GOODBYE HASSELBLAD

When I was racing around on motorbikes – which I did for several decades – I had some big ones: 1000 cc BMWs and Moto Guzzis in particular.  Bit by bit however I began to realise that it was the smaller ones which were the most fun.  I rebuilt a dead 350cc Moto Morini once and rode it for several years finding out just what it was capable of as a tourer and roadster and daily commuter and really enjoyed it.  It was economical to run, went like the clappers,  could, with ingenuity, take all my camping gear; and if it fell over I could pick it up with one hand.

Image from the Hasselblad company’s website

For the past few years I have owned a Hasselblad 500CM and a 35mm Olympus OM.  I can’t help feeling that the former is the photographic equivalent of the BMWs and Guzzis and the latter is more like the Morini.  Which is why I finally decided to sell the Hasselblad.

There is an interesting article about the Hasselblad as a day-to-day camera  here.  My experience was that it was a fine camera with great lenses but all in all a bit of a faff for the kind of thing that I do – which is basically to photograph life as I find it.  It was heavy (especially with an extra lens or two); like all MF had a desperately shallow depth of field; took an eternity to focus; I was forever forgetting to take out the dark slide before I pressed the shutter button; and I didn’t really like walking around with such an expensive piece of kit hanging from my shoulder.   It’s true that the results were often very pleasing but they were rarely spontaneous.  I’m not a collector and I don’t like cameras hanging around on the shelf gathering dust so it had to go.

I do still have a Rolleicord but I wonder sometimes if MF might be approaching its sell-buy date.  35mm is nimbler,  cheaper, simpler and more popular.  And all the advantages of MF can be improved upon by going to large-format which seems to be gaining adherents all the time.  So MF is squeezed in the middle.  Both Kodak and Lomography dropped the price of 120 film recently and I do wonder a bit about a drop in demand.

The question of image quality always comes up when MF and 35mm are seen as being in contention.  IQ is an ill-defined concept but I do think that you can often get more atmosphere out of the smaller format.  It may not be quite as sharp in larger prints but that leaves it with a power of suggestion that can be a great asset.

I enjoy just using the one camera and a couple of lenses.  I can explore what in motorcycling is known as the performance envelope and become really familiar with the one machine.  It’s remarkable what this discipline reveals: hidden characteristics begin to emerge over the months and years and the one piece of kit becomes truly familiar.  It’s well worth it.

A FEW HOURS IN CHESTER

The alignment of stars and fate need not necessarily make for the epic.   Mostly it’s pretty humdrum.  And so, quite by chance, I found myself recently with a few hours to spare in the city of Chester with both camera and notebook.  Perfect.

It’s a wonderful thing simply to meander without any goal but it’s probably easier somewhere you don’t know at all: no expectations.  I took to the city walls, slalomed round the tourists studying maps and facts and dates and events, and tried to focus on atmosphere.  I forget all the facts except the most basic ones on my travels and so don’t bother much with them now.

A fine river frontage ruined by three flatroofed blocks of offices or flats over on the far bank of The Dee.  A man either dancing or talking animatedly in a bandstand.  An amphitheatre and other Roman ruins helpfully though unhistorically assembled all in one place.  I look down from a city gate onto the street scene and behind me hear a tour guide launch into his spiel.  He’s quite animated and I listen for a moment  or two and then find when I turn round that he has a tour group of one – a slightly embarrassed looking young woman who obviously feels that she has to respond continually.  Exhausting.

St. John’s church.  Never been in it before.  So much clutter at the back of churches these days.  Coaches from Shropshire waiting outside and their tour groups idling slowly round the aisles.  A queue for the church toilets and I hear a woman say to another: “Have you been to Lytham?  Lytham’s nice. Is there only one toilet?”

“No.  Two” says her friend “but the other one’s for the disabled.”

The church building itself is quite fine, the lower Norman arches topped by Early English ones on the clerestory.  I think of the way that buildings are thrown up now – this church obviously took so long to build that it spans two clear architectural periods.

It’s mid-afternoon and getting dark.  I manage a couple more shots from the walls and then cut up into town for a cuppa.  The English teashop is such a great civilised tradition - the  modern coffee house simply cannot compete - but it’s finding a decent one.  My pot of tea is at least made of real leaves but the scone has been microwaved warm and falls apart in my hands.  That’s six quid and thank you kindly, sir.

Darkness falls after a magnificent red and aquamarine sunset made all the more startling by the fact that the sun has not been out all day.

When I develop the photos there’s not a single decent one other maybe than this below.  I’m trying to get to grips with a 35mm lens that I bought recently.  It can be difficult but what I like is the way it will create a large context for a small detail – a bit like a Chinese landscape if that does not stretch things too far.  I waited for several figures to pass across this scene until this old lady beetled through and I thought maybe that did the trick.

THE SAXOPHONE PLAYER

In an odd sort of a way, every photograph is a coincidence.

