It starts off as pressure. Then it may become a few words, or a repeated phrase. Now that, after all these years I have come to recognise this, I carry a small notebook around and try to jot the words down before they skid away and I am overcome by a nameless regret. Then when I get a moment I sit down, start writing and try to recapture whatever it was: memory, idea, image, sentence. I usually come up with some short text which for many years I simply put away in a plastic envelope.
With the photographs, it’s the same but different. The pressure is there and I go out with a camera and take a few photos and feel freer when I get back. I then have to develop the negatives and scan them and have a look at what I’ve got. Quite often ones which at first don’t catch my eye start nagging away at me later – even weeks later. I produce working prints which I arrange in collections, some of which you can see on the Photographs page of this website.
Recently, something bigger has been arranging itself though. I had always seen the texts and the photographs as completely separate. But I have a daybook which I originally used to paste up images that appealed to me from magazines and newspapers and bits of prose and quotations that I liked. Then I started to paste up my own photos printed out on ordinary paper and I interspersed with them my own prose.
Now I have around 70 or 80 photos with 30+ pieces of text and I am sure they go together but I can’t quite work out how. I take some solace from a Leonard Cohen quote in an interview when he’s asked whether he is putting together a new album as he has been in the recording studio quite a lot. He says: “Well, we might be doing an album but maybe not. I don’t know.” He is saying that it is important to keep the whole process open.
This question of form is important. In my head these photos and texts seem to be some sort of mosaic or even mandala. In a perfect world they would end up perhaps in a patchwork display on a huge wall. For the moment though I am puting them into a linear arrangement since that is most practical.
The words and images do not speak directly to one another: though there are oblique references in some in others there is no obvious reference at all though there is a shared atmosphere. Here is an example of a small part of the working sequence. It’s pretty experimental at the moment.
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A few miles from where I used to live lay a great estuary busy with shipping: passenger ferries, trawlers, oil freighters, tramps, tugs, pilots. Occasionally a thick sea mist would roll in from the coast – called a ‘roke’ locally – sometimes floating several miles inland so that all the houses and roads around would be enveloped in the same thick cloud as the shipping. Foghorns would boom faintly over the countryside through the swirling whiteness, breaking the silence which pressed in.
In my workshop, as I tinkered, I used to see the mist curling across the window and listen to the foghorns as though they were some sort of morse – long, long, short, dash, dash, dot. If I were set on a minor task - valve clearances maybe, or adjusting bearings – the clink of my spanners, cold in my hand, would counterpoint the foghorns like triangle to tympano.
After a while I’d realise my muscles were stiffening so I’d sit back on my stool and then imagine those dark angular shapes down at the estuary slipping through the white clouds and the cold, cold waters. I’d look around the workshop’s grimy surfaces and feel a slight shiver.
Occasionally, wandering around the countryside, I’ve come across those WW2 pill-boxes: flat-sided, turrets with slits for weaponry. Just suppose – it occurred to me one day - that you had spent all of your life inside one of those: all that you had experienced from day to day was the inside of this fortification – walls, ceiling, floor : all, that is, apart from what you could see through the slits. Your daily reality was the interior but you were aware that there was something else outside. Now suppose one day you found a door and, curious, you pushed it open and stepped out. Wouldn’t it take your breath away, that unbound earth and sky? You’d have seen them before of course through the slit but now you would be seeing them unframed. Wouldn’t you be speechless?
There are three men waiting as I leave the little café with the swing doors. I glance down at them over a low wall and they gesture to the one empty chair. A washed sky is reflected off the cobbles as far as the corner. Now the men are calling to me and stamping their feet. A cat wandering by their table skips up the steps and into the café through a window curtain. The air is chill though a pinkish sun is rising and the day will be warm. The men call to me again. I see their mouths moving but already the sound is fading and I can’t make out the words.
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Display options are pretty limited on a website: you can’t really arrange the words and images so that they breathe together. This gives some idea, though. I’m taking my usual break from the blog over summer and I’ll be working on this sequence to see if I can mould it into a little more shape.