NOSING AROUND

Bromholm Priory, ruins of Chapter House wall.

If you have the time and means to nose around the backwaters of the UK you will generally come across something of interest sooner or later.   You might need a map, and you will definitely need a sense of curiosity and an open mind, but you will get there.

Recovering from a shambolic lunch in a Norfolk café this summer (howling dogs, bizarre salads and bickering staff) I set off on a walk round the coastal village of Bacton to clear my head.  A workman trimming hedges stopped to let me pass and as I turned to get past him I saw, a couple of fields away, the magnificent ruin above.  I asked him if it was possible to get closer to it.  He told me that it was part of an old monastery, now on a working farm; that he and his pals had played there as children; that a new farming generation had banned them; but the very latest entail holders seemed not to mind visitors.  So I marched up the drive to a kind of Gormenghast Hall in a deserted farmyard and rang the bell.  Nothing.  I rang again.  Shuffling of feet.  Door opens.  Darkened hallway.  Young man.  Could I look at his ruins?  Sure, he said, and shut the door.

Bromholm Priory, ruins of refectory wall.

So - I looked.    There wasn’t much to see bar these walls and some unkempt farm buildings and machinery but that just stimulated my imagination all the more.  All around me stretched the big East Anglian skies and flat landscape.  The sea was only a few fields away. A shower of rain fell.  The wind blew. The atmosphere was breathtaking.  Something ineffable pulsed for a second and then was gone.  I stared through the Hasselblad’s ground glass and clicked several times. Then suddenly it was all over and I found myself standing in a farmyard in Norfolk.  And a scruffy one at that.  So I resumed my walk and got soaked in a second shower.

Bromholm Priory, ruins of Chapter House.

(You can find out more about Bromholm Priory, a Cluniac monastery built in the 12th century and suppressed in the 16th century - together with a lovely little 3D model of it put together by The Paston Heritage Society - here .

I took the photos with a Hasselblad 500CM on Ilford FP4+ rated at 200 and developed in Ilford DDX. )

DARKROOM FEVER

Here’s a neat little graphic from the B&H Photo site which I hope they won’t mind my using if I give them this shameless plug: they are clearly enthusiasts and have really useful articles on all sorts of phototopics.

Last December, keen readers of this blog may remember, I took delivery of an Intrepid darkroom enlarger. I had helped crowdfund its development though I have no idea why - an impulse, I suppose.  Once it arrived I couldn’t be doing with it, so I put it in a cupboard.  To salve my conscience I said in my blogpiece (with a bravura that I didn’t really feel) that I would commit to producing by the end of the year a picture which I had darkroom developed and printed, then mounted and framed myself.  Well, the end of the year approaches – and I have not been  idle. 

In Spring, to convince myself that I was on the job, I bought a darkroom easel and focus magnifier secondhand from my local Real Camera Co.  Then feeling a certain resistance again I put them in the cupboard with the enlarger.  In these situations it is always best I find not to push things.  They will eventually happen of their own accord (or not, of course, just depending).

Late summer I found myself cleaning out the shed and realised this was a displacement activity.  For what, I wondered?  Then I found myself cleaning out the loft.  Aha!  I had been intending to use the bathroom as a darkroom but as I looked round the loft I realised it was a much better space though it had no running water.  Never mind.  I fashioned two rooflight blackouts from picture backing board and covered those with black cloth.  Then I bought some plyboard and black felt to block the trapdoor opening.

From ebay I bought a copystand to suspend the enlarger and an enlarging lens (a very fine Rodenstock Rodagon and the nearest I have ever come to getting a bargain on ebay).  I ordered some chemicals, trays and sundries and, miraculously, I was ready to go.

The first session was very tentative – not least because the rooflight blockers kept on falling down and flooding the space with light at the crucial moment of exposure.  I recategorised them as prototypes and wedged them into the velux frames more firmly.  Brute force, but there we are.

The lack of running water in the loft means that I can print only one or two photos at a time before shlepping them down the loftladders and into the bathroom to wash them.  Time consuming, but it does keep me fit.  By the end of the first session I had two test strips and three prints and I count that a success.  Second time round I got a bit quicker and produced two sets of contact prints; four test strips; and four working prints.

Some early conclusions:

·       It’s true what they say: when you see the picture appear in the developing tray – it’s magic;

·       It’s nowhere near as complicated as I had imagined.  The basic process is pretty straightforward even though producing a fine print is a great skill;

·       It’s not cheap.   I have spent over £500 though it could probably be done for half that with better husbandry.

The real revelation for me though is this: that looking at a photographic print fresh out of a developing tray and looking at one from a scanned negative on a computer screen are two completely different experiences.  The darkroom print is a bit like talking to someone in the flesh while the onscreen version is like talking to them on zoom.  No comparison.  

It’s now mid-October, so about ten weeks till the end of the year and my self-imposed deadline.  Werhoo - almost there.

MORE THAN A PILE OF PEBBLES

 Question:  how many Zen Buddhists do you need to take a photograph?

Answer: None. The photograph takes itself!

Well, even I’m not satisfied with that as an answer.  Obviously, you need some human intervention.  But what sort?

Standard Zen photos seem to major on things like carefully raked sand or gravel; piles of pebbles; long exposure shots of the sea; distant horizons with nothing in the foreground; and so on.  The recurring theme is stillness or calm but the subjects are very hackneyed.  Moreover, in my understanding of Zen practice, calmness is not to be preferred over any other mental state.  If you seek it out you simply have yet another attachment.  It may or may not be a by-product of the practice, that’s all.  So what are we aiming for?

