OF BOOKS AND BACKGROUND HEDGES

            Language is a wonderful thing.  One theory is that it came into existence in early hominoid social groups as a more efficient means of communication than grooming.  I’ve no idea what the evidence is for that but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how important language is in forming relationships and creating status, just as grooming may once have been.  Then what started out as a few grunts and groans ended up as War and Peace, or Hamlet.  Presumably, words just started pouring out, as they still do.  New ones turn up out of nowhere to fulfil a need and disused ones die off.

All the same, it’s not uncommon these days to find someone conjecturing that images will soon usurp language as our primary form of communication.  I think that is pretty unlikely: images cannot make statements and they know nothing of particles such as ‘not’, ‘when’ and ‘if’ and so cannot contain negatives, time, or conditionality.  They can of course arouse emotion - but but they cannot express it.  A photograph of an angry person does not tell you whether the photographer was angry. On the other hand, if I read the words of someone who is very angry I can easily surmise that they are angry (though I in turn may not be).

So the dividing line between words and images is pretty clear.  And when you put the two together you can get some powerful results - advertising and propaganda being two examples. But if you don’t really get it, then the result can be the sort of confusion I noticed in a newspaper piece recently.

Every week in the Guardian there is a Q and A session with a writer in which more or less the same questions are asked: the book that changed me; the last book that made me cry; the book I wished I’d written; and so on.  The writers are generally pretty knowledgeable and, as you’d expect, well-read.  A couple of weeks ago the interviewee was Vick Hope, a broadcaster and writer who this year is one of the judges for the Women’s Prize for fiction.  Her answers showed her also to be intelligent, well-read and knowledgeable.   The accompanying picture though baffled me.  To get the combined effect you can find them both on the Guardian’s website here: you need to see the two together to get the full effect and there is too much to reproduce here. (The quotation under the photo on the website didn’t feature in the hard copy, by the way.)

If you turned the magazine page round and squinted hard at the credits you found that the photo had in fact been shot for an airline company.  Vick Hope is beautifully turned out in an off-the-shoulder evening dress of some sort and she is wearing drop earrings and full make-up.  The foliage background is a bit strange but you can see how it might possibly make sense if you were promoting some sort of international travel.  Her stance is neutral except for the positioning of the right arm, which is rather model-like, and the curious upward tilt of the hand at the hip which has twisted the whole of the forearm up to the elbow and looks a bit uncomfortable.   What I can’t work out though is the connection between this photograph and the words below it about Vick Hope’s tastes in literature.  The two are miles apart – they aren’t even within waving distance.

This is not to say that a woman who dresses in a glamorous evening dress and drop earrings cannot be a perfectly serious literary figure.  Obviously, she can.  But for the purposes of the Guardian literary pages the picture adds nothing to the Q and A session.  There is no mention in the text of travel, parties, fashion, or even an interest in background  hedgerows.  Text and image are about two completely different things and you wonder why on earth they were ever paired together like this.  The photo does not supplement the text.  It illustrates nothing.  And the text tells us nothing about the photo.

This is not uncommon. There will be a press article about someone whose appearance is of little relevance to its contents. Yet the inevitable photograph appears next to the text, floating around like an unmoored barrage balloon. It makes me think of C S Lewis and his famous lecture on The Two Cultures. He argued that the many contemporary ills (this was 60 years ago) could be traced to the gap between the two worlds of science and the humanities. Scientists knew little of the humanities and humanists knew little of science. The same is true now of the visual world and the verbal world. Visual literacy is for specialists - and those specialists do not always have the best of intentions.

This is the great unexplored area.  Words are powerful.  Text is powerful.  Working together they are unstoppable; yet we are still at the grunt and groan stage in analysing the text/image relationship.  The ideas have not yet emerged which could throw a bridge across the waters dividing the two.

PILGRIMAGE

Since little stirs through the dark days of February - especially in lockdown - I thought I would try to cheer things up a bit with another travel tale (much as I did early last year), this time from about ten years ago. The journey was in deepest Russia. The mode of transport was a motorcycle and sidecar - a combination generally known to enthusiasts as a “combo” or “outfit”. It is, in my opinion, the great but sadly forgotten means of transport: it combines all the exhilaration of a motorcycle with the luggage-carrying capacity of a small car. Since Russia is a country which fascinates me, putting the two together seemed to be a masterstroke. I wrote the article up on return and it was duly published in a motorcycle mag. I have amended it for this blog to miss out matters of interest only to dyed in the wool petrolheads.

