularly bold lighting effects today as the sun came up on a freezing cold morning with clear skies and a steady northerly wind.






I should say I'm utterly confused, colour wise, at the moment.

I've just replaced my venerable Epson Stylus Photo 1270 printer (which I've had for seven or eight years, I think) with an Epson Stylus Photo 1400. Yes, that's right, I chickened out of getting a pigment ink printer, and have stuck with dyes. I thought long and hard about going the pigment ink route so I'd feel comfortable about selling prints. But, I like the way dye prints look. Still, the claim is that Epson Claria ink prints will last 200 years if kept properly i.e. in a locked lead-lined steel box in a dark, humidity- and temperature-controlled room, preferably in Switzerland... (Joking!! The 200 year part is true, however).

To compound the confusion, my equally venerable Dell monitor has given up the struggle, so I've stolen my daughter's HP flat screen. I'm now in Colour Management limbo. If anyone has recommendations for colour managing the Epson 1400 with standard Epson papers, I'm more than happy to hear them.*

So, I think these two pictures look pretty damn good, but I can't be sure! The only thing I know is that the on-screen and printed versions are different...


* I've calibrated the screen (HP w1907v) with a ColorVision Spyder 2 Express ("produce stunning photos like the pros!"), and I'm mainly printing using the supplied ICM profile for Epson Premium Glossy paper, with Photoshop Elements controlling the colour management, as recommended by Epson. It's not great. I suspect I'd get better results giving control to the printer, and using the sliders to adjust the CMY settings. Anyone got a favourite combo?

Imagine

Around this time of year, as the shops really start to crank up the Christmas machine, I am often struck by the decline in the standard of our public imagination. Christmas, of course, is entirely built out of inauthentic cliches, mainly borrowed ones. When, for example, did "red ribbon tied in a bow" come to signify "a Christmas gift" in this country? Angrily twisted sticky tape would be nearer the mark. I suppose it's no worse, as a signifier, than "snow". Do you remember the excitement when your favourite comic would arrive in the week before Christmas with the masthead topped with snow? And the baffling sense of anti-climax, when it never did snow before New Year?

But Christmas is not the only stimulus for my glumness, however. It really starts with the lead up to Remembrance Sunday. I think the concept of "the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier" is a piece of public imaginative theatre so brilliant and so moving that it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. We used to do it so well, didn't we? How could a country -- once capable of such an original, appropriate and unsentimental act of therapeutic symbolism -- sink so low?

Look around you at our civic, industrial and retail architecture. Everywhere, flat-pack buildings with all the aesthetic appeal of a carpet tile, all the pride and permanence of a closing-down sale; mere factory farms for the incubation of "imaginative and innovative solutions" that are nothing of the sort. Worse, look at these huge new national institutions we've had wished on us, like the National Lottery or Children in Need. How tacky, how predictable, how unworthy they are!



And then, this year, the Ashes series is about to be contested in Australia. Never mind the cricket, what an amazing idea that little urn of ashes was, what a focus of imagination and engagement it represents! Especially looked at from this era, when the iconic trophies and contests of sport have become mere brand vehicles for the highest commercial bidder. We have gone from stripey-blazered Corinthians to shell-suited chameleons in a couple of generations.

The private imagination, though, does seem intact. We're actually living through something of a Golden Age of the Arts. It's the public domain that seems to have atrophied; we're no longer giving it our best attention. Everything is now measured by "good enough", "just in time", "one size fits all", and above all, "value for money". That is, "bad", "late", "too small", and "cheap". It seems we're now prepared to sit back and watch hard-won public national treasures -- our Health Service, our Civil Service, our schools and universities, council housing, trades unions, legal aid (this list could get appallingly long) -- abolished, sold off, or irreversibly cheapened.

"Privatization" doesn't just mean flogging off the national family silver; it describes a nation retreating mentally and physically from the public arena into the private realm, watching comforting but unimaginative rubbish on TV while real rubbish blows uncollected in the pot-holed streets outside. Imagine!

The Competition

Lately, like a lot of other people, I've been thinking about taking my urge to write more seriously -- as seriously, say, as my urge to take photographs. Inevitably, this poses the question: write what, exactly, and for whom? And, how many other people are thinking the same thing?

Perhaps as a way of avoiding any actual writing, I decided to look at the figures on the latter question. It sometimes seems like every third literate person in the country is either writing, contemplating, or putting off writing a novel (first man at party, "I'm writing a novel"; second man -- who happened to be Peter Cook -- "Really? Neither am I"). So, what is the competition really like, statistically?

It's harder to get good figures than you might think, but estimates of how many books are published in the UK each year vary between 70,000 and 100,000, of which about one tenth would be regarded as proper "fiction". So, between 7 and 10 thousand British novels are published, every year. Say, 8500.