Having a surfeit of energy a few weeks ago I took my camera and bicycle out to the coast for a blow.  I cycled south through the dunes from Southport and then inland to Liverpool catching a couple of exhibitions on the way.  I  checked in at the Youth Hostel where I’d booked my bed for the night (despite my now very tenuous claim on any kind of youth).  It was a warm evening and still quite light so I took myself off towards the river frontage with the camera.  Having made the perilous crossing of the four-lane highway that divides the city from the water I heard – apparently from nowhere – a long burst of saxophone through the evening air.  I have the road to my right and some scrubby open land, fencing and low buildings to my left – but no obvious saxophonist.  Curious.

I’m not a great fan of recorded music: I find it very disruptive.  But this was both live and unexpected which is quite different – a great delight.  So I set off to investigate.  After a minute or two I found the source. 

 Wedged into just a few feet between a brick building and some boundary fencing, this guy was blowing wild phrases on his sax, up, down, round and back, fast and slow, his long conga line of notes snaking randomly through the air and mixing distantly with the thrum of the traffic.  I was an audience of one for this curious performance which was so entrancing that I forgot the camera in my hand.  Then the notes began to die – maybe he’d spotted me – and I just managed to get this one shot through the fence before he stopped, packed up the sax and disappeared.

Reality is a thin ice, is it not?  This guy and I spend our respective days which coincide briefly for that minute’s concert and then we are both off again and all that is left is this photograph to show what once briefly was.

PATTERN

When they built the M60 round Manchester they had to raise it above the Mersey floodplain to the south of the city. So they excavated gravel nearby and then flooded the huge hole left to provide a recreational area - Sale Water Park - and to help with flood defences over the riverplain. Sometimes, after heavy rain, I go down to the river to the far side of one of the sluice gates to watch the charging runoff. The power of the water coursing through is mesmerising. It roars and churns and roils and some deep instinct makes me take a step back. In quieter weather I often take a walk around the lake and my eye is always attracted by the reed beds dotted along its shores. There is an almost calligraphic precision to the angles of the reed stalks. Like this.

It's hard not to pause and think about the nature of pattern. Is it possible that what appears as chaotic is simply a failure on our part to grasp a bigger context and that what attracts the eye in a scene is some sort of recognition of that?

I WISH THEY WOULDN'T DO THAT

I went to see Yanis Varoufakis in conversation a couple of weeks ago.  He was the Greek finance minister during the Syriza government and afterwards became something of an enfant terrible of european politicians.  Very charismatic and bursting with a restless energy but I’m not sure I’d want to live in a country governed by him: hot on criticism but a bit vague on solutions.

Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post.  This is. 

 This was the publicity shot of YF for the talk.*  What do you notice?  To give you a hand I’ll add this shot of author Julian Barnes which I snipped out of a magazine recently.  Same thing. 

Well, they caught my eye because they are both examples of a recent photoportrait phenomenon.  The focus is on the eyes and the depth of field is razor-thin.  So the ears are somewhere fuzzy in the background and the nose and chin are adrift in the foreground.  It’s very unflattering for the sitter and a bit dizzying for the viewer (this viewer, anyway).  I guess that it’s done with a  very fast lens which gives the widest of apertures and so it’s an example of how style is often driven by technology.  Come back, Cecil Beaton: all is forgiven!

(*I don’t have any copyright details for either photo unfortunately)

PROVIDENCE AND THE PREPARED MIND

I came across this quote recently and it set me wondering.

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.  Concerning all acts of initiative there is always one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way.  I learnt a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”

It’s from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition by W H Murray (1913 – 1996), a mountaineer and writer whom I had vaguely heard of, I think – and seems to be quite well known.  According to Wikipedia the quote from Goethe is a very loose  translation.

As I thought about it the Nike strapline “Just Do It!” leapt into my mind.  Notionally the two seem to be on a par - the common idea being that you must stop thinking and launch yourself. But not so fast. Almost half a century separates the Nike (1988) from from the Murray quote (1951) and we might see the two as expressions of their respective times.  What Murray is saying is that once you have committed to a course of action then there will be helping hands.  Fortune favours the prepared mind, in a sense.  There may be a long period of preparation before you embark on the project itself but once you have assessed the risks and put your doubts to one side you will have the wind at your back. There are two stages: commitment and then action.

The Nike quote on the other hand is very much of our modern times. It makes no distinction between commitment and action. It is a celebration of the impulsive. There is plenty about its provenance on the internet for those who study these things but what interests me is that Nike apparently sees it as a philosophy promoting athleticism and self-confidence.  I read it as a slogan by a company trying to sell you stuff. It’s not athleticism that they are celebrating but consumption. Just buy it! The last thing they want is for you to start reflecting on the nature of your impulse.

Murray was philosophising full stop while Nike is dressing up advertising as philosophy.  I can’t help seeing that as a sign of the times. 