PILGRIMAGE

WARNING:  Due to the nature of the tour certain everyday words used in this article have a specialised meaning which I ought to explain.  They are as follows: 

Day: a length of time between periods of sleep not measured in hours and bearing no relationship at all to dawn, dusk, planetary cycles or any other cosmic phenomena whatsoever; 

Road: a generally consistent direction across the earth’s surface varying from a hideously dangerous four-lane highway to the vaguest hint of a track disappearing into trees; 

Tent: an expanse of tarpaulin anchored to the ground by at least three corners which is apparently designed to accelerate the momentum of falling rain; 

Meal: anything from a mouthful of chocolate to a stomach-straining sequence of courses; 

Route:  a week’s generally circular direction, largely made up from hour to hour;   

Guide:  Sergei; 

Sergei:  the guy with the map;

Map:  that crumpled piece of paper Sergei has in his hand;

Making our way through deepest Russia on board the magnificent Ural 750 outfit.

 Here is the story.  Mrs Barker and I fancied an adventure.  Being keen motorcyclists and thinking, as we were, about getting back into sidecarring, we decided to go on the annual Pilgrimage to Irbit.  This is a week’s tour of backroads Russia organised by the West European importer of Ural motorcycles which are the only present-day purpose-built motorcycle and sidecar outfits.  They are mechanically very simple, or primitive some might say, versions of pre-war BMWs.  The design plans for them were either supplied by the Nazis under the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact; or simply the result of the Russians buying one, taking it apart and copying it.  Like so many things in Russia - No One Really Knows.  Irbit, a town of some 40,000 souls in Sverdlovsk oblast, is the site of the factory which makes these outfits. Hence the idea of “Pilgrimage”.

 So we paid our money, we got our visas and we turned up in Prague airport on the appointed day.  We had very little idea of what would fill the next week other than that it would be in Russia and would involve Ural outfits, a  museum and factory visit, a rally and some touring.  We had both been to Russia a number of times before and can speak conversational Russian.  So we thought we knew roughly what to expect. 

I suppose that, even without explicit directions, our party were all bound to bump into one another eventually at the airport since we were getting on the same plane to Ekaterinburg.  There were ten of us: eight British and two French.   Birgit, our Austrian minder and ace sidecar pilot, sketched out the plan for the first day: four hour flight to Ekaterinburg, breakfast (bodytime midnight), a coach tour of the city, four-hour drive to Irbit, hotel check-in, tour of the Irbit Motorcycle Museum,  tour of the Ural factory; pick up the outfits, dinner.  Then we could go to bed.  For those who had flown direct from the UK rather than taking a day or two in Prague that was a good 24 hours non-stop. 

The coach tour of Ekaterinburg was memorable largely for a visit to the site where the Russian imperial family was shot in 1917 and a glimpse of Boris Yeltsin’s old office when he was party boss in the 1980’s.  We then careered on to Irbit – a city unremarkable for anything really other than motorcycle production.   At the motorcycle museum those new to Russia learnt an important lesson right away.  This was that the answer to any question you ask of officialdom may depend entirely on the wording of the question. 

“Could we” we asked “take photos in the museum?”.

 “Nyet!  You have to buy a permit to do that!”  Very high price mentioned. 

We retreated to confer and then returned.  “Could we buy a group permit?” 

“Nyet!  These do not exist!” 

Another retreat and return. “Okay.  Where would we buy this permit?” 

“The permit seller is having her break!” 

Retreat.  Bright spark.  Return.  

“Could we buy the permits at the end of the tour?” 

Some thought.  “Da!” 

So we all snapped away and of course nothing more was ever said about permits.  This is an Important Russian Lesson:  when you meet with a “Nyet!” it’s probably your fault for asking the question in the wrong way. 

As you might expect, the museum was full of old Soviet motorcycles – some not entirely innocent of dust.  Our guide was at pains to point out however that it had recently been taken over by the government and was now an official State Museum.  “Just like the Hermitage in St Petersburg” he said  - which I felt was overstating the case a little.   

The factory was just down the road from the museum. In its heyday it consisted of 12 huge production sheds going full tilt and employing some 12000 workers. 