We can apply the sound general principle that "90% of anything is rubbish" in two directions. First, of those 8500 published novels, let's say only 850 are really worth reading. I don't know about you, but identifying, getting hold of, and then reading 15 or more brand new novels every week is a little beyond my capacity. I'm just not keeping up -- last week I only read three! And none of those was published this or even last year!! Let's face it, even if only 85 are really worth reading, I'm never going to get round to reading them all. I still haven't read any Jane Austen.*

But, going the other way, let's assume that only 10% of submitted manuscripts get published (that's probably wildly over-generous). That's 85000 completed and submitted manuscripts. We could probably go further, and say that only 10% of aspiring novelists manage to complete and submit a manuscript -- that means there are probably 850 thousand dreamers out there, who have actually put pen to paper, but so far failed to complete and submit. God knows how many there are who haven't, but they don't count.

So, good news! If we accept a literate population in the UK of 52 million (80% of 65 million) then my initial impression (that every third literate person was attempting a novel) was completely wrong: only every sixtieth literate person in the UK seriously hopes to publish a novel.

Now we've got that sorted, only one thing remains to be determined. Have I actually got anything to say? The numbers on that seem to be harder to calculate.


* Shocking, but true. Talking of Jane Austen, if you want to see how blog comments can take on a life of their own, check out these comments on a very brief post "The Austen Kerfuffle" on the Language Hat blog (no relation) 18/11/2010. I have rarely seen so many evidently intelligent people making utter arses of themselves. Brilliant!

Reflective Coda

Without intending to, I seem to have started to add a coda to my "Mirrors, Windows, Walls" series, which I thought I had finished with/off some while ago. Actually, this is quite useful, as I never got round to sequencing those images into a proper final book, and there's nothing quite like rediscovering the original impulse behind a set of images for motivating you to look at them with fresh eyes, and finally do something substantial with them.

Scrap Book

Jules Guerin, The Sphinx, 1908
(illustration from Robert Hitchens, Egypt and its Monuments)

In the main, I try to restrict the images on this blog to my own photographs. Copyright and "intellectual property" theft is a serious issue, and too many people on the Web take the view that stealing and republishing other people's images or words is not really wrong. Oh, yes it is.

Proper acknowledgment softens the blow, but using someone else's work without their permission is theft, pure and simple. Every harmless blogger who believes "content wants to be free" simply emboldens those giant corporations (naming no names) which would love to take our "content" for nothing, and then exploit it for massive financial gain. Content may want to be free, but content providers want to eat.

Having said that (ahem) I do keep a digital scrapbook of images that take my fancy, in the same way that people have always done a literal "cut and paste" job with bits of magazines and ephemera. It's one of the best ways of refining your own eye, and also of remembering things, which is more important to the eye-refining process than people think. Just as a diary can remind you of who you were and what you used to think, a scrapbook reminds you of what has pleased or intrigued your eyes. Memory is intrinsic to learning.

Ernest Ashton, Evening at the Pyramids
photogravure, 1897

Of course, kids these days rarely have to learn anything, in the true sense of committing complex and difficult things to memory. Us over 50s had to learn "by heart" whole poems and dramatic speeches, conjugations and declensions, multiplication tables, mathematical proofs, geographical names, etc., etc. Getting these into your head, where they would form the rich raw material of intelligence, was once a large part of the schooling process.

Indeed, before the advent of cheap printed books, the ability to memorize improbably vast chunks of information was the chief skill of the scholar. No longer. We've let ourselves off the hook of rote learning -- no more tears, no more boredom! -- but the analgesic gain will never balance the mnemonic loss. Wikipedia is not there when you sleep. You know how your phone battery fails if it's not repeatedly emptied and fully recharged? That's your brain, that is. Harumph.

Anyway. For a change, all these images are from my digital scrap book. If I have infringed anyone's copyright, do let me know.

A Kodak No. 1 circular image, Sphinx and Pyramids

The Nebra Sky Disk

A Christmas Ghost

Ivory Tower

There were foghorns this morning out on Southampton Water, and the fog was so dense I could barely see the other side of the street as I scraped the ice off the car windscreen. The deep booming of foghorns is such an evocative sound. At midnight on New Year's Eve all the ships in harbour let them off together, and you can hear them for miles. Today, I was put in mind of the opening track "Gibraltar" on the album Black Market by Weather Report, one of my all-time favourites, and I've been humming and whistling the screechy Joe Zawinul parts all day.

By lunch time the fog had lifted, leaving a slight veil which diffused some brilliant sunshine in an interesting way. Damned if I didn't stumble across an actual ivory tower, round the back of a building I'd somehow not explored before:



I have no idea what it is, or what it's for. You have to wonder whether a princess is imprisoned in there, behind those fairy-tale windows. Then there were these spectacular specular reflections on the side of the library extension:



Very pleasing, and perhaps the best photograph I've yet taken of my own ivory tower / prison / place of work.

Humming Humument

Readers of this blog will already know that I am a fan of the eminent British artist, Tom Phillips, perhaps the most outstanding example of an obsessive project-led artist alive on planet earth. Tom's long-standing (44 year) project to mine aleatory significance from that most unlikely but almost preposterously fruitful I-Ching -- the Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, chosen at random from a second-hand bookshop -- is already the stuff of legend. If you don't own a copy of at least one edition of A Humument, you don't know what you've been missing.

Now, incredibly, Tom has made A Humument available as an iPad app. Not having an iPad, or any prospect of owning one, I'll have to give this edition a miss (unless there's a way to view iPad content on a PC? Anyone know?). But what a great idea -- and cheap, too!