Now here’s a nice contemplative photo of mine to calm us down.

Leaf: Olympus OM1; Delta400@800; DDX

AND BREATHE……

Just felt like a bit of a break. Back before too long…….

SOMETHING HARD TO FIND

 What’s hard to find these days is something that’s hard to find.  I think it was Alan Bennett who wrote that and if he didn’t he certainly should have done.  Everything is so over-marketed. So when I spotted two little photo exhibitions locally putting their hands up at the back of the class, so to speak,  I made a point of going to see them.  They were Bury Art Museum‘s A Celebration of Life in the North 1970’s – 1980’s; and Capturing the Modern Backdrop: Shirley Baker Photographing Salford at the Working Class Movement Library  in Salford.  Ostensibly they had much the same focus but but turned out to counterpoint one another very interestingly.

So first to Bury on Manchester’s wonderful tram system.  I love these trams and especially their distinctive toot-toot: they make me feel so cosmopolitan, so – dare I say it – European.  The Museum is nobbut a cockstride from the tram terminus and has a lovely atmosphere.  It’s local without being parochial, has a great café, and the person on reception has a beautiful Lancashire accent.  Upstairs British Culture Archive has selected 31 photographs in its collection from four photographers: Don Tonge, Chris Hunt, Luis Bustamente and Thomas Blower as, I guess, a representative sample of late 20th century images of northern England.

I contacted both British Culture Archive and Bury Museum for permission to show one or two photos from the show but haven’t been able to get a reply out of them. So my iphone shot of Don Tonge’s ‘Newspaper Seller, Manchester City Centre 1970s’ will have to do for the moment. Newspaper sellers have disappeared from the streets of course now and so have their “Late Night Final!” cries.

The British Culture Archive was founded by Paul Wright in 2017 “to document, highlight and preserve the changes in British culture and society through documentary photography”.  That’s a big project and 31 photographs can only give a flavour of the range that you can find on the BCA website (link above). I do wonder, incidentally, if archives like these are going to take over from social history books as a record of people and place.  Oral history would be a natural partner for these visual records and together the two might give a fuller narrative than a third-person historical account can do.

The exhibition had side displays of books, records, magazines and other memorabilia from the 70s and 80s but virtually no curatorial comment. Although I often find curators’ remarks distracting, in this case I missed them a bit. Why these pictures, I wondered, and why now? And precisely what did they illustrate about 1970s and 1980s Northern England? Also: just what is so northern about them - delightful though they are? After all, there are very similar series from other parts of the country: Roger Mayne’s Southam Street for example; or Oscar Marzaroli’s Glasgow archive; or Vanley Burke in Birmingham.  Then there all the Cafe Royal books. The UK is a small country and things don’t vary as much from corner to corner as we sometimes imagine. 

Nonetheless it is hard to resist the allure of this saunter down memory lane. The photos are charming, the display unfussy and there is plenty to delight the eye and interest the mind.

From Bury I caught a tram back to Victoria Station and then walked up into Salford which took a good 45 minutes or so because I wanted to go across Blackfriars Street and then along Chapel Street which is a small but atmospheric part of Manchester where to your left you can see the high-rise future coming into being while on the right the low-rise past disappears.  I eventually staggered into the cafe in  Salford Museum and Art Gallery to ask myself the question that I always ask there: how can such a beautiful café space have such a dreadful menu?  The café is light, spacious and has a fabulous bay window looking out over Peel Park.  It’s really lovely.  The best I could find on the menu was beans of toast but it was catering pack beans and possibly the worst bread I have ever tasted.

Over the road then and into the Working Class Movement Library – an ex-nurses’ home which houses a collection first put together by Edmund and Ruth Frow in the 1950s and now numbering around 33,000 books. The Shirley Baker exhibition was in one room and comprised 15 photographs (in the ubiquitous black frame, I am afraid, as were the ones in Bury).  A casual glance might have suggested that the photos were much the same as those in Bury but an article in a local history magazine displayed on a nearby table and a reinspection of the photos brought out some deeper features of the display.  Essentially, what the article said was that Shirley Baker was not simply a chronicler of the streets of Salford but had a very disciplined focus on the process of history – on the changing visual aspect of the city and its effect on its people.  The streetlife for example of children’s play and adult conversation which disappears as the tower blocks rise and the back to backs are demolished.   Looking round again I realised how accurate that comment was. This, for example……

…gives way to this……

I couldn’t get a reply out of The Working Class Movement Library either. Both images © Estate of Shirley Baker

There were also interesting contemporaneous press reports and inquiries into the dire mismanagement of housing provision in the city.  Plus ça change, eh?

From there I got the bus back down into Manchester and the tram home. It was a Grand Day Out: some fine photos; interesting ideas to chew over after the visit; and a feeling that I had unearthed something for myself rather than having been the target of gallery marketing departments. 

The Bury Art Museum exhibition continues until 18 May and the Shirley Baker exhibition until 21 April.