No tumbleweed but a certain air of dereliction…..

Now they are down to one shed and 400 employees.  In the yards, weeds grow up through cracked concrete and buildings are boarded up.  I didn’t actually see any tumbleweed blowing through these alleys nor hear any banjo twanging desolately but they didn’t seem far away.  So I stood there, closed my eyes and imagined the industrial clamour when the factory was first moved east during the war to keep it safe from the advancing German forces.  I conjured up mental pictures of hero workers toiling day and night on the soviet war effort.  In those days, we had been told at the museum, if a worker was ten minutes late for a shift they lost their half-kilo daily bread allowance.  If they were twenty minutes late they got ten years in the Gulag. 

But it’s easy to get nostalgic over such straightforward management techniques so I opened my eyes again and stepped with the group into the one functioning shed.  

Insiide the one functioning shed…..

Not exactly state of the art…..

It was spellbinding.  I love old industrial sites: the machinery, the smells, the shafts of sunlight falling on the dust of forgotten corners.  The workers themselves seemed redolent of another era with those strong features and bulging muscles that stared out from old Soviet posters as yet another production target was exceeded.  I saw one chap hump a huge lump of engine block from one bench to another.  In his trainers.  Health and Safety would have freaked out. 

A worker clears up her workbench….

And this is how to get a shine on your petrol tank….

A dusty but photogenic corner of the factory….

 Eight brand new Ural outfits had been prepped for us so we hopped onto these and rode back to the hotel in downtown Irbit.  It was a gloriously unreconstructed Soviet era pile. These places are not luxurious but are always clean and basic in my experience.  We had just got into our room and unpacked when a plumber arrived to work on the shower turning off the water on a stiflingly hot day.  This could have been a negative experience but, then again, how often do you get to talk to a Russian plumber about cold solder?

 After that one last comfy night in a proper bed we headed off the next day for the Irbit Rally – one of Russia’s biggest and best.

Let the good times roll…..

Check out the samovar.

 Part way through the day a great parade of bikes ran through town.  Crowds lined the streets as we rode through the heat and the dust, stopping to pay respect at the war memorial, jinking from side to side to miss the potholes, gawping at the crumbling infrastructure.  This is the country that was the first to send a man into space,  yet during the parade my eye was drawn to an old woman bent over a street corner standpipe collecting her domestic water…….. 

I still had to pinch myself.  For most of my life towns like this were closed to foreigners.  This was the enemy.  Now here I was waving and smiling at them as they cheered us on our way. 

Part of the afternoon’s entertainment….

The entertainment  at the show was a characteristically Russian fantasy.  First up on stage was a traditional small Russian choir and dance group, followed by young children reciting poetry – Russian is a very beautiful language and you don’t need to understand the poetry to appreciate its rhythms and cadences.  Then, as the night wore on, out came the inevitable heavy rock bands.  Campfires glowed in the dark and the Russians were producing wonderful dishes on blackened and battered pots and pans over campfires.  None of your namby-pamby camping stoves here. 

Not a Trangia in sight….

Not a world record, but definitely a lot of fun…..

Sergei the Magnificent

Next morning, many of the revellers had departed and quiet had descended by the time a loud banging, rattling and revving split the Sunday peace and a battered red Mercedes van bounced into view spluttering to a stop beside our tents.  Inside were our Support Team: burly Sergei, ex-all Russia sidecar motocross champ; lugubrious Sasha his sidekick; and their wives Svetlana and Olga.  They had spent the morning victualling up and a little after midday our column set out.  For some it was to be all about the miles but for me – I just wanted to go looking for Russia.

I found Russia at very close quarters some several minutes later.  Despite ten years experience of riding an outfit – admittedly not a Ural – I was disconcerted to find that at the first right-hand bend of any significance my machine simply went straight on.   We shot over the opposite (thankfully empty) carriageway and verge and ploughed through a hedgerow, fortunately avoiding any trees.  Exactly the same thing had happened to one of us the day before and he had come to rest unscathed in a field.  Unfortunately for us, on the far side of the hedgerow was not a field, but a lake.  And in we went.  You might say, of course, that if you are going to hit something in such circumstances then several feet of water and soft mud are not to be sneezed at. 