We salute you, sir. Long may you run.

Tom Phillips at 50 (1987)

It's That Picture Again

Some pictures seem eternally topical. Forgive me for showing it again.



That's (part of) me, top left. That's the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change with the battering ram (apparently "the tenth most powerful minister in the new government", no less).

I took the day off yesterday, half -intending to go up to London to add my voice to the crowd opposing the Coalition's policies for higher education, half-intending to redecorate the mouldy bathroom ceiling. The ceiling won, I'm afraid.

The Prof was there, however, and reports that the best chant was "Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue!". Apparently the route chosen was a little odd, and created long periods of crown immobility, which may have contributed to the eventual outcome.

Does the Coalition start to crumble now, imploding under the stress of Lib Dem hypocrisy and Tory condescension? We'll see.

Your blogger assembling a union banner in ancient times

I Am But Mad North-North-West

Most of us, these days, at least pay lip service to the idea that culture is primarily a construct, something put together out of custom and practice and, above all, language. We accept that cultures can construct things differently, and that language both reflects and determines different world views. It's Humanities 101, these days.

If you have grappled with multiple languages you will be acutely aware that it is quite often impossible to translate directly and mechanically from one language to another. Consider the fact that some languages, for example Russian, have no definite article ("the man") or indefinite article ("a man"). Then consider how fundamental, practically and conceptually, that distinction is in English. Yet, somehow, the Russians seem to muddle through without much confusion. Why, they might even one day put the man on a moon!

But the radicality of this idea is such that we can accept it without living it, just as we accept that the relatively small earth goes round the relatively immense sun but persist in seeing the daily journey "across" the sky of a small bright object. Plus, certain concepts are so fundamental -- up/down, hot/cold, open for business/closed for lunch -- that we might assume that all languages and cultures must have them in common, and not need to express them in roundabout ways.

But then you come across something like this discussion of the subject, including these observations about the way certain Australian aborigines orient themselves, and your head is done in all over again:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like "Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

Lera Boroditsky, How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think? (Edge, 6/12/09)

As someone with a poor and much-mocked sense of direction, I confess this revelation induces a mild sense of panic.

Of course, there are constants which are the same across the entire known world, in all cultures and languages, and throughout history. One of them is the failure of writers to acknowledge or cite their sources. Read this reassuring article in the New York Times, for example, discussing those self-same aborigines. In an uncertain world, it's good to know that some things can be reliably unreliable.

Look Here, Upon This Picture, And On This

A few times recently I have mentioned that distinction between photographs which are pictures made "of" things, and those which are pictures made "from" things. It's pretty self-evident what I mean by this but, hey, these blog posts don't write themselves.

I sometimes make a similar distinction, in my work life, between "people who make things happen" and "people who make things work" -- both essential, but often co-existing in mutual suspicion. The art of project management, is to make sure you've got strong exemplars of both, and then make sure they can work together. If you can find them, of course: both varieties are rare and precious. Most people, in my observation, are simply useless dorks who stop things happening or manage to break them.

In photography, people tend to have a strong preference for one type of picture over the other, but there's no reason why they should ever be persuaded to agree or co-operate. Indeed, trying to bring about harmony between the extremes -- let's say, the sharpness obsessives vs. the toy camera crew -- is futile. What would it achieve? For some, photography is an essentially documentary activity, for others, it's an art medium.

Obviously, a camera is just a tool, and can be used for different ends. If you're documenting an archaeological dig, it's no good using the remains in front of you as material for self-expression or experiments in motion blur. "Yes, but it's how I felt about the skeleton" won't save your job. But, equally, obsessive attention to the accuracy and precision of a camera's ability to record is an activity for trainspotters.

As an example of what I mean, here are two postcards:



This first one, I think we can agree, is pretty dull. By any standards. Photographs do not get any more utilitarian, scenery more pedestrian, than that. But it is a classic photograph "of" something. For that is the stage set of my childhood, and thus fascinating and evocative to me. Such purpose-built rows of neighbourhood shops were scattered all over our town -- it was part of the theory of the "new town". You have to smile, though, that -- in the brave new world of the late 1950s -- six random little shops would constitute a "shopping centre". But that curiously innocent and ugly scene is the Eden where our sweets, our broken biscuits, our toys and our comics were bought with pre-decimal pocket money.



This second postcard is something quite different. I've never been to Ashridge, though it is in God's own country, the chalk hills of Hertfordshire. But this is a picture artfully made "from" what is little more than a partial view of some trees on a hill. Every time I see it, I get that thrill that a perfectly-seen image can give. Quite apart from the picture itself, with its bold composition and beautiful tones, I love the letterbox shape of the frame and its placement on the card, and the writing along the bottom. There's something perfect about it as an object. And yet it's a picture of nowhere and nothing in particular.

But sometimes both types of image do come together, and that's when you often end up with a masterpiece. Here is a photograph that combines "of" and "from" elements into a masterful, compelling image of an historically compelling subject. For this wonderfully mysterious, high-vantage viewpoint shows barricades at yer actual Paris Commune of 1871. It was taken by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, about whom I know nothing, other than that he did a nice line in plump Victorian nudes, too.