DARKROOM DIARIES

 Regular readers may remember that my darkroom activities were not proceeding apace.  So I went on a buying spree to get a better enlarger, kit to control chemical temperatures; and had a general rearrangement so that I could sit down at least some of the time.  All of this helped but the real leap forward came when I extended works to our bathroom to include waterpipes up into the loft; and then the installation of sink and worktop.  Bliss – no more running up and down the loft ladders to wash the prints.  Here is the finished arrangement.

Dimensions are about are about 7 square metres or so in all.

 Darkroom heaven, is it not?   I just have to be organised.  If I’m not organised I’m, well, disorganised.  The ten pound warming tray is doing a good job of keeping the chemicals at 20 degrees and there is plenty of space for drying the prints.  Great!

I must now however address a serious philosophical question.  Am I going all in for a totally analogue workflow or should I keep one foot in the digital camp?  Back in the pre-digital era there was no choice: once you had developed your film you had to make a contact sheet from the negatives where each print was the actual size of the negative.   Like this. 

 You would squint at this with a magnifying glass of some sort and try to work out which frames were worth printing.  Now it’s possible to circumvent all that faff with a computer.  You can scan the negatives and produce a digital contact print but why bother even with that?  It’s easier still to have a look at your digital positive full-size up there on the screen and assess its printing potential straightaway.

That's tempting,  but for me this mixing of the digital and analogue waters just doesn’t work. There is a huge difference between looking at a computer screen version of a photograph and holding a print – even a small one - there in your hand.  It’s two different worlds.  If I had been wavering on the question my mind was made up a couple of weeks ago when Windows 11 updates locked me out of Lightroom – and therefore my entire photo archive - for several days.  I sorted it eventually but it gave me the final push I needed to jump into the analogue pool with both feet.

IT'S ALL AN ILLUSION

Be honest. It’s not often that you get to talk to a tiler about the Bezold effect, is it? This tiler was putting up some tiles in the bathroom which were of a subtle shade that we had spent some time choosing. Now, up on the wall, they seemed pretty dark.

“Don’t worry” says the tiler, “Grouting makes all the difference.” He didn’t actually use the word ‘Bezold’ but he knew what he was talking about. Once that soft white grout had slipped into the gaps the shade lit up very noticeably.

I dashed for my bookshelves and the tome about optical illusions.  I’ll give neither title nor author of this book since it’s truly slapdash effort.  While doing a bit of digging for this blogpost, for example,  I noticed that the author has lifted whole chunks of text straight out of Wikipedia. (At least I change them around a bit….. ) But the visual illusions in the book are interesting nonetheless.  The Bezold effect, for example, concerns the way in which a colour’s tone is changed by those around it.  Like so. 

 The white surround makes the red look lighter and the black makes it look darker.  Now this jogged my memory.  My next stop – prompted, I admit, by Wikipedia -was White’s Illusion which is not dissimilar. 

 Here the basic black and white grid has been overlaid by two sets of grey rectangles of the same shade.  Yet the grey between the blacks looks darker than that between the whites.  This is even though, unlike the Bezold effect above, the former has white at each side; and the latter has black on each side.  Curious, eh?

Now this is of some importance to anyone (okay…..me) who is mounting and framing black and white photos.  The bit of my memory that these illusions had jogged was an example in the excellent Larry Bartlett’s Black and White Photographic Printing Workshop (Fountain Press; 1996)*.  Take the two photos below.  Which of the prints do you prefer: the darker or the lighter?

 Okay, you’ve probably guessed that it’s a trick question.  The prints are exactly the same.  The one on the right looks darker than that on the left simply because of the shade of the mount.   It may be that the two different slimline borders may mitigate that effect, I’m not sure.

I will be bearing this in mind in the future.  It has always been my habit to mount my prints on some sort of ivory shade of mountboard because it seems to give the print more light.  Now I know why.  But I had never thought of using a darker mount deliberately to darken the print. I was so inspired by this idea that I went straight to the Photographs page of this blog and converted all my Cow Parsley images to darker mounts. See what you think.

*The original price of this book was £24.95 and I picked it up secondhand for £3.99.  It’s odd that the price of film cameras is increasing everyday and so is that of darkroom kit.  But pukka instructions on how to develop and print properly from the days when there was no alternative are still available at bargain basement prices.  What does that tell us? I have a handful on my bookshelves now and they are a treasure trove of knowledge and experience which I refer to constantly.

ONE FOR THE ECONOMISTS

Jaywick Martello Tower: Hasselblad 500 C/M: Ilford FP4+ @ 200.

 On holiday in Essex this summer I noticed on the OS map this Martello Tower and read in a pamphlet that it is now a gallery and visitor centre so we set out for a visit.  It is located at a place called Jaywick just down the road from Clacton at the mouths of the Rivers Blackwater and Colne.  As we cruised down, that name ‘Jaywick’  kept circling round and round in my head.  Where had I heard it before?  Then it came to me.