We were unhurt though soaked.  The outfit had to be pulled out with a towrope and the motorcycle and engine were submerged for about half an hour while that was done by Sergei and Sasha and assorted bystanders.  I assumed that my three-wheeled adventure had ended then and there.  No bike – no tour.  Oh ye of little faith.   In a nearby field they drained the oils, dried off the spark plugs and emptied out the carburettor float bowls.  Then they towed it round the field and we watched the pistons pump the water out of the cylinder heads in a sparkling sunlit parabola.  Back in with the plugs, filled up with oil and, mirabile dictu, it started first time.  I could hardly believe my eyes.  Since it tried to repeat its going-straight-on trick again at the next bend I handed it over to a more experienced Uralist to check who pointed out that the steering damper was tightened right up.  Once adjusted the handling reverted to nearer normal. 

We spent the next four days on tour.  There was plenty of on-road and plenty of off-road and plenty of something in between – the rough dirt roads that service the villages and farmsteads in the Russian countryside. 

There were plenty of these to cross….

If you changed the people back into traditional Russian clothing much of what we saw as we rolled through these villages in the summer light could have come straight out of nineteenth-century landscape painting: Aivazovsky, Levitan, Shishkin and, my favourite, Arkip Kuindzhy.  Ducks and geese wandered at will.  Many of the traditional wooden houses were well-cared for with lovely vegetable gardens.  Others were tumbledown and had clearly been abandoned in the flight to the cities.  Out in the fields there were some modern tractors but also horse-driven ploughing.  Yet what looked like fairly up-to-date agricultural machinery could at times be seen rusting in compounds around the villages.  Unlike England, much of the landscape seems untouched by mankind, just rolling acres of forest and plain to the horizon.  I loved every moment of it. 

Errrr…… where’s the road?

We really got to poke around behind the scenes in backwoods Russia.  The sense of adventure was heightened by the fact that we seemed to spend most of our time either partly or completely lost.  At one point, I had the distinct impression of going through the same village three times in one afternoon.  One of my abiding memories of the tour will be of Sergei skidding to a halt, leaping out of the van onto some passing local, stabbing a forefinger at the map, waving an arm to the four points of the compass, shouting incomprehensibly then leaping back into the van and roaring off, leaving the passerby in a haze of diesel fumes and staring in bewilderment at our passing cavalcade. 

You can lock the drive to the sidecar wheel so that you have three-wheel drive. But it didn’t help much here.

 Campsites were pretty wild and very picturesque.  The camping gear was adequate though if the weather had been very rough I am not sure how well it would have coped.  Although the daytime weather was beautifully sunny and warm there was a lot of rain at night and our tent leaked as did others.

Mother Russia. The wonderful Svetlana and Olga.

Cooking was done by Svetlana and Olga and was delicious.  All they had was a calor gas stove somewhere in the depths of the red van but everything was fresh, hot, nutritious and smothered in delicious dill.  They even put dill on the breakfast fried eggs (now a standard serving procedure in the Barker household).  Meals were, um, irregular: it was best to eat whenever you could since you were never sure when the next opportunity would arise.  But every evening we would gather round the campfire, split a few beers and munch on some wonderful Svetlana/Olga production.  

Our route described a 500km rough arc from Irbit back to Ekaterinburg.  The mileage may not seem great but you have to remember that some half of it was spent off-road.  Once or twice the going got so tough that we needed to find a tractor to tow the Mercedes through and then four or five of us had to haul each machine over ruts about two or three feet deep.  

This time the Mercedes van got stuck and the local farmer came out to lend a hand. He eventually had to go and get a tractor…

 Our second night stop was just outside the village of Glinskoye.  Here we were scheduled to have a free day so that we could do a little touring on our own.  However, we were told that Sergei was off to do ‘a little shopping’ and we could go with him if we liked.  Most of us did and we were not disappointed as the day developed in traditional Russian style.  We did indeed call in at a village shop – and very well-stocked it was too.  Next we rumbled to a halt outside an imposing pair of double gates by a beautiful house with carved decorations.  In we went to find the owner, Nikolai - not surprisingly a woodcarver by trade – who had a rather good banya (a traditional Russian steam bath) to one side of his yard.  After some banter we were all invited back later in the afternoon for some samogon (home-distilled liquor) and a good steam.  We trundled off through the village backstreets to another house into which Sergei disappeared; out came the owner who turned out to be the mayor of the commune.  He took us off to his market garden where we picked all the vegetables – carrots, onions, leeks, beetroot, tomatoes, for our meal later.  Did we want a cup of tea next, asked Sergei.  Yes!  This day was building up a momentum all of its own.  He took us to a ‘stolovaya’ a Russian workers’ canteen which serviced the factory over the road.  The factory was once in collective farm ownership but had metamorphosed into what the mayor, Pavel, called a cooperative producing milk and meat.   