Quite amazing. Both "of" and "from", with a bit of "by", "with", "to" and "for" thrown in for good measure, and endlessly fascinating. That one man, for example, standing transfixed: might he perhaps be thinking, "Mon dieu! Sous les pavés, la plage!!"?

Project Proposals

In a number of previous posts I have mentioned the value of "the project" as a way of both getting work done, and ensuring that the resulting work has a level of coherence. I don't think anyone who has worked this way would doubt its value. However, there is another kind of project which, in my experience at least, is rather less benign.

From time to time, galleries or arts organisations will request a "project proposal", either directly from selected artists, or by open submission. Before I came to terms with my fate as an Eternal Also Ran, I would usually respond to these invitations, because I thought it might open a magic door into a new life. Ha!

Now, it is a fact that my mental metabolism seems to work somewhat faster than the norm. If my interest is piqued by a subject, by the next day I'll more or less know what I'd like to do about it. By the end of the week, I'll know what I need to know about it. By the end of the month I'll have come out the other side of my enthusiasm and be looking for something new, unless it's really got its hooks in to me, and has joined the ongoing party of my resident obsessions. Conga! So, I'm a sucker for a project proposal.

For example, back around the year 2000 I was approached directly by a gallery: they liked my work, would I be interested in submitting a proposal for a Year Of The Artist project and exhibition? I explained that I was in full-time employment and anyway did not go in for the kind of work that would tick the "community outreach" box or indeed any of the other bien pensant boxes the Arts Council would require to be ticked in exchange for their cash. No problem, they said. They really, really liked my work.

So, being an idiot, I said OK, and I gave it the full-on treatment. It was quite an exciting prospect. The gallery in question was in a town in the south of England with strong and historic military connections. Hmmm. By the next week I had a fully-fledged project in mind, that could be carried out in the time I had available. It was brilliant, though I say it myself.

It had long puzzled me that, in any town of any size and of any greater antiquity than the New Town I grew up in, certain street names would always be found, especially in those older parts of town where rentable accommodation was to be found. If you are British, and have been a student, I'd bet you knew people who lived in or near Alma Road. Or possibly Inkerman Terrace. I gradually realised that there exists a connection between them -- the Crimean War of 1854-6. This half-forgotten conflict, overshadowed in memory by the Great War of 1914-18, was immensely important in the history of Britain and Europe.



Those roads of modest-but-respectable housing built in the housing boom of the late 1850s often bore names that memorialised the battles and personalities of the Crimea. A roll call of some of those names gives the flavour: Alma, Inkerman, Sebastopol, Balaclava, Raglan, Cardigan. Note also that connection with knitted comfort-wear for cold climates -- balaclava helmets and cardigan sweaters, sometimes with raglan sleeves!

I decided my project would be to photograph in and around those streets in towns with names that derived from the Crimea, looking for ghosts of that long-ago war, that I would connect to our eternal ambivalence about our army and its role in foreign wars started by our politicians. Think Rudyard Kipling's "Tommy". I put together a killer proposal, a statement to end all statements, plus a portfolio that showed I meant business. In military terms, I was pretty sure we'd all be home by Christmas.

But, as any general knows, no plan of action survives first contact with the enemy. Despite the gallery's enthusiasm, just as I predicted, the Arts Council weren't having it -- my project ticked none of their boxes. In the end, the money went to precisely the kind of forgettable "community photography" project that gives publicly-funded art a bad name. In this man's army, at least.

There were other similar "project proposals", too, none of which came to anything, and I -- like most losers in what are, in effect, competitions -- ended up looking on both the winners and their sponsors with a jaundiced eye. Sour grapes aside, I think the problem is the way a "curator's view" (thematic, thought-through, neat, after the fact) gets superimposed on a "producer's view" and distorts it, by demanding a degree of forethought and deliberation which is inimical to the production of anything except conceptual work or community projects.

In the end, those galleries and organisations which commission new work to order by judging competitive artists' submissions (rather than looking for coherent bodies of finished work) have the same relationship to those artists as Tesco does to its producers, and it's just as unhealthy and one-sided. If Tesco wants blemish-free apples, that's what Tesco gets. At the risk of sounding like a free-market libertarian, I think a whole generation of artistic work has been corrupted by competition for public subsidy distributed by committees. If you have to spend your creative life trying to second-guess committees, you end up with no real creative life left at all.

Despite the senseless slaughter, a number of good things came out of the Crimean War, apart from the knitwear. One of them was putting an end to the corruption, inefficiency and sheer military stupidity engendered by the sale of commissions in the British Army. I'm just saying. Stand easy!

Moralistic Lightbulbs

The clocks have now gone back an hour in the UK, and the days continue to shorten, so it's pretty gloomy in the afternoons. When I get home from work, I sometimes feel the need for a little extra light, even though, technically, it's not yet actually dark. So I switch on the light.

Infuriatingly, until yesterday, nothing would happen. At first, I thought the bulb had gone, but replacing it with another identical energy-saving bulb made no difference. Logically, my next thought was that there was a fault with the electricity. But the computer was grinding away (must get a new one before that hard drive expires), so it would have to be the circuit in the ceiling, but bulbs in the next room were fine.