“Jaywick” I said to Mrs B. “is, I’m pretty sure, the place that is often referred to as the most deprived ward in the country.  I’ve just remembered.”

And indeed, as we hit the outskirts it was clear that we had come to a very unusual place.  So far as I could see, it seemed to consist mostly of static mobile homes – some beautifully kept in well-tended gardens and others on their last legs.  I   felt the atmosphere in the air on that warm summer afternoon was guarded but not hostile.  Shops were few but there was plenty of life about the place.  We had to go right through to get to the Martello Tower which turned out to be shut that day so I never got to see inside.  I looked the place up later and found that it had originally been a holiday camp for Londoners sited on saltmarshes with no agricultural value.  Bit by bit, over the years, it became permanently inhabited.   A home here wii cost you about £60,000 or so, apparently.

We cruised back and carried on round the coast to a place called Brightlingsea where we found these beach huts grouped round a pleasant little Marina. 

Brightlingsea Marina Beach Huts: Hasselblad 500 C/M: Ilford FP4+ @200

We had to buy some food so went into the town centre where glancing into an estate agent’s window we were pretty shocked to find that the huts were changing hands for about £40,000 each.

How has this happened?  How is it that a stone’s throw from the poorest place in England a beach hut will cost you 40,000 quid?  Should this not be an essential question on every economics course in every university in the country?  No answers based on neoclassical economic theory permitted: we’ve heard them all before.

IN THE MOMENT

NBAE Getty Images

This picture shows what was apparently a big moment in basketball history.  The chap in yellow is Lebron James and he is just setting a new point-scoring record for the NBA.  The accompanying article in The Daily Telegraph is entitled: “Proof sport is now lived through the lens”.  The text goes on to draw attention to the sea of mobile phones behind the players and then the seemingly buddha-like focus of the spectator down at the bottom right (who is Phil Knight, one of the founders of the firm Nike).  The article’s theme is the contrast between him and the crowd and, almost inevitably, the suggestion that Knight is mindfully  in the moment while the rest of the spectators are not. 

I’m not sure I would go along with that (and to be fair to the journalist the article is more of a discussion than an accusation).   The idea behind mindfulness is awareness of the present moment.  To suggest that watching a game as Knight is doing is more mindful than all the iphoners therefore begs the question because it assumes what it sets out to prove – that witnessing without a phone is more mindful than witnessing with one.*  Yet taking stills or videos of an event could be perfectly mindful so long as the person snapping away is aware of what they are doing.  Similarly, Phil Knight could have half a mind on what he is going to have for his tea for all we know.

So, firstly, the photo doesn’t “prove” anything – and no photo ever does.  And secondly, if you go to see Lebron James score a record point and you say to yourself that you are going to capture it with your phone and you set everything up to do that and you come away with a nice shot – how is that not mindful in its own right?

*I  have a bee in my bonnet about this expression which is virtually never used correctly these days.  To “beg the question” does NOT mean to invite the question.  It means to make a circular argument. The example given in good old Fowler’s Modern English Usage under the wonderful heading “Petitio Principii” is: ‘Capital punishment is necessary because without it murders would increase’. Take that.

DARKROOM DIARIES

I’m afraid that matters have not proceeded in the darkroom at the pace I had expected.  First of all, I did not meet my own target of producing by the end of 2022 a print which was good enough for me to mount and frame myself.  Producing a print, I have found, is not so difficult.  Producing a decent print is another matter altogether. 

The main problem is getting a well exposed basic print. You can see the problem with the two images of the boats to the right here. These are experimental prints and as you can see they are too dark.

f8 @ 6 seconds

f11 at 6 seconds

This means that the exposure in the darkroom is too long.  You are supposed to aim for an exposure of between 10 and 15 seconds with an aperture of about f8 on the enlarger lens. But the one to the left above is only 6 seconds at f8: anything more than that and it would be completely black. The one to the right is f11 (ie half the exposure) and is still too dark. I can only assume that my negatives are a bit thin which might be something to do with the way I am developing them.  Decision?  I decide to park the problem for the moment and simply go up to f16 on the enlarger if necessary to get myself into the 10-15 second zone. And while I am on - this is not the only problem I am having.

Firstly, I am finding the process physically uncomfortable.  Secondly, I find the Intrepid enlarger quite a fiddly thing to deal with.  And thirdly, I have a temperature problem in the darkroom: although the loft is well-insulated, as the weather grows colder it gets harder and harder to keep the chemicals up to 20 degrees which is the standard operating temperature. 