In The Zen of Creativity (Ballantine Books, 2005) John Daido Loori says that the essence is ‘no intent’.  “The activity, whatever it may be, is not  forced or strained.  The art just slips through the intellectual filters, without conscious effort and without planning…..a continuous stream of spontaneity.” At its heart, it seems to be an absence of expectation. With photography, that is very difficult to achieve since hovering in the background there is always the idea of “good” photography and “bad” photography. This is something we have to get over, to banish from our minds.

So when I finished my recent retreat I was interested to see what sort of photographs would emerge from the 24 hours or so of the post-retreat period – a walk in the surrounding countryside and then up the coast.  Here are several examples below so you can make up your own mind about whether or not they have any quality in common.

Abandoned street lamps, Crosby

Weathered Barn, Crosby.

Liverpool blitz debris, Crosby.

Coastal scene with disused groynes, Crosby.

Unidentified structure with graffiti, Crosby.

Well. To my eye the answer is a resounding “Maybe”. They re possibly a little over-pictorial (just nice pictures) but perhaps they do have a good slow pulse as well.

A WALK IN THE WOODS

In April I wrote a blog post about a retreat that I had been on.  I thought that I had finished with it as a subject but when I came to develop and scan some of the photos I took I realised there was something else to say.

The location of the retreat was an educational trust housed in some beautifully refurbished farm/manor buildings next to the grounds of a later manorial building,  possibly 18th century,  itself surrounded by extensive fields and woodlands.  As a retreatant you have the right to wander in these grounds.

Sycamore leaves in April. Beautiful patterning.

One morning I decided to take myself off during free time with my Rolleicord.  It was just after I had taken the photograph above that I noticed a figure approaching.  I had seen one or two random dog walkers on other days but this chap looked a bit different.   He was dressed as if by one of the better kind of gents’ country outfitters circa 1960: leather, waxed cotton, moleskin, a trilby.  A suspicion formed in my mind.

I was approaching from his right and could see that I would have to exercise a quarter-turn back onto the main path and so pass him.  Clearly we could not ignore one another.

“Good morning” I said to seize the initiative.

“Good morning” he replied.

I think there may have been a few words about the weather then - silence.

Then he said, “Who are you?”

Since we were both Englishmen of a certain age and therefore in the business of Giving Nothing Away For The Moment conversationally I thought this was a tad direct.  I clearly wasn’t a dog walker since I didn’t have a dog   But he had asked me so I replied.

“I’m Peter” I said.

This had the merit of answering his question yet revealing nothing.  (I think that somewhere in the back of my mind was a scene from a Just William story in which William meets a Great Actor somewhere in his village.  After a short exchange the Great Actor booms at William: “Don’t you know who I am?”  And William replies: “No, an’ I bet you don’t know who I am either.”)

By now, my suspicion had turned to certainty.  This was the Lord of the Manor.  He clearly did not see it as his place to explain that and so I had to take him by the hand conversationally, so to speak.

“You’re the owner?”

“Yes.”

I explained that I was a retreatant from next door.  (Who else would be walking around his private forest, I wondered, and then thought of the dog walkers. Maybe he was patrolling.)

“Of course you are!” he cried.  “How stupid of me.”

For my part, I wanted no toff-meets-commoner politenesses so I yanked the conversation right round and asked about  how he managed the woodlands.  Very little, seemed to be the answer.  Then I asked about the many, many yew trees and their age.  But he, in turn, was having  none of my man-to-man egalitarianism.

“Not very old” he shrugged,  “The Victorians were very fond of them, you know”  Was there just a hint of lineage there, I wondered.

I thought that I had done my bit for inter-class harmony by that point.

“Good to meet you” I said.

“Quite” he replied, and we went on our separate ways.

He seemed a decent cove and I would like to have stayed chatting to him for longer but I didn’t think he was inviting it.  I did get this photograph of a beech tree below, though, immediately after.

It was just before taking this picture that I had the encounter above. This is a magnificent beech which stands at the crossing point of two woodland paths. Or is it two beech trees wrapped round one another? I should have looked a little more closely. Now what I see is two trees locked in a lifelong embrace.

THE CLASSICAL DARKROOM

For a long time, in my head, I have associated Classical with the idea of endless refinements of a given theme; and Modern with endless innovation.  Being a child of the sixties and seventies  I always found the former to be rather tedious: those eternal artistic representations of religious scenes, say, or drama shackled by the unities of time, place and action.  Meh.  Who needed these constrictions when you could throw away the rulebook and do whatever you wanted?

A couple of years ago when I started developing my own film the shortcomings of the Modern approach became clear pretty quickly.   I started by trying a few different developers and a few different films.  The result was chaos: this developer with that film; that developer with this film; add a few seconds here; shave a few seconds there; agitate a bit more; agitate a bit less; dilute a bit more, dilute a bit less.  A rulebook of some kind was definitely needed.  The problem then turned out to be not that there were no rulebooks but that there were too many rulebooks.  There seemed to be experts at every turn.  Everyone on the net has an opinion. Enough, I decided, was enough and I went back to the drawing board.

For authoritative voices, I decided, we need to step back in time to when there was less shouting. Some time ago I bought a copy of Henry Horenstein’s 1983 “Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual”; and more recently Andreas Feininger’s 1965 “The Complete Photographer”. Neither breaks the bank and both are full of sound practical advice for the tyro developer and printer. They can be a little outdated technically but they are authoritative in the good sense of definitive and helpful. This weaned me off internet advice.