In the stolovaya the serving ladies were disappointed that we had come all the way from England and were not eating their food.  Sergei took up their cause.  Three times he pressed us and in the end we could not refuse any longer.  Pelmeni (a kind of Russian ravioli) were served up for the meateaters and lovely crunchy salad with stewed vegetables for the non-carnivores.  National honour satisfied Sergei and the ladies beamed proudly at us. 

Back at the campsite we delivered the vegetables and another meal was served up mid-afternoon.  At five o’ clock we were back at Nikolai’s for the banya and beautiful pizza-like savoury pastries followed by sweet plum and apple ones all freshly baked by his wife.  This was washed down by his samogon (grain, water and yeast and nothing else, Nikolai told us) and a delicious non-alcoholic strawberry compote.  

The secrets of the banya….

The banya (naked – the Russians will hear of nothing else) was about as hot as I could bear.  But Sergei was a hard man and threw more water on the coals. Then he started the rub-down with ‘venniki’ - the bundles of birch leaves which had been soaking and which Russians claim are the cure for virtually all ills.  At the end I was so jiggered that when Sergei said ‘Get up’ I thought that he said ‘Stay there’ and lay motionless.  After two attempts he obviously concluded that I was possibly dead and started heaving me off the table for resuscitation.  Served him right, I thought darkly. 

It was past eight by the time we got back to the campsite well-scrubbed and steamed to find Pavel the mayor and Larissa his wife who had come to pay us all an official visit.  They are keen to encourage tourism to the area they explained.  It turned out that there had been two hundred campers on this site a few days ago and a he had arranged a special clean-up for the foreign visitors.  They were a very pleasant couple and we chatted as night fell and Svetlana and Olga served up yet another meal.  Speeches were made, medals awarded, presents exchanged and vows of friendship made. 

As I lay in my sleeping bag that night I ruminated that when a Russian asks you if you want to go for a little shopping it is wise to tag along for the ride.  I suddenly realised too that I had eaten five full meals that day.  Which kind of made up for the day before when for reasons I never quite fathomed all we ate was two doughnuts until the evening.  Russia – it’s feast or famine. 

The days slid past and our itinerary seemed to slip into a very Russian dream state. They even have a word for it: ‘mechta’.  This is often translated as ‘dream’ but it is really a daydream, a kind of sleepwalking state applied to all functions.  It is truly maddening when you are trying to organise anything but deeply relaxing when you are on a tour such as this.  All you have to do is lie back, stop asking questions and appreciate each moment as it passes. The weather continued to be fabulous – warm sunshine and a cooling breeze – and the bikes rumbled along taking everything in their stride.

The van gets stuck again. Sergei and Sasha take the opportunity to brandish the map at the passing tractor driver…..

 At the end of our final day we found ourselves in the village of Bingy a few miles from the larger town of Nevyansk.  We rolled to a stop outside a seemingly ordinary wooden house, its double gates were opened and we guided the combos into the yard and parked up.  Then the owners, Steffan, a German and his Russian wife Olga took us for a tour of their home.  In this country you really never know what is round the corner.  This was a kind of eco-guesthouse.  So along with the solar showers and the compost toilets there was an extension to the house built by traditional methods.  This appeared to mean that despite the river at the bottom of the garden it was not set on a concrete raft and so tended to expand and contract according to the atmospheric humidity.  Rare is the day, Steffan told us, that you can open both the door and the windows.  It tends to be one or the other…….  Best of all though were the four yurts in the garden – a real bed for the night!   

Before dinner a Russian Orthodox priest came to bless us and the bikes.  He stayed to eat and it turned out that before the priesthood he was lead guitarist in a punk rock band.  And so it was that I found myself in a small village somewhere east of the Urals having a vodka-fuelled in-depth discussion with this priest about Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.  It was that dreamstate again.