Still, nothing worth having is easily got.  I decide that I must take a lesson from the French and reculer pour mieux sauter en avant.  Go backwards the better to leap ahead.  Or perhaps more accurately: get out the wallet and buy more kit. By this time I had discovered the existence of the Second Hand Darkroom website - an irresistible cornucopia of darkroom kit. I bought a proper big enlarger (a Meopta Magnifax) and an RH Timer - which is a thing of beauty in its own right. I also bought a two-slot Nova Print Processor to keep the chemicals at the right temperature. Just after that I spotted an old darkroom warming tray for a tenner on ebay and snapped that up out of curiosity. Then I rearranged the whole darkroom so that I could be sitting down most of the time.

This was beginning to look like displacement activity - spending all my time creating the darkroom rather than printing. So at that point I turned out the lights and started printing again. More next month.

UP AND DOWN IN 2022

Man Ray: Violon D’Ingres 1924.

The Collector Daily website has published its annual review of photography auctions and prices for 2022.  The record price for a photograph was broken in May 2022 when a buyer paid $12,412,500 for a 1924 print of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres*.  This was the first photo ever to sell for over $10 million – a ceiling which was breached again in November when a 1904/5 print of Edward Steichen’s The Flatiron sold for $11,840,000.  If you click on the link above you will see the top ten by value photograph sales for the year and you can flick through the photos themselves. The website suggests that the significance of the prices paid is that collectors of surrealist and contemporary art may be crossing over into the photography market.  It certainly shows that there is a lot of spare cash still sloshing around in those circles. 

The other thing that is interesting about the list is that only one of them – the Steichen – is what you might call a ‘straight’ photograph.  All of the others seem to come with some sort of unspoken message which the viewer is left to decipher.  So it seems to be a particular style of photography which is selling (and in my view a particularly charmless one). 

As pointed out by the Collector Daily commentary, the price graph falls pretty rapidly after those top two prices: number ten on the list went for $724,000 – a price which would not generally get you into the top ten at all.

I understand very little about economics – and I sometimes wonder if economists are not the witchdoctors of the modern world – but reading between the lines of the commentary it seems to be anybody’s guess whether prices such as these are sustainable.  And myself I can’t help wondering if, in histories to be written about the precarious economics of the 21st century, art prices will merit a footnote as indicators of imbalance for those who cared to look.

• My French dictionary defines ‘le violon d’Ingres’ as an expression meaning ‘an activity pursued actively outside one’s profession’ (ie, a hobby or pastime presumably) and is a reference apparently to the artist Ingres’ violin playing. Quite what it means as the title of this photograph is perhaps another message for the viewer to decide.

ECSTATIC

St Winifred’s Well, Holywell, Wales. (Rolleicord/Ilford HP5+)

I took this photo last summer at an old Catholic shrine at Holywell.  I was on a cycle camping trip round the Welsh coast and this was a place, mentioned in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I did not want to miss.  It was a long, a very long, pull up from the coast road on a hot day and I was beginning to wonder if it would be worth it by the time I got there.  It was.

I had imagined it would be a hole in the ground with perhaps an information board but it is very much more than that.  Legend connects it with St Winifred and there are the usual stories of miracle cures.  As you can partly see above, the well itself is enclosed within a 15th century vaulted gallery. It is built into the hillside and on top of that is a chapel.  The charming lady at the till gave me a rundown of the main figures in the well’s history and its chronology.  She was of a very kindly disposition but quite elderly and unfortunately she couldn’t quite call to mind either the names of the figures or any dates in the chronology. Nonetheless, as her historical tour d’horizon meandered towards some distant conclusion, I did my best to remind myself that this is presumably how legend has been passed down through the centuries and accuracy is perhaps less important than narrative.  After about 15 minutes, sensing some understandable restiveness in the growing queue behind me, I made my excuses and advanced into the well’s precincts.

As I neared it I became aware of some sort of hubbub, a splashing and shouting, and I saw that there was a plunge pool in front of the well proper and in it were several figures.  Nearer still I heard Irish accents.  A middle-aged man in the water seemed to be encouraging youngsters in.  But it was a figure beyond him that drew my eye: a woman perhaps in her sixties, fully-dressed but her body completely immersed, making her way round the pool, grasping onto its edge as she went.  Her eyes half-closed,  her face thrust upwards, she was reciting some incomprehensible litany, swaying forward then stopping, then forward again, round and round.  She was clearly undergoing an ecstatic experience.  Although I was brought up a Catholic and educated by the fiercely faithful I have never seen such a thing in this country.  Occasionally one of the woman’s group would come and support her as she made her way round and round the pool.  When I glanced about me I realised that on the benches arranged against the stone walls surrounding the area were seated other figures, their eyes closed too and their lips moving silently.  Just for a second, I was transported back to a medieval Britain in which faith was a commonplace and reason a mystery.  Then the eye of my imagination snapped shut and I was back in the 21st century.

I got the key for the chapel and went up to have a look and when I got back they were all out of the pool and dried and chatting amicably at some tables and chairs as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

I had stayed much longer than I meant to and was well behind schedule.  Then I was further detained by the views over the estuary from Flint Castle so that when I cycled into the industrial hinterland of Ellesmere Port in early evening I was beginning to wonder where on earth I was going to camp for the night.  Then I came off route, rounded a corner and – boom – out of nowhere a pop-up campsite.  I put up my tent, heated some food, sat back and raised my glass of tea to St Winifred.