Film is not dead yet, for sure.  Not only are plenty of products on the market but new ones are appearing frequently.  I decided that, despite all the siren voices from the margins, the thing to do was to go mainstream.  I’d always had perfectly acceptable results from Ilford products – and I particularly like the way they seem to handle the mid-tones in black and white (if I’m not imagining it).  They have the added advantage of manufacture only a few miles down the road from where I live.  And middle of the Ilford road are two traditional films: FP4+ for the summer months and HP5+ which needs less light, in winter.  At 35mm I found I wasn’t keen on the very grainy results from HP5+ so I tried Ilford’s more modern equivalent, Delta 400 and much preferred its smoother look.  That nailed down the film side.  The two middle of the road Ilford developers are ID-11 (recommended by Ilford for the traditional films) and DD-X for the Delta range.  I haven’t made my mind up about those: the ID-11 is cheaper but  you need a litre for two medium format films.   It comes in a powder form that you have to make up to a solution, so if you buy I any bulk you end up having to store several litres if your photographic output is modest like mine.  DD-X  comes as a concentrate which you dilute as you go so needs less space and fewer bottles to store.

General opinion seems to be however that that grainy old HP5 is not at all as grainy at medium format because the negative is bigger and therefore the tonal changes are smoother.  I’m not sure I buy that because any given square centimetre of negative with a given emulsion should presumably give the same results with any given developer regardless of the total size of the negative.  All the same I have bought some HP5 medium format to try out.

My aim is to get down to two films, one for winter one for summer, and if possible one developer.  What I am looking for is predictability rather than experimentation: a steady platform.  To my surprise therefore I find myself ditching the Modern and siding with the Classical: endless repetition within very narrow technical conventions.  Who’d have guessed?

This is Delta 100 film shot on an Olympus OM-1 and developed in ID-11. Youi can still see some grain - especially in the sky. Would it have been any smoother if developed in the recommended DD-X? No idea but maybe one day I will be in a position to say. I find it very difficult to resist these scenes of the human figure way off to one side in an empty landscape - or seascape, as here. They seem to replicate my feelings about the individual and the world.

THE INTREPID ENLARGER

Well.  I’ve been and gone and done it.  Whether it was a wise thing or not only time will tell.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that it is a longstanding aim of mine to expose, develop, wet print, mount and frame a photograph.  Hanging on the walls here at Barker Towers are several examples of my work but they all have missed out one crucial stage: the traditional darkroom printing with water, chemicals, potions and other dark brews.  They have all been digitally printed.  I have always shied away from the darkroom for reasons that, to be  honest, hint at a certain lack of moral fibre.  The whole thing seemed, well, just a bit too complicated:  too much kit, too expensive, no darkroom space, takes forever and so on.

The central piece of kit in your darkroom is the enlarger – which fires light through  the negative and onto a photosensitive sheet which you then douse in developer and fixer and, hey presto, you have a photograph.  There are many secondhand enlargers on ebay and other sites but I know nothing about them and would probably be throwing my money away.  Then one day, somewhere, I noticed that a firm was seeking crowdfunding for a new design of enlarger which would apparently knock the socks off everything which had gone before.  I had vaguely heard of the firm, The Intrepid Camera Company. .  They are best known for making large-format cameras and so are in the business of rethinking traditional photographic kit design. It must have been an impulse, but I decided to sign up for their proposed enlarger.  In a curious way I think that it was a subconscious delaying tactic.  I reckoned it would take them months to fund and build and manufacture it so I would be safe for quite a while from the promptings of my inner Ansel Adams.

But the day of reckoning always comes, Intrepid proved to be as good as its word, and a box arrived shortly before Christmas.  I left it where it was for a few days and then found a quiet moment to have a look at the contents.

Enlarger, control box and negative holders. Those negative holders are a thing of sublime metallic beauty compared to the flimsy plastic ones that came with my scanner. Photo © Intrepid Camera Company.

First things first.  It looks beautifully made, with some bits of it fashioned from, yes, real metal and others from futuristically light materials the nature of which I can only guess at. Being a man of a certain age I would have greatly appreciated an exploded diagram and some basic written instructions but I think I have to accept that these days instructions are what you find on the net and not what you get in the box.  There is indeed a little leaflet included about the control box, but that’s your lot.  It is, as they promised, light, compact, packs down small and leaves me with no excuses whatsoever.

All I can now do is rely on my inner slacker.  (He lives next door to my inner Ansel Adams and believe me those two are bad neighbours.)  I need to buy some basic bits of kit: a lens for the enlarger, a focus finder, some trays and chemicals and so on.  That should take me ages.  Then I am going to have to knock up some blackout curtains for the bathroom.  We’re talking months here.  But I am going to make a public commitment. By the end of this year-ish there will be hanging on a wall of this room a darkroom print that I have shot, developed, wet printed, mounted and framed myself.  Yes, I’m looking forward to it but as in all human affairs we must remember:  it’s about the direction and not the goal.

The darkroom set-up, only not dark. Obviously. Photo © The Intrepid Camera Company.

In order to maintain the high standards of artistic integrity to which this blog aspires I have to admit a little shamefacedly that I have written to Intrepid and asked for permission to use the two photos above but I haven’t yet received a reply. I am sure they’re busy people though and I may not be their number one priority so for the moment I am counting on their goodwill……

WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE (2)

Taken with a Rolleicord Vb on Ilford FP4 developed in Ilford ID-11

I had spotted this group on the Great Orme in Llandudno and thought it might arrange itself into something if I paid attention.  But I had also spotted out of the corner of my eye a fellow enthusiast edging towards me.  Edging towards me, I imagined, because he had spotted the camera that I had hanging off my shoulder - a 1960s Rolleicord.  He himself was carrying a modern digital camera with a very long lens.  I had a feeling that somehow I was going to be tested.

I kept my eye on the swirling kaleidoscope of figures  at the summit but it was only as the group on the right of the photograph above sidled helpfully into the frame and then the young woman by the trig point raised her arms that I felt the miracle had happened.  I took one shot, just in time.

“Are they as great as everyone says?” he asked, beside me a moment later and nodding at my camera.