Eventually, I realised that it was the bulb that was the problem, but in a subtle way. The bulbs I had bought have a built-in light sensor and, as far as they were concerned, it was not yet dark enough to turn on. How about that? A moralistic, greener-than-thou lightbulb... The only way I could get one to do its job was to fool it by stumbling into a dangerously gloomy room and reaching up to darken the sensor with something. This began to infuriate me out of all proportion. I wanted to rip out that puritanical little know-all bulb, and stamp it into dust.

But, the consequences of breaking energy-saving flourescent bulbs are less than green: they contain mercury, would you believe? Here is DEFRA's advice for a broken bulb:

Vacate the room and ventilate it for at least 15 minutes. Do not use a vacuum cleaner, but clean up using rubber gloves and aim to avoid creating and inhaling airborne dust. Sweep up all particles and glass fragments and place in a plastic bag. Wipe the area with a damp cloth, then add that to the bag and seal it. Mercury is hazardous waste and the bag should not be disposed of in the bin. All local councils have an obligation to make arrangements for the disposal of hazardous household waste.

Holy shit, and lucky for you, you preachy little lightbulbs! But I've bought another lot without sensors, and they do my bidding without a thought. I'll decide when it's dark round here, thank you very much. It's very dark indeed in the cupboard under the stairs, but that's where those too-clever-by-half smarty-pants bulbs are staying. In their boxes.

Blue Suburban Skies

Three skies from three different late October mornings.

Picture vs. Photograph: bonus track

I'm very pleased with this one, and I'm posting it as a "bonus track" to the previous post. I've started to work up an interest in the use of blank white shapes -- those much-feared "blown highlights" -- in the compositional process.




A massive prize (payable in Kudos, the rival to the Euro and the US Dollar) to anyone who can figure out what this actually is (tiny clue: it's also in the Ashmolean).

Picture vs. Photograph

In the light of recent remarks on "technical quality" vs. "pictorial impact", I thought it might be interesting to think out loud about the process of making this image:



In case anyone has the wrong idea, the photos that I show on this blog are not intended to be representative of my "considered work", if I can put it that way. They are simply what floated to the top from that week's picture-making, and seemed to complement whatever I happened to feel like writing about. When I come to select and sequence images with my "serious" hat on -- perhaps a year or more later -- different factors are at work, and different images will come to the fore.

The one above, for example, has resonances that will probably make it a candidate for several sequences that are forming in the back of my mind. It's a photograph from my recent visit to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. I was using the Panasonic GF-1 with the 14-45 f/3.5-5.6 zoom, a good lens but not ideal for dim interiors -- unfortunately, I'd somehow omitted to put the 20mm f/1.7 in my bag. Idiot! The only solution was to raise the ISO.

Now, I never work above ISO 400, for the simple reason that I'm the sort of fool who still thinks in film terms, and for me ISO 400 colour negative film was on the limits of usability, even in my medium-format Fuji rangefinder. But it was obvious that in the sepulchral gloom of a museum I was going to have to use ISO 800 and even, ulp, ISO 1600.

I had made my first pass through the galleries, and had got the feel of the layout, the light, the angles, the opportunities. When the attendants weren't looking, I steadied my camera by pressing the lens against the glass of the vitrines -- no point in being precious about optical quality when working hand-held at ISO 1600. When they were looking, I leaned against anything solid that wasn't 4,000 years old, and invoked the gods of photography ("Oh, Leica, Lord of Luxury, steady my hand in my hour fifteenth of a second of need..."). It's easy to bring out your inner pagan when surrounded by the pious detritus of human history.

Now, that first pass is essential in any context : you flush all the obvious shots out of your system, get the feel of the place, start noticing the less obvious shots, and -- with any luck -- start to get "into the zone", that wonderful mental space where everything drops away except you and the camera and you finally start seeing.

When I reached the top of the gallery, I saw that attendant, draped against the rail of the stairwell, thirty feet away, through a showcase of ceramics on a mezzanine balcony. I dropped to my knees, pressed my back against a convenient wall, let the lens focus on the vase inside the cabinet, prayed ("Oh, Zeiss, God of Good Glass, let me be lucky"), and took the shot. ISO 1600, 1/50 second at f/5.4, zoomed to 33mm (66mm in 35mm terms), everything on "auto" but underexposed by one third of a stop. Click. And again, zoomed to 45mm and rotated to "portrait". Click. I only remembered I was on ISO 1600 too late to change it: the attendant moved away, and the moment was over.

Technically, the result is all over the place -- both under- and over-exposed, unsharp, and inevitably rather noisy. Here's a 100% crop of the image, converted from RAW but unmanipulated:



Notice: it's not that noisy. Compared to a scan from film, it's not noisy at all. In fact, that's quite impressive for an ISO 1600 shot, hand-held in available light. Well done, Panasonic engineers. And I like the image a lot, so it's worth some work to rescue it. In the end, I didn't do a lot of manipulation: just the usual adjustments to the levels and the colour curves and, above all, I ran the file through the Noise Ninja filter plug-in. If you don't already have any decent noise reduction software, I thoroughly recommend Noise Ninja --used carefully, it can rescue otherwise unusable photographs, and is indispensable for scans from film.