Processional Cross, St Winifred’s Well. (Rolleicord/Ilford HP5+)

WYNDHAM LEWIS: SWAGGER

A couple of years ago the IWM North had a Wyndham Lewis exhibition.  I went along out of curiosity and found his work to be quite striking.  A couple of weeks ago I picked up the exhibition catalogue secondhand for £3.49*. I really took to the 1932 self-portrait above.  It has a bit of a swagger to it and it’s fun to let the eye rove over it and pick out all the basic forms that he’s used.  Below is a photograph of Wyndham as an artillery officer in 1917.  Think of all those studio photographs you’ve seen from both world wars of expressionless men in uniform all doing their best to look ramrod straight and disciplined and military.   In comparison this shot is an absolute scream: the dangling cigarette, the sidelong pose, the provocative glance, the hooded eyes, the half-smile - a total subversion of the genre.  What’s remarkable though is that it projects exactly the same swagger as the self-portrait.  I always say that painting and the other visual arts have very little in common with photography but these two images seem to suggest otherwise.

* What is this bizarre retail convention of pricing articles a penny below a round sum? It should have died out years ago.  Who uses pennies any more, after all?

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

STAYING ALIVE

Image taken from The Week magazine on my iphone. It shows an installation of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011.

I was walking around Salford Quays a few months ago and I noticed a very large tent-type structure housing what it called a  ‘Van Gogh Immersive Experience’.  “Have you ever dreamt of stepping into a painting?” asked the hoardings. (For £25, if I remember correctly.) There were no queues – which didn’t surprise me – and I imagined that this attempt to turn the work of a great artist into some sort of digital sensurround was bound to fail.  Even these days of visual excess it seemed pretty tasteless to take great work in one medium – oil painting - and desecrate in another – digital projection.

Well, how wrong can you be?  There are, apparently, five of these things going great guns across the globe.  There are Hilma af Klint experiences, too, and in Paris there is one about the Mona Lisa.  There’s a Dali and a Frida Kahlo about to open. Suddenly, immersion is everywhere.  (And now I see where the Sebastiao Salgado exhibition ‘Amazonia’ which I found so noisy and wrote about in July got its forest-immersion ideas from.)   You can see why this format would be popular with the the galleries: no security problems because the artworks aren’t actually there; the digital medium can flash round the world in seconds, so no logisitical problems; and you can mount them in different places simultaneously.  Think of the revenue!

Those artists above are all dead, so they can’t complain.  But now David Hockney has taken the plunge with an immersive exhibition called ‘Bigger and Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away). There’s even a “specially-recorded voiceover”.  In the press releases about this he is reported as saying: “The audience will feel in this. They will feel in the forest.  They will feel on the cliff….”   The suggestion seems to be that this one is more legitimate because the artist is alive and participating.

I haven’t been to any of these “experiences” though I might go to one, if I get the chance, now that my interest has been piqued.  I’ll try to keep an open mind but I don’t think it is too hard to imagine what they will be like.  They will attempt to engage digitally with every human sense: vision, sound, smell even, possibly taste and doubtless touch one way or another.  Customers will pay to be overwhelmed. 

It’s the digital medium that’s the driver.  There is nothing to restrain it.  Anything is possible.  It’s like someone who humbly offers to help you with a job you have and then takes over completely and gets you sacked.  So it starts off as a kind of support technology to the arts and all of a sudden it has become the art itself.

I’ll reserve judgment.  But I think that my problem with all of this is that I already have an all-round immersive experience. It’s called ‘Being Alive’ and it’s unbeatable.

QUAKERS AND PIES

Wood Carving, Quaker Meeting House, Settle.

In Settle marketplace, in Yorkshire, I stood my bicycle next to two tourers with razor-thin saddles then pushed open the door of a nearby café.  Inside, two women in cycling gear sat over a pot of tea and I was about to give the conventional cyclists’ nod when I realised they were not going to make eye contact.  I couldn’t pursue the inevitable chain of speculation that this prompted because after a good morning’s pedalling something far more important was on my mind and that was cheese and onion pie.  Installed at a table, I discovered though that all the menu offered was quiche.  Now cheese and onion quiche is not cheese and onion pie – obviously.  This perhaps northern aperçu was redundant however, as it turned out that the quiche was off anyway.  This was not going well but in a flash of inspiration I asked if there was any chance of an off-menu cheese and onion pie and she said yes, she could get one from their baker’s next door.  I ordered that and a bottle of dandelion and burdock and sat back triumphantly.  Another waitress put a mysterious slip of paper on my table.  It had neither my order, nor the price on it, just a single number. 