I felt this boxed me in a tad.  If I said yes it was, then I would be setting myself up to justify that; and if I said ‘no’ then the obvious question was ‘why do you bother then?’  The only thing to do was to tug the exchange round in a different direction.

“Look,” I said, pushing the camera towards him “the image is reversed in the viewfinder.”  I’d have to admit that there might have been an element of majesty in that response, because everyone who is up to snuff knows the image is reversed in these cameras.

We proceeded to push the conversational pieces around the board but it wasn’t a very interesting exchange.  The territory of photography is so vast that you often stumble across tribes that you only vaguely knew existed.  You  speak their language only brokenly and they seem to have no idea of yours.  His interest was digital night sky photography.  I’m afraid I can’t even identify the North Star.  Ostensibly, capturing digital images of the moving heavens is the same activity as snapping shifting groups of figures on black and white film but in practice there isn’t that much in common.

After a few desultory minutes we tacitly agreed on a kind of amicable no-score conversational draw and he continued on his way.  I turned back to the scene I had photographed to find it had disappeared into the ether and this one frame is the only evidence that it ever existed.

(For Waiting For The Miracle (1) see May’s blogposts below.)

A LITTLE AGITATION

Regular readers of this  blog will know that I have been teaching myself the dark art of film development for a couple of years now.  For me, it turns photography into a craft rather than a digital miracle.

A few months ago I developed a medium format film and came up with this.

 My shot of the old Menai Bridge over to Anglesey has a fault – as if some sort of heavy rain were falling across the image.  Every frame in the roll was the same.  I sort of assumed it was my developing technique since all kinds of things can go wrong: old developer, wrong dilution, wrong quantities of chemicals and so on and so on.  Nonetheless, I contacted the film manufacturers Ilford who to their great credit, having checked the batch number, told me that it was a manufacturing fault and sent me some free film.  Nice of them, of course, but it’s a good job I hadn’t been photographing a Royal Wedding for Vogue, eh?

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.  I pulled another film out of the developing tank and found this. 

 Down the righthand side, as you can see, is a honeycomb strip of bubbly summats spoiling this otherwise winsome shot of Mrs B. contemplating the meaning of life on our recent romantic mini-break on the coast of North Wales.  All frames were the same, thus spoiling my first theory that someone had lit a heavy bonfire to my right as I shot. Ever hopeful, I contacted Ilford who didn’t put their hand up this time but made the polite suggestion that I might be over agitating.  ‘Agitation’ in the darkroom refers to the process of turning the development tank (which is about the size of a pint pot) over regularly so that the developing solution is evenly spread.  And it is a matter which causes not a little discussion in our small community: speed, direction, frequency and their consequences (too much contrast, not enough contrast, shadow detail, highlight tone) are all the subject of detailed scrutiny and strong opinion.

Casting my mind back I realised that there had indeed been some foaming of the developer and concluded that was almost certainly the cause: the film sits on its side in the tank and so when the developer foams the top edge of the film doesn’t get the full treatment. Oddly two other films which I developed after this one were unaffected.  From somewhere – I can’t recall where now – I had got the idea that a ten-second agitation requires ten turns of the tank.  In fact, it seems that is way too much and that four or five is adequate.

It’s frustrating but how else do you learn a craft other than by practice?   

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

 Back in the day, the Central Electricity Generating Board used to have adverts in magazines showing a pristine landscape stretching for miles.  The accompanying text asked you to admire the electricity distribution system.  You couldn’t see it of course: it was underground.  All those ugly pylons had been demolished.  It went without saying that this was a great improvement.

“Like whips of anger/With lightning's danger/There runs the quick perspective of the future” wrote Stephen Spender in a rather fevered 1930s poem about their effect on the elysian English landscape.  Then there’s Cecil Day-Lewis: “ascetic pylons pass…… charged to deal death” is his contribution.  So they’ve never gone down well with the pastoralists: too big, too modern, too industrial, too intrusive.

I’m a bit of a fan myself, though.  I spent a good part of lockdown in photographic pursuit of these magnificent beasts and you can see some of the results in the collection ‘Circuit’ which I have posted on the Photographs page of this website.  One that features there is this 275kv line just beside South Manchester substation.  I see an almost calligraphic precision in its structure, as though I were looking at a gigantic ideogram.

 You could see them as supporting the electricity lines that stretch between them; or you could see the lines as joining the pylons together so they become one massive structure. 

 It’s the way that the lines hang motionless from those horizontals while the electromagnetic waves hurtle through them at something close to the speed of light – 300 million metres a second.  300 million metres a second.   Mostly you can only imagine the immense power that they are carrying but when you stand underneath them in damp weather you hear an insidious crackle and pop.  That is water droplets speeding up the electrical breakdown of the air, and it gives you an almost physical connection to the immense charge above you.   As they near their destination the pylons get smaller, the voltage steps down and down from 400kv through substation and substation to 275kv;  then 132kv and down again to 33kv and 11kv then into the ground where it speeds into your living room, at 240v to power up your lights, your phone and your TV.

I am not alone in my enthusiasm, by the way.  The very wonderful  Pylon Appreciation Society  will tell you everything you need to know about pylons and perhaps more.  And Pylon of the Month – quite separate from the PAS – will give you a magnificent monthly fix.

I was out walking recently and came across what looked like some pretty heavy duty maintenance work to a line.  I fell into conversation with the work crew and asked about that cable you can see right at the top of the pylon below.  Every pylon has one and they intrigue me.  What I suspected turns out to be correct.  It’s an earth line.  Yes, even these mighty beasts are earthed.  So if one ever did fall on top of you its weight might kill you but at least you wouldn’t be electrocuted.