Here's that same 100% crop at the end of the process:



The image actually started out like this:



There's a lot to be said for the composed chaos of the rectangular image I originally saw through the viewfinder. Some people might object to that strong vertical bar on the left, but I think it balances the strong shape of the vase rather well, and "holds" the composition together. Nevertheless, my favoured square crop does simplify and calm the image down, and makes more of the interplay of the bold shapes, especially that trumpet-shaped vase.

Technically, this picture has little going for it, but I think its pictorial impact far exceeds any worries about focus, noise or "burned out highlights". It has a sombre mystery that would never be conveyed by a perfectly-captured picture of any of its elements, separately (though, obviously, I wouldn't have minded a perfectly-captured picture of all its elements, together). It's a good picture, if not a good photograph, and that's what counts.

Of course, if only I'd remembered to take the right lens...

Reserving Judgement

There has been a mini-furore of reaction, almost entirely negative, to the announcement of the winner of the "single image" category in the British Journal of Photography's International Photography Award. The announcement, and the winning image, can be seen here.

Something interesting -- possibly good interesting, possibly bad interesting -- is going on here. I was very struck by the force and unanimity of the reaction -- not so much a debate as a public hanging. Even the usually reliable Mike Johnston saw it as an opportunity for a caption competition, not for reflection. I posted this comment on TOP (which I may live to regret):

Mike,

I'm not immediately impressed by this image myself, but aren't you -- as a professional contrarian -- even a little bothered by the strength and unanimity of the negative response to it?

Think back to the reactions to f64, New Topographics, John Gossage, Paul Graham, Alec Soth... Almost always "Why, these aren't proper photographs! They're so banal!!"

For sure, I'm not saying this is an outstanding photograph -- it looks very ill-considered to my 56-year-old eyes -- but it is very typical of what some thoughtful young photographers are producing, perhaps in reaction to what us oldies hold dear about our photographs.

I think it's wise to try to stay open to the "Hendrix Moment" ("Coltrane Moment", if you prefer) -- when something new arrives that trashes certain expectations of a previous generation. This may or may not be such a moment.

I hope not, personally, but I'm reserving judgement until I understand what is really going on. I don't know about you, but my instinct is always to head in the other direction to the baying of the Flickr crowd...

Mike

I know, I can be an appalling elitist when it comes to photography, but why not judge the things you love by the highest standards? It doesn't seem to trouble football fans.

That "Hendrix/Coltrane Moment" is a precious and rare thing, worth looking and listening out for. As I've written before, if there's one thing I have learned, it is that -- unless you are living on the cutting edge yourself -- your eyes and ears are never ready for the genuinely new. You have to learn to learn from your discomfort.

You always have to ask, "Why don't I like something that someone else thinks is well worth my attention?" Sometimes arriving at an honest answer to that question will just end up confirming your own beliefs, but sometimes it will radically change your mind. "Free your mind and your ass will follow", as George Clinton would say.

Boots

I hate buying new shoes. I have small, wide feet that won't cram comfortably into any leather shoe with a bit of structure, and the first month after purchase is always a period of pain and discomfort, alleviated with sticking plasters and extra socks. I rarely have more than one pair, and I wear them to destruction before replacing them.

A few years ago I made the mistake of buying a pair of those "lifetime purchase" shoes which rubbed my heels so badly that the fancy yellow leather lining was soaked with my blood. I eventually threw the expensive bastards in the bin. Right now I'm wearing a new pair of Josef Seibel lace-ups ("the European comfort shoe"), extra wide and made of supple leather, and my left little toe is rubbing and both insteps are aching. A large part of my consciousness has currently located itself in my feet. It'll get better, eventually.

So I have reason to remember comfortable footwear, the way some people remember cars. I have always found boots a better match to my feet than shoes. My grandfather passed on to me a pair of American army boots when I was 14, and from then on I habitually wore boots at school -- usually Dr. Marten's Airwairs. But the best pair I ever had were my Dutch work boots.

Boot boy

In 1973 I went to Amsterdam with a friend for a few weeks, where we stayed in a dormitory over a bar run by an American in the Nieuwmarkt district (which turned out to be the base for a massive car-and-dope-smuggling operation, but that's another story). If you never went hitchhiking round Europe in the 70s, you probably won't know about sleep-ins.

There were two types. First, there were the cheap dormitories with bunks and basic facilities, not unlike youth hostels, and plentiful in popular destinations like Amsterdam. These were oriented to youth culture, and usually had a few very basic rules like "no dealing on the premises; no tripping in the dormitory". Then there were the emergency municipal sleeping spaces, often a school hall, aimed at getting the young summer backpackers off the streets as they passed through town. You could spend the night in a sleeping bag on a hard floor alongside maybe 50 or more other pilgrims. This was European civic-mindedness at its tolerant best; hitchhiking was mostly good fun, but the less streetwise kids were very vulnerable.