Blessing the bikes…

 The final morning was tough.  We took to a motorway to get back to Ekaterinburg and this became a kind of endurance test.  Russian main roads and motorways are dangerous.  There is little of the highway engineering we are used to in the west, the surfaces are poor, and the traffic fast.  This doubtless accounts for the accident statistics – which are horrific. So we hung on grimly.  Levels of concentration were not helped by the fact that this seemed to be a famine day.  One fried egg for breakfast and that appeared to be it.  After about sixty kilometres we turned off and headed for the continental divide – where Europe meets Asia.  This is not apparently a notional line but was scientifically validated by Vasily Tatischev in the 18th century.  We lined the outfits up, shook hands across the two continents, ate lunch (a small bar of chocolate) and then, as the skies darkened for the first time on our trip, we headed off to a compound where we parked the bikes up and took a coach back into Ekaterinburg through a cloudburst.  How satisfying to have missed it on the combos by minutes…..

To the left - Europe. To the right - Asia. You can see the storm clouds massing behind us.

 Next morning, there was a last-minute scramble for the plane back to Prague and we only just made it.  As I watched Ekaterinburg disappear below I reflected on the whole experience from the time we decided to go to that very moment. 

The trip did not come cheap.  The basic price for one was 1900 euros and for two was 3700 – which included the flight to Ekaterinburg.  Say about £3000.  Then there is the flight to Prague which cost us £160 and the visa fees which also came to £160.  It is strongly recommended that you have a number of immunisations two of which are not available on the NHS and these cost a whopping £200 per person.  So that’s another £400.  All that adds up to not far off £4000 for the trip for two.  Against that you spend very little on the trip itself since all the food is free and so is most of the alcohol.  All the same, £4000 for a two-person one-week holiday is, in my book, expensive.  If you were simply to take off with your combo from the UK you could get a long way for that sum and doubtless have many adventures on the way. 

I’d like to say that the whole thing was well-organised but, hand on heart, I cannot.  For me that is part of its attraction.  If you want an adventure then you have to accept that it can get messy.  That is the nature of adventures.  Otherwise you would book a holiday with one of those firms that pretends to be extreme but in which every minute of every day is very safely accounted for.  And you still pay a fortune. 

But the trip wildly exceeded our expectations.  We just loved the whole thing.  We made some good friends; we got to see parts of Russia that were really off the beaten track; we were able to immerse ourselves in Uralling; and each day was filled with incident and interest.  We had a real adventure and what more can you ask for?

That was a fine adventure…..

I’m afraid that I can’t attribute any of the photos above. I myself didn’t bring many images back because my camera got soaked in the lake. So most of these photos were taken by the others on the trip but I can’t for the life of me remember who took what. I’m sure they won’t mind.

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.

STEEL - OIL - STEAM

When I first put a series of photos together and tried to think of a title for it I came up against a blank wall.  I seemed to be forcing the little darlings into a strait jacket.  I think I may not be alone because I am often struck when leafing through photobooks of how many are couched in vague abstractions: time, memory, identity and so on.  I even came across one the other week about  “the dualities of mortality”.   My tastes run to rather earthier topics so when I spotted a photobook recently entitled Steel-Oil-Steam I was onto it like a flash.  I got round my self-imposed limit of £20 (it costs £24) by the simple ruse of inviting someone to buy it for me as a Christmas present.  Clever, eh?

It’s a lovely little book of text and photographs by Tom Evans and Terry Hulf* which takes as its subject the doings of the Kent and East Sussex Railway - a heritage line which runs from Tenterden in Kent to Bodiam in East Sussex.  Its 80-some pages depict locomotives, lines, hardware, workshops, employees and volunteers and the photographs are interspersed with quotes from these two latter about work and life on the line.  An introductory essay quite properly concerns itself with the workings of the line and leaves the photos to speak for themselves.

The camera used for the series was a 15” x 12” ultra large format model made by J T Chapman here in Manchester in the 1880s, the characteristics of which lend a timeless quality to the 21st century.  This look is doubtless the product of its lens (the 1875 original) and, I think, also the use of orthochromatic film – an early type of film emulsion which is less sensitive to the full colour spectrum.  So the whole series of images is characterised mostly by a range of clear but dark tones well-fitted to the steel, oil, gleam and grime of its subject.