 We all know that our household appliances must be earthed but to see this basic principle applied at the macrolevel comes as a bit of a surprise.  It all comes down to the circuit: the mutual compulsion of plus and minus which powers up the whole caboodle - the return to earth. Negative just cannot live without positive.  The electron must find its proton.  Then there is balance and all is well with the world.  It is exactly the same balance which is holding together every object around you and, indeed, your own body.

 It’s not really an electricity distribution system at all – it’s a gigantic metaphor.

HIGH AND MIGHTY

I’ve often thought that the skyscraper or towerblock is the perfect symbol of our economic system because it is very high and has a very small base.  It’s a picture of instability.  As I watch the towers spring up here in Manchester I feel uneasy: too many, too late, too sporadic.  One day, if you ever get the chance, stand close to the bottom of one where it meets the street.  It’s hard not to shiver in its icy maw.

Here is a picture of a pair of them which I took down where the Ship Canal meets the River Irwell, near Pomona Island. Not unusually, they reflect one another - eclipsing perspectives and setting up their own order.

WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE

A blowy day on the coastal dunes west of Liverpool. The Marram grass which takes up most of the picture and which is so common on these sandy expanses has a very distinct visual quality, particularly in the wind. The light seems to bounce off it endlessly. As I stood and watched, figures came and went. I raised the camera to my eye, hoping for some sort of visual balance between the patterns of the grass and the movement of the people to emerge. You have to be quick because it is there and gone in an instant. (It can become uncomfortable too, standing there with your arm raised and squinting through the viewfinder.) The scene here emptied and filled up once or twice but eventually this moment emerged.

BUBBLING UNDER

All cities have it, but some have it more than others.  It’s the feeling you get as you walk the streets that something is bubbling just under the surface.  From time to time you notice that it has brimmed over - perhaps in voices that you hear, or a chance turn of phrase, or some music floating out of a window somewhere, or a sign that someone has put up.  Here, in this city, I recently saw an abandoned freezer with a poem written on its side.  Pretty commonly it’s what you see on the walls though.  I took all of the photos below within a few yards or a few miles of my house.  So you don’t have to look that far.

It can be unintended - just the passage of time……

……or a few dabs with a paintbrush…….

…..or something just as simple but a little more considered…….

…….or maybe just a popular spot…..

….or something that you notice only the twentieth time you walk past it……

…….convention plays its part, as in all creative endeavour…….

…….or sometimes a touch of the existential…..

…..or the classical (love this one……there’s such a lot in it)……

……or the straight representational…..

….you might even bump into it……

I guess it’s sheer energy, sheer exuberance. It’s very uplifting and although cities get their share of bad press you don’t find this kind of thing anywhere else really. Certainly not in smaller places. Maybe it’s a kind of communal energy or maybe spectators will always draw out a spectacle. Whatever it is - long may it last.

COINCIDENTALLY

When is a fact not a fact?  The blog post last month about Red Colour News Soldier touched on that.  Now I find myself unexpectedly revisiting it through two recent events connected to my life four decades ago.

British Embassy, Kabul, 1979. In fact, this bit was the Ambassador’s Residence, believe it or not.

It started with an obituary.  Obituaries always seems unsatisfactory when they are of someone you once knew, even if only slightly: a life summarised in a few hundred words somehow cannot do justice to the personal memory.  This obituary was of the journalist Robert Fisk and it immediately sent my mind scurrying back to a brief acquaintance I had had with him in Afghanistan some forty years before.

After the Soviet occupation in 1979, the crowd of western journalists reporting on events, would do the rounds of embassies in Kabul to pick up information.  I was a junior diplomat in the British Embassy and so they came to my office and listened and made notes and asked questions and left again.  I enjoyed chatting to them because they were new faces and intelligent people.  I think that I had vaguely heard of Robert Fisk from his reporting in Northern Ireland. One morning my office door crashed open and in he walked.  He sat down, started talking, and didn’t stop for about an hour, telling me exactly what was going on and how I was wrong about almost everything.  I couldn’t get a word in edgeways, but he was very entertaining and I took to him. 

Shortly after that he filed a report which The Times published about a trip he had made north of Kabul, up the Salang road.  He either went in a Soviet troop carrier or was picked up by one, I can’t remember which.  Anyway, they had come under fire, according to the report, and he had been given a gun by the Russian soldiers and told to defend himself.  I discussed this report with other journalists and eyebrows were raised very high.  I had no idea whether that was professional jealousy or seasoned judgement. 

I was eating a meal with him in a local restaurant shortly after and I thought I would mention this report.  Maybe I didn’t show sufficient respect, but he was very, very touchy about it.  His brow darkened.  “You can go too far, you know.” he said and there was an awkward silence for a few moments.  I saw him a few more times but the report was never mentioned again.

What actually happened?  Does a report in a western newspaper of repute establish authenticity?  It’s those slippery facts again – the ones that Li Zhensheng and Zhan Xianliang wrestled with.  Our lives are underpinned by certain suppositions but outside of a courtroom – and maybe not even there - very little is established beyond reasonable doubt.

The second coincidence stemmed from a doppelganger who has made odd appearances in my life.  Someone whom I had known in Kabul and who now edits an academic journal on Afghan affairs contacted me a couple of months ago to say that I figured in a piece that had just been published in his journal about the history of the British Institute of Afghan Studies (BIAS) in Kabul.  He sent me a copy and I found it very odd.  It was well researched, meticulously annotated and it did indeed refer to my name and my job title and it quoted a couple of memos with my name at the bottom.  To understand why it was odd we have to take a step back.

When I first arrived in Kabul I met an older, very cultivated, man, Ralph Pinder-Wilson, who was head of the BIAS.  I became good friends with him: he had a great influence on me and I learnt a lot from him about attitude and conduct.  One day in 1982 he was suddenly arrested by the Afghan authorities on very unlikely charges.  It turned serious when after a brief trial he was condemned to death.