As I waited I thought about the Quaker Meeting House I had just visited.  It was one of the oldest in the country - plain, austere almost, and had that quality you sometimes get in religious buildings once you have closed the door behind you: it is as though time has been suspended and space unframed.   It’s not the design that does that but what informs the design.  What makes it, makes it, so to speak.

The waitress brought my order and I saw to my disappointment that it was a pasty, not a pie.  Not only is a quiche not a pie – a pasty is not a pie, either.  Only a pie is a pie: does this have to be spelt out?  Inside this pasty was some sort of processed mash of cheese and onion and possibly  potato.  Disappointing.  The chips were dry, too, and I mean dry in a suspicious kind of way.  An air fryer kind of way.  I needed every drop of the dandelion and burdock to get it all down.  As an act of self-discipline nonetheless, I left two of the chips.

The cycling ladies were preparing to go, keeping their backs firmly towards me.  They were wearing shorts with gel padding – presumably to counter uncomfortable saddles.  It is an odd solution to an unnecessary problem, I thought peevishly. Why not just fit a comfortable saddle in the first place? 

I paid up and left, riding up a steep incline out of town that eventually beat me so I got off and pushed.  Once the gradient had flattened out I started to rattle a bit  unsteadily along a rough bridleway. The headbearing was loose, I knew, and I could really feel it here.  The bicycle had had to be taken apart recently to straighten a dented downtube and it hadn’t been put back together properly.  I’d adjusted it several times but it wouldn’t nip up as it should have.  It wasn’t serious for the moment so I put it out of my mind.  Magnificent views stretched away over the surrounding hills. 

Church Door, All Hallows, Rathmell, Yorkshire.

A horse-drawn caravan stood off the path and as I passed its dog darted at me, snarling and feinting.  I was just considering my options in a frantic sort of a way when a figure appeared from the caravan and shouted roughly at the dog which skulked away.  Heaven knows what the sheep watching from the other side of a stone wall thought of all this: probably - rather me than them. To my left three horses had ignored the whole fracas.

I then followed a long bumpy descent into a town with a famous outdoor shop whose marketing trumpets the joys of adventure, challenges and self-discovery.  It had started to pour with rain so I decided to pop in for a browse and, frankly, some shelter.  But it was one minute to closing time as I tried the locked door and the staff kept their eyes firmly averted. 

It took me several minutes to cross the main road and then I pulled on my rain cape, put my head down and pedalled off into the deluge.  Ten minutes later I came across a huge bowser blocking the road.  It was making an emergency delivery of water.  In a rainstorm.

Wall Detail, Quaker Meeting House, Settle.

I took all three photos on this rather damp cycle trip with a Hasselblad 500 CM on FP4+ @ 200

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE

Like so much that ends up as significant, this started out as serendipitous.  I was wandering through a bookshop, noticed a book, flipped through it and then bought it.  Back home, as I read through it I wasn’t much impressed.  But it did contain a photograph I really liked and so I tracked that back and ended up with another book that I then realised was going to be important for me.  It’s funny how this happens but sometimes I think all you need to do is follow your nose and world will supply the rest.

Anyway, taking things chronologically, here is the photo.

Entrance to the South Aisle, Le Thoronet, 1986 © David Heald

 I think it is fabulous – right up my street.  It seems to take light, structure and texture and to place them into a delicate balance which makes silence almost palpable.

The image comes from The Architecture of Silence by David Heald (Parabola Books, New York, 2000) - a collection of his photographs of Cistercian Abbeys in France taken over a decade or so from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s with a very informative accompanying text by medieval architectural historian, Terryl L.Kinder.   What attracts me about it is that, in the here-today, gone-tomorrow world of modern photography this book has a truly lasting quality.  I can’t find Parabola Publishing on the internet but I am assuming that it is connected to Parabola Magazine the mythology/spiritual traditions quarterly.

You can find more images from the book at this page of his website. 

David Heald is the Director of Photographic Services and Chief Photographer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and you can find an interesting short clip of him here  talking about his work over the last forty years – a large part of which has been photographing the Museum building itself.  He sees that building as the most important work of art in the Guggenheim collection.

The unique quality of photography is that it is a direct representation of the world around us.  It is therefore singularly well-placed to let the world speak for itself without interference.  This is a truth generally obscured by much modern photography which seems to reflect only the restlessness of the age.

To have photographed the same building for forty years and still to find something new in it is a bit of a lesson for us all.

FLAT

Nothing is absolutely flat.   Less flat and more flat are out there, of course. Plus flat enough and not flat enough.  All of those, plus flatter, flatter than that and then flatter still.  Almost flat, too, and not quite flat.  Ultra flat and simply not flat.  And let’s not forget the flattest and the least flat.  We can qualify flat endlessly and compare flatnesses infinitely.  But still nothing is absolutely flat.

Just how is it that there can be so many variations of that which does not exist?

(Photo taken by me on the Hasselblad 500CM with Ilford FP4+ @ 200 and developed in ID11)