After we had got over the novelty of Amsterdam's coffee bars, where many fancy varieties of hash could be bought legally, laid out on trays in glass cabinets like patisserie, we explored the surrounding area, which was very lively in those days. Apart from the nearby Red-Light District, the area was a hotbed of political activism, full of squats and communes and covered with inventive grafitti. At the time, people were gearing up for full-on opposition to the proposal to bulldoze the area to make way for a metro and motorway. In those days, this was very much my kind of scene. In 1975, riotous violence exploded in Nieuwmarkt (but it was bulldozed, nonetheless, and the metro still got built).

In the main square was a market, and one of the stalls sold nothing but hand-made clogs and work boots. When I pulled on a pair of the boots -- rawhide calf-length loose jackboots, with leather soles and reinforced toecaps -- I found, to my amazement, it was like wearing slippers. Rather robust, hyper-butch slippers, it's true, but I had rarely felt so immediately at one with footwear. They instilled a sense of well-being and confidence -- not least, I have to admit, because the substantial heels added somewhat to my height.

Boot boy's best boots

I wore them for the following decade. Their hand-made construction meant they could be repaired eternally. Cobblers' eyes would brighten with pleasure when I handed them over the counter for a new heel or sole. The good ones would comment on the distinctive German style of the sole construction.

But, one day after I'd started a "proper" nine-to-five job, someone wondered whether my habitual footwear didn't seem a little OTT for office work. At the time I was alternating the Dutch boots with a pair of equally comfortable German paratrooper's boots. I found I could see their point, and I experienced that rush of self-awareness -- not quite shame, not quite wisdom -- that is the onset of growing up. You begin to see yourself as you really are, and the realisation comes that your days of wearing items from the dressing-up box are coming to an end.

I had been trying to combine a fairly wild social life with a job that required early rising and sober concentration, and it seemed a choice had to be made; I was, after all, not far off 30 years old. For everyone there comes a point where -- unless you are a supremely talented and motivated individual -- self-invention starts to shade into self-delusion. For me, I decided that point had arrived, and I chose to accept the walk-on part in the world I had been offered, rather than imagine I was ever going to give it the good kicking it deserved.

Twenty five years on, though, I find I miss my old boots. Perhaps it is an indicator of impending mid-life crisis that I find myself wondering whether the discomfort of new shoes is still a price worth paying. I never quite pulled off respectability, anyway. And, if anything, the world is more in need of a kicking now than it ever was. But, I promise, no ponytail and no motorbike.

Unconquered Sun

We had our first morning frosts this week, and it's suddenly unexpectedly dark in the late afternoon. I'm very attracted to sombre but rich palettes, the sort of thing that hints at an immense, deep power temporarily banked down, like a furnace. It's very much the feel of this time of year, as the sun's increasing distance from us starts to make itself felt.

Annuals and Cards

As this month marks the second anniversary of this blog, I thought it would be fun to produce two books in the form of an "Idiotic Hat Annual" (Christmas is coming) using the Blurb "blog slurping" facility. So far, it's looking promising.

The emphasis will be on the text, not the pictures, but without editing each volume currently runs to over 250 pages. I've written rather a lot over the past two years. I suspect that once I've pruned the initial "slurp" of an entire year's posts each volume will be around 150 pages, but that's still going to cost you £25 or more each in paperback...

However, in the end, my main intention is to preserve my efforts on paper rather than to shift product, so if you want to buy in to the foolishness that is the Idiotic Hat project you're very welcome, but if you don't, don't.

It is also coming up to the time to produce my Christmas / New Year cards again. I haven't chosen the images yet but, as last year, I will send a card to anyone anywhere on the planet who has taken the trouble to comment on this blog during the previous year, provided you send me a terrestrial address by email (see my profile over on the right there for my email address). Last year's recipients need not re-apply, unless you have moved house!

Possible card candidate:
a (very) still life

The Burden of Nineveh

As I had to ferry some more objects to Oxford on Sunday afternoon*, I thought it was high time I dropped in on the refurbished Ashmolean Museum. I must admit, despite all the plaudits, I was a little nervous about it. It has always been one of my favourite places, an inexhaustible treasure-house, a gigantic Wunderkammer crammed to the rafters with the most amazing stuff. Might they have spoiled it by radically thinning out the collection on display, or by "interpreting" it to death for the benefit of ten-year-old visitors?

When I was feeling fragile on a Sunday afternoon as a student, I used to stumble across St. Giles and lose myself in the place. Actually, you could very easily get lost, as the layout of the original building was quite strange, like one of those hotels knocked together out of several adjoining buildings, linked with dim passages and irrational staircases. But I had my touchstones to navigate by: the Anglo-Saxon Alfred Jewel, the enormous Uccello painting "The Hunt", the Cycladic figurines, like maquettes for a children's stop-motion animated series, and above all the little row of Samuel Palmer's visionary landscapes done in sepia and gum.

Meet the Cyclads

I even got to see behind the scenes. It had become obvious to my tutors that I was slightly adrift with regard to employability, but when it emerged that I had an interest in museums an appointment was arranged with the director of the Ashmolean, who happened to be a fellow of the college. When he discovered I was a Pre-Raphaelite fan, we had a lovely afternoon in the basement stores, pulling out the sliding racks to admire -- and, indeed, laugh at -- the lesser Pre-Raphaelite paintings not on display upstairs. It was like an upscale version of the wire-cage lockups for residents' junk at home in our block of flats.