I was a bit distressed by the article in this academic journal because the memos quoted and the account of these events suggested that I had more or less left Ralph to stew in his own juice; no one from the Embassy had visited him in jail, it said, and the memos cited were not very sympathetic to his plight.  But here’s the thing.  This all happened in 1982 and I had left Afghanistan in 1981.  The trial, the sentence, the memos: all of that happened a year after I had resigned from my position and gone back to the UK.  I certainly didn’t write those memos: when Ralph was in jail I was thousands of miles away in the UK, my short diplomatic career just a memory.  Who then was this other shadowy Peter Barker still operating in my absence? He certainly seemed to have written the memos and was active in advising various government departments and committees.  What was going on?  I pointed out this apparent rent in the fabric of reality to the editor of the journal but he knew no more than I and neither of us could explain the curious sequence of events. Doppelganger? Coincidence? Spooks?

In the end, Ralph was released from prison shortly after his trial and put on a flight back to London so all was well.  It must have been a frightening ordeal but he turned it into a polished and very funny anecdote which always amused me when I heard him tell it in later years.

But still. When our own lives become a playground for unruly factoids spilling through from some other shadow realm what is left for us to depend on?

Here are some photos from those times. They seem much less complicated.

I was just a poor northern boy……I’d never seen so many melons in my life before. He was selling them. Well, obviously.

Uncombed cotton. You could buy it and fill old grain sacks with it to make great floor cushions. We had some in our house for many years.

Look at the colouring of the little girl on the left. You saw many Afghans with straw coloured hair and blue or green eyes. They were said to be the genetic descendants of Alexander The Great’s armies. That’s romantic enough to be worth believing, I think.

These children will be in their fifties now and it is hard to imagine the lives they will have led in their unhappy country over the last forty years.

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OAK

This is a photo that I took over the summer in one of Manchester’s many lovely parks

I marked it down in my notes as an oak – and pretty obviously a dead one.  Cause of death?  I don’t know, but all the trees around seem healthy enough so maybe it was disease rather than environmental.  The crown seems to have died back and what’s left of the branches give the appearance of having been twisted by some final stricture into a remarkable suggestion of departing energy splintering a living body.  It’s a very fitting object of contemplation and I tried to do it the honour of close observation before I took the photograph.

PERSONAL CHEMISTRY

A developing tank and spiral

I was hopeless at chemistry at school.  Spectacularly bad.  The subject was a miasma of foul gases, , disastrous experiments and incomprehensible theory so I dropped it as soon as I could.  Perhaps, however, there remains some slight bruising to my psyche because the moment I unpacked the developing kit that I had ordered just before lockdown I felt a quiver of unease.  Thermometers, decanters, pungent liquids: could this developing business be as easy as they said?

Not in fact a straitjacket but a mini-darkroom.

What you do is wind your film round that white spiral and you pop the spiral in the black tub there (above right).  Since no light must intrude you have to do that with your hands and the kit inside this black bag with the light-tight sleeves here.  If you have a darkroom of course you can use that instead of the black bag.  Once the undeveloped film is out of the camera, onto the spiral and into the tub you can bring them out into daylight because the tub is light-tight.  Simples.

Then you dilute the chemicals according to their label and put them sequentially into the black tub through its clever light-tight spout.  Developer, stopping agent, fixer and wash: all at 20 degrees centigrade for specific lengths of time, inverting at regular intervals.  Out they come, lovely toned negatives that you allow to dry and then scan into your system.

So it is indeed a simple enough process.  But my first two attempts have not been without grief.  First, getting the film onto the spiral can be a minor wrestle in the dark.  Rather unwisely, probably, I started with larger, medium-format film which is harder to get onto the spiral because it can buckle and twist more easily.  Inevitably it did buckle and twist and the results can be seen below in those white scars across the face of the image.

 Next: who knew how hard it could be to get a constant 20 degree stream of water out of a standard mixer tap?  I faffed about endlessly, then gave up and let it sit in jugs until it was just about right.  I think the problem with a mixer tap is that there are two streams of water, one warm and one cool and so it isn’t just the one temperature throughout.  When you come to wash the negatives you really need a stream of water though.  If you don’t wash (or dry) properly you can get the sort of problem you see below. The main image is a detail of the one to the left. Those tiny white marks suggest, I believe, a failure to wash or dry properly.

Then, after drying the developed negatives, I found this. What is that dark shadow down the left-hand side of the photo?  It is visible to a greater or lesser extent on every image in the roll – but only the one roll.  Internet research tells me that there are several reasons you might get a lighter strip down the side but I seem to be on my own with the darker one.  

A number of proverbs spring to mind:

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What’s worth having is never easily got.

If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well

If you can’t fight, get a big hat.

(That last one was a favourite of a long-dead auntie of mine.  It is perhaps of doubtful relevance here but I’ve always liked it.  It suggests that if you look the business, people will take you for the business.  I find its moral ambiguity much more attractive than the questionable certainties of the others.)

Clearly, I need a strategy here before the whole thing becomes an endless replay of the psychological trauma suffered by my fifteen-year-old self in the chemistry lab. I am therefore cropping and reframing the project in my head. I am lifting it right out of that chilly scientific context and setting it down somewhere warmer where I have always felt much more at home: the kitchen.  From now on I am going to see the development process as more like a recipe: necessary ingredients, of course, but a hint of this and a pinch of that too – a craft to be developed over time.  I am not built for the clear-eyed precision of the laboratory scientist, the endless and exact replication of set tasks, nor indeed to follow instructions to the letter. It’s just not my way.