Shovels and Irons, 2019

The disappearance of heavy industry from the UK over the last several decades mostly leaves us only with memories of its very distinctive shapes.  There were the large-scale blast furnaces, goods trains, half-built ships and coke ovens  of course. But there were also smaller scale forms around us - tools, signs, workboots, hands, waste - perhaps unnoticed at the time, whose blacks, silvers and greys were enhanced by a patina of filings and oilstains which you can see quite clearly in these pictures: like this one below, for example.

Spanners, Washout Plugs and Fusible Plugs

(And as anyone who has been in one will know – it’s not only the shapes of a workshop.  It’s also the smells.  On my lunchtime walks around Hull where I used to work I was always drawn inexorably to a small general engineering shop where I would hang around outside its double doors and suck in the narcotic scent of ground metal to counter the sterility of my morning in the office.)

The locomotives themselves, the wheels and the rails and the steel sheeting all set up basic visual forms: cylinder, circle, line and rectangle which draw the eye around the images in a way I find rather reassuring.  They remind me of a quote from Saint Exupéry that I once wrote down and for which I no longer have the source.  He was talking about the lines of an aircraft and said that they seemed not so much to have been designed as discovered.  The same is true of these locomotive images: the basic forms are timeless and were once pressed into service around us over and over again. Yet they seem less noticeable now, as if the modern world of colour had hidden them.

Rolvenden Yard with 0-6-0 Pannier Tank, 2016

 Maybe it’s my age.  Maybe it takes me back to my boyhood.  But I do have adult form in these matters as well.  For several decades I rode and fettled my own ageing motorcycles in my homebuilt workshop.  You can’t explain the intoxication of  maintaining machinery in working order.  It keeps you very grounded.

So - without wanting to romanticise - there is a kind of intoxication in this world and it comes in the portraits and quotations which run through the book.  In a sense (and I may be rather cleaving towards the abstract myself here) you might say that one of the book’s themes is the enthusiasm that clearly binds all the workers together.

Sheila McKenna, Volunteer Steam Raiser, 2019.  (It could be 1919 though. The softness of form, the neutral expression, the insouciant flip of the jacket collar: all straight out of the nineteenth century.  And that head torch and cap: just a hint of steampunk I think….)

Here are a couple of the quotes.

“I wake up in the morning looking forward to going to work and hate it at the end of the day when I have to go home.  I would love to just stay and carry on.” (Jamie Clapp.)

A steam engine is the most spectacular and engaging form of power.  You can see it, hear it and smell it.  The exhaust steam, smoke, and motion stimulate all the senses.”  (Richard Moffatt.)

(Which puts me in mind of the immortal words of a Brummie motorcyclist I once fell into deep conversation with.  I’ve never forgotten them.  “Choice of tyre lever, Peter…..” he said, looking me in the eye “……it’s a very personal thing.”)

Steel-Oil-Steam definitely gets my Photobook of 2020 award.  It’s true that it was the only 2020 photobook that I actually bought, since all the others were secondhand, but so what?  It’s a lovely unassuming little publication which raises the spirits and certainly has my warmest recommendation. 

Steel-Oil-Steam, Evans + Hulf, Samson Press, 2020, £24.  You can buy the book from the website link which is in bold in the first paragraph above.  Also, Tom Evans will be giving a Royal Photographic Society talk - on Zoom, of course -about the camera, the photographs and the book on 4 February. Details are at https://rps.org/Steam. Tickets are free and bookings come with a special offer to buy the book at a discount.  See you there.

(Copyright in all photographs and quotations in this blogpost rests with Evans + Hulf to whom I’m grateful for permission to reproduce.)

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.

HIROH KIKAI 1945-2020

The death of Hiroh Kikai seems to have gone largely unnoted in the photoworld.  Yet over several decades he produced what I think is one of the truly great series of photographs: Asakusa Portraits.*   From the mid-1980s onwards he would go regularly to Senso-Ji Buddhist temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, and wait for visitors whose appearance caught his eye.  He would then ask them to let him photograph them in one of several regular spots in the temple grounds.  He took two or three photos of each, against a backdrop of the temple’s red walls, letting them adopt their own stance and making a three-quarter or waist-level shot always with the same camera, a Hasselblad.  Put like that it sounds pretty formulaic, but when I first stumbled upon his work quite by chance in a university library I was immediately transfixed, for two reasons.  The first was a remark he made in a foreword to the book; and the second was the caption – I might even say the micro-text, included with the images.  Like this.