It seemed like a good job to me. But in the end I decided to stay on and do some research -- on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, as it happens. It was all sorted -- I had a full three-year grant and everything -- but then I had a crisis of faith in the whole literary-critical enterprise, and went off to study literary theory at the University of East Anglia instead. People thought I had flipped. The jury is still out on that one.

Head of Laocoön

Anyway, there I was, going up the steps to the Ashmolean on Sunday, having first dropped by to see my son. I remembered taking him up those very same steps, aged six months, one drizzly day in 1991 when the Prof was giving a seminar at Ruskin College. The first sign of the renovations was a rather inadequate revolving door, allowing only one person at a time to shuffle through. I stood impatiently while a pair of Japanese idiots attempted to pass through together, causing the emergency stop to halt the door every other step. Once inside, I was asked to carry my backpack, not wear it: "We've had some breakages." Uh oh.

But it was fine. Having once been reminiscent of the world's best bric-a-brac shop, it is now like the world's best gift shop. Wonderful things, wonderful things, all in subdued and subtly lit vitrines or on gallery-style plinths. I took some photographs, but mainly took pleasure in just looking and wondering. A couple of hours later, it was time to go.

A fist-bump with antiquity

As I pushed back out through the revolving door, I had one of those epiphanic moments (I did tell you the jury is still out) as it all came together in a rush of recognition: I remembered the poem by Rossetti, "The Burden of Nineveh", describing a visit to the British Museum that had sparked my interest all those years ago:

In our Museum galleries
To-day I lingered o'er the prize
Dead Greece vouchsafes to living eyes, —
Her Art for ever in fresh wise
From hour to hour rejoicing me.
Sighing I turned at last to win
Once more the London dirt and din;
And as I made the swing-door spin
And issued, they were hoisting in
A wingèd beast from Nineveh

Reading it now I realise that, if only he'd left it there, it could stand alongside Shelley's "Ozymandias" as a good poem in the ironic archaeological sublime mode. But it plods on for another tumpty-tum nineteen stanzas, to no great purpose. Ah, well. Those could have been a rather wasted three years, after all. Amusingly, I discovered this early draft on the Rossetti Archive (what a magnificent resource):

I have no taste for polyglot:
At the Museum 'twas my lot,
Just once, to jot and blot and rot
In Babel for I know not what.
I went at two, I left at three.
Round those still floors I tramp'd, to win
By the great porch the dirt and din;
And as I made the last door spin
And issued, they were hoisting in
A wingèd beast from Nineveh.

A useful lesson, that even second rate poems can be third rate to start with. But I do love the way the poem has mutated from a grumpy, wasted hour in Bloomsbury to a redemptive encounter in a busy city centre with the sublime. But that's what museums are for, isn't it?





* including an IKEA table -- do those product names sound less ludicrous in Sweden, I wonder?

A Modest Proposal

From the Dean of Serious Sciences

Dear Vice Chancellor,

As we are all acutely aware, the government is shortly to announce unprecedented cuts in funding for universities. If the rumours are to be believed, all public funding for degrees in the humanities is to be withdrawn. I think we can all condemn this savage act of philistinism; if nothing else, where are the future life-partners for engineers and chemists to come from, if not from an on-site pool of young humanities students? I have tried not to "gender" this comment, as the social scientists would say, but I think we're probably on the same page here.

It strikes me that the underlying issue is simply one of cost. Although, in material resource terms, the humanities are relatively cheap -- how much can a whiteboard and a pack of coloured pens cost? -- an awful lot of useful money is being invested in staff. Now, I think it is well established that research in the humanities is, in terms of outcomes, verging on the pointless. Does the world really need a fresh perspective on Milton when, if the bibliometric evidence is reliable, the previous 1753.6 perspectives have had an impact so negligible as to be unmeasurable?

A rhetorical question, obviously. That argument has been won lost. But, if there is to be a humanities presence on campus (and, from a practical social and emotional hygiene point of view, not to mention the "student-centredness" of our approach, I would argue that this is essential) the question of the excessive cost of employing teaching staff needs to be addressed. I have given this some thought, and here is my conclusion.

We talk of spoon feeding. Increasingly, undergraduates are being taught by student-friendly pedagogical techniques, such as multiple-choice and scratch card. Why couldn't we take that approach one step further: could not degrees be dispensed in pill form? Obviously this would be impossible in information-intense subjects, like Serious Science, but the humanities?

A recent neurological study has shown that the impact of an English or History degree on the 20-year-old brain is indistinguishable from a placebo effect (using a controlled comparison with degrees in hairdressing and pet psychology offered by rival institutions). Why not go the whole hog, and offer a humanities placebo pill, delivered in three equally-spaced ceremonial doses?

A suitable stock of colourful sugar pills would not represent a major investment, and a nurse or two could be recruited on a purely seasonal basis to accompany your worthy self on the awarding platform. That is, assuming your presence is still considered necessary; perhaps using the facilities of the Medical Centre would represent savings in terms of marquee hire, etc.? A spoonful of sugar, a glass of water, and everybody's happy.

It's a win-win!

Kind regards, etc.