I’ll let you know how I get on.  In the meantime here are a couple that did come out and which I am adding to my pylon series. Magnificent things, these pylons. They can spoil an otherwise pristine countryside of course, but when you are up close and you can hear them hiss and crackle you get a sense of fantastic power. Stephen Spender says “Like whips of anger/With lightning's danger”. I’ll go along with that.

THE PASSING OF THE DAYS

The recent death of an old friend of mine from my Afghan days sent me rushing to my small photo archive to pull out some pictures of him. To my astonishment I had none. I was deeply saddened. So instead of any images of the friend himself I had to make do with the photographs below - which at least helped smoke a few memories out of the back of my brain. They are some forty years old now. I had never owned a camera before but I bought a little Pentax SLR, taught myself the basics and got cracking. I can vaguely remember taking most of these images but I destroyed the negatives long ago so they are scans of prints originally made by local photo shops in the backstreets of Kabul, using who knows what chemicals. The first and second images have always made me think that if you could time travel back to medieval England with a camera you might bring back to the present images like these. Looking back all those years I remember the Afghans as being both dignified and friendly people and I think that maybe you can see some of that in these images.

The lesson I’ve learnt: take photos of your friends and keep them somewhere safe because they mark out the days of your life and provide something to hold onto when the friends themselves are gone.

A teashop, I think.

Firewood sellers.

Preparing firewood.

Guard outside the British embassy. A lovely young man who always waved rather than saluting.

BOOKMAKING

This fabulous array – if I may be so immodest – is the product of a couple of courses that I have been on recently at Hot Bed Press and The Portico Library.  The three thinner ones, bottom right, are all pretty simple combinations of paper and thin card cover which are stitched together in the middle.  The long thin one (bottom middle) is known as Japanese stab stitch and is the same simple construction but you can see how the stitching holds it together.  The bigger grey one and the smaller, thicker one at top left are both open spined so that you can see the decorative stitching which is holding them together.  Top right is a standard hard back with blocks of paper aligned inside (known as ‘signatures’)  The smallest one at top middle is a concertina book with lettering – which I will come back too.

There is a good hour’s worth of stiitching there so I thought I might as well show it off. You get a better idea of the concertina book (acting as support) too.

This kind of bookmaking is not expensive and not too difficult if you are reasonably dexterous.  It is also very contemplative. The handling of simple objects such as paper and card, needle and thread, the coordination of hand and eye, and a steady pace all combine to lower the blood pressure significantly.

My personal interest, as regular readers will know, is in the use of this kind of book for the interaction of text and photograph.  In particular the larger open-spined book and the Japanese stab stitch make layout very simple because they have no signatures: they consist simply of page upon page all sewn together.  This means that layout is a cinch.  With the others layout is more complicated because sections are folded into sections so you have to work out the whole scheme before you start printing.

The other subject that I picked up some good tips on was paper weight.  Paper weight is expressed in ‘grams per square metre’ (gsm) and goes of course from the flimsiest paper to the thickest card.  Obviously there is an optimum range for a book which will combine the practicalities of folding with a reasonably long life.  There are also questions of shade, texture and grain.  Fortunately, at Hot Bed Press, I stumbled on the enormous G F Smith catalogue (also available online) with its seemingly infinite ranges of paper.  Each paper is annotated with shades, weights and so on but best of all, printer compatibility.  Two papers recommended for laserjet printing by our tutor from this range were Munken and Syklus.  (Impressed with that detail?  Just thought I’d let you know.)

So bit by bit I am edging crab-like towards the goal of producing a hand-made photobook combining text and image.  I just have to work out what to put in it now.

Just one last thing.  The rather eyecatching cover of the concertina book is in fact a woodblock letter print that I also made at Hot Bed Press.  We were supposed to be printing words but when I saw the letter outlines in such a large size I decided to ditch meaning and just go for shape.  This was the result.

 I was pleased.  I thought it had a touch of the Soviet Constructivist about it.  I’ll probably frame it.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

After I left the world of full-time employment I had a lot of time on my hands and I realised that I needed a strategy to deal with that.  Having read a bit and thought a bit I decided to chunk that time into four areas of activity which were: earning some money; pursuing the spiritual; charitable volunteering; and having fun.  I stuck to these for quite a while and each New Year I would devise some short-term and some longer-term points of reference within these activities so that I could plot my course.  I wouldn’t call them goals because I am not a great fan of goals: direction I like, but goals I avoid.  I just prefer to maintain a general tack.

After about a decade or so I dropped this system because I was more confident about where I was going and what I was doing.  More recently I’ve found myself in need of some sort of a framework again for my creative activities.  In fact, this blog is part of that because it helps me reflect on what I’m doing both in writing and in photography.

Then last January I set up a few resolutions to navigate my way creatively through the year.  These were mostly courses: an online course in modern architecture (which got cancelled); some bookmaking tuition which I will have completed by the end of January 2020; and some darkroom work - which I did in March.  I may rebook the architecture course but I can’t help thinking that courses, while helpful in their way, can easily become a distraction.  So how can I plot a line through 2020? 

Well, perhaps I have been a little adrift photographically since making the move over the Pennines to Manchester. Photographing whatever happens to float across your lens is a reasonable day to day strategy - for an amateur anyway - but it’s also good to have something longer term in the background.  My new cataloguing system is helping (see Blogpost 25 October) but I am devising at least one self-contained photographic project which I intend will bear some sort of fruit before the end of the year.  Obviously, my lips must remain sealed because the more you talk about these things the less you do anything about them.

Secondly, browsing through this year’s crop of photographs, I realise that I must exercise more control technically.  Swapping from digital to film is not for the fainthearted.  Digital cameras flatter you enormously but a simple film camera lays bare your technical shortcomings mercilessly. A significant weak point for me has been in the development of negatives.  You send them away to a lab and you have no idea what chemicals they are to be steeped in. This affects overall results because the development of the negative is critical to image quality.  To the barricades then!  I will develop my negatives at home because that is the only way to control that bit of the process.  Printing is another matter but I’ll stick to scanning and digital printing for the moment.

And what of Words + Photos?  This seems to have emerged as a major blog theme over 2019.  I keep turning it over in my mind and am going to try this year to put together some short text and images in a way that satisfies me at least.  This will be in handmade book form.

In order to maintain quality in the text I will be submitting haiku to various journals as well. I’ve had longer form prose published in the past but haiku are a completely different discipline. I’ve written lot of them over the years yet have never sent any for publication.  Looking back at them now, that may not have been a bad thing.  A long apprenticeship presumably makes for a better craftsman.

So that should see me through 2020 quite safely. As should this blog, too, of course.

Here’s a photo to end the year with.

I’ve heard it said that all words are metaphors in the sense that they stand in for reality. I suppose the same might be said of photographs. So here you get two metaphors for the price of one. Or maybe a photograph of a word is a double metaphor? This was a rather beautiful gravestone which I chanced across when visiting the ex-cotton town of Rochdale - which just happens to be my birthplace.

TREES, TREES, TREES

Over the years I have tried very hard with my tree recognition skills. For a long time I had a lovely copy of The Observers’ Book Of Trees and several others too and I even took them on my walks with me but, try as I might, I simply could not keep in my head the details I needed to sort out even the most common types. It wasn’t only trees either: I had books on birds, butterflies, shrubs, clouds and even grasses.  At times I was carrying half a library with me on my rambles. But my head just became a kaleidoscope of beaks, wings, leaves and branches.  It was very stressful.

When I moved to Manchester and my new urban life I got rid of nearly all of my books and these nature volumes went too.   Goodbye sylvan tranquillity; hello urban grit. 

All of which is a bit of a lengthy prelude to explaining why, when I walked across Northumbria this summer I was not altogether sure what trees I was taking photos of.  There wasn’t a lot else to snap. I don’t really do your standard landscape.  And no disrespect to Mrs Barker but after nearly forty years of peaceful coexistence I think we have just about reached mutual exhaustion photographically.  Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe we are not. 

So to give myself a challenge I decided to concentrate on trees and took one a day. 

Everyone recognises the hawthorn, don’t they? There is something indomitable about their twisting growth pattern.

And the birch - such a lively tree. We had two of these in the back garden of our old house and when the wind and sun caught the leaves the reflected light would dance around the back rooms.

Hmmmm. I kind of had it my mind that these were poplar but now I’m not so sure.

And birch, birch, birch.

I read somewhere that you will take more photos if you walk round with a camera in your hand than if the camera is slung round your neck. And either of those two will give you more photos than if you walk around with the camera in your bag. But walking ninety odd miles with a camera in my hand or round my neck is just not practical. Especially with the mighty Hasselblad which weighs in at around four pounds. The truth is, I think, that if you are doing serious distances in all weathers then the photography is not going to take priority. But one or two shots a day is not only doable but is an excuse for a break and can make for an interesting mini-project: kissing gates; fence posts; cows’ eyes; signposts; gravestones; footbridges; pylons. They are all there for the taking.

THOSE CREATIVE JUICES YET AGAIN!

I dunno. You think you’ve got all four corners of the suitcase battened down then you look over your shoulder and you find that one of them has popped up again.

By using The Little Game from The Online Photographer website I managed earlier this year (see posts 1-3 in this series in April- June below) to refocus my general photopractice and to give it a bit more definition.  I decided then that I would stick to a core of four categories: Spirit, Growth and Form, Cityscape, and People in Situ.  In the past couple of weeks, having the summer’s photos to catalogue, I decided that it would be logical to use those four categories to keep things in order.  So thanks to the wonders of software I can keep them both in chronological sets but also in subject categories. 

I renamed Cityscape ‘Les Alentours’ – which is simply the French for ‘surroundings’  or ‘environs’ but I thought it leant an air of Gallic sophistication to the humdrum realities of my photolife.  Seized by this notion I then changed People In Situ and gave it the new title of Personae. ‘Persona’ was originally a mask worn by Greek and Roman actors and came to mean the part or character played in the world so I thought the new title gave a certain, well, gravitas.  ‘Spirit’ I changed to Contemplative to widen it, and Growth and Form I left as it was. 

Then I took each of these four and subdivided them, rigidly policing my tendency to lapse into the abstract.  So, for Les Alentours, I have Bridges, Buildings, Underpasses, Walls and so on.  For Personae I have Framed, In Space, Talking, Thinking and suchlike. Ditto for the others.  From now on every photo I keep will fall into its category and subcategory in this system!  It may well feature more than once but this is the basic grid. 

You might think, as I did, that this would be just a technical matter, a question of attribution.  But in fact, a small miracle occurred as soon as I had done this.  Look at the existential crisis I had fallen into when I wrote one of my first blog posts in February 2017 (below entitled My Jigsaw Puzzle Of Photographs).  I was clearly all over the place.  Yet suddenly this has sorted itself into clear patterns.  For example, I never knew that I took so many photos of urban walls.  But look!

I love these Wallscapes.  They seem so personalised – either in their construction or in the layers that have been added over time.  They run all the way from a classical kind of formality to sheer unruliness.  Who did all this (and, in particular, who put that letterbox so high up on the one second from the top? Was it a humane attempt to save the postie’s fingers from the alsatian’s teeth?)

Who did all this? The ghosts of the city, of course!

I feel really buoyed up by this whole process.  You start off with A Little Game and you end up with A Big Discovery.