A man who said he'd just had a drunken quarrel

 But let’s go back to the remark in the foreword.  What he said (I’m quoting from memory here because I don’t have the book) was that his ex-university professor of philosophy lent him the money to buy a Hasselblad one day when he had mentioned that the price had dropped due to an exchange rate fluctuation.  He soon realised that the Hasselblad medium-format camera is a very particular kind of machine.  It excels in some situations and is very difficult to use in others.  Many people might have tried it and then discarded it in order to keep all their photographic options open.  But he did something very philosophical which I always try to bear in mind: he decided to take only those photos which the Hasselblad was made for.  Other possibilities he just pushed to the back of his mind.  That strikes me as being very clear thinking and it seems to introduce the kind of discipline which we are often told is at the heart of creativity.  We seem to have completely lost this idea now - that constant repetition may strip away layers to reveal an essence in a way that constant variety does not. 

A clerk who was letting her hair grow long,

The captions are wry, witty and compassionate.  He says: “….these captions and these photographs are exactly the same thing. At least, they come from the same approach. For me they are intrinsically linked and both create an intense expressiveness.  Photography and writing are part of the same battle for me: both involve making something intelligible which is not necessarily so….”* *  As I’ve written often enough before, the way that words and photos can play together fascinates me.  Get it wrong and they seem to wrestle and exhaust themselves; but get it right and they really dance, as they do here. 

"I've always wanted to be different since I was a kid, and I've always been knocked around for it."

The photos are remarkable in their own right – that lovely sculpting of tones, in particular. So what is it that the text adds? The words are mostly drawn from short conversations he had with his subjects, so they are not labels as most photographic captions are; they slip out of the invisible world of the spoken word - so fleeting that they reflect the split-second of the photograph itself. Psychologically they act almost like a flash-bulb. In their lightness and wit they tell us something about the photographer, too. Sometimes they are simply descriptions, perhaps because the subject gave nothing away in conversation (‘a man with a penetrating gaze’ or ‘a man wearing four watches’) but they still suggest the invisible world we all carry around with us. We are left with a pleasing balance that HK pulls off time and time again.

Asakusa Portraits which is now out of print fetches about £100 secondhand but the 2020 Persona can be had for a little more than that including postage from Japan. I am tempted, I must say, to break my ‘no-more-than-twenty-pounds-for-a-photobook’ rule - just this once.

HIROH KIKAI 18/3/1945- 19/10/2020 (portrait from Instagram)

 *Asakusa Portraits was published in 2008 by Steidl. Earlier this year further photographs in the series were published by Chikumasobo under the title “PERSONA: The Final Chapter 2005-18”. I have also seen reference to an earlier (2004) PERSONA edition.

**(‘intense expressiveness’?  Hmmmm… I bet that packs more of a punch in the original Japanese.)  The quote is from a Lensculture interview with Marc Feustel which can be found here 

You can find more of HK’s work with the captions here and here.

All photos from Asakusa Portraits © the estate of Hiroh Kikai, courtesy of Steidl.

RED COLOUR NEWS SOLDIER

In 1966 during the tumult of China’s Cultural Revolution, Li Zhensheng was working as a news photographer for the Heilongjiang Daily. He realised that he needed a Red Guard armband to get better access to events so he tried to join the two Red Guard units at his newspaper. When one turned him down for being too conservative and the other for not being proletarian enough, he formed his own unit with some pals.  There were only seven of them so they couldn’t be a rebel “group”; they had to be a “fighting team”.  For the next few months his fighting team and the two other groups argued endlessly about who was the most revolutionary.  In the end they decided to take it to Beijing and they sent their representatives to the Chinese Media Association in the capital to debate it out.  The Association decided in favour of Li’s group and gave them a new name – Red Colour News Soldier – with an armband and characters copied from Mao’s own calligraphy. 

Li’s armband bearing the official stamp of the “National Headquarters of the Revolutionary Rebels in News Media”.

That armband got him everywhere and it is the reason that we now have his archive of some 30,000 annotated negatives recording exactly what he saw. Since he believed deeply in the role of the photographer as a reporter of events he often strayed from his brief – which was to take only images giving a positive impression of events.

“A young Red Guard performs the “Loyalty Dance” while awaiting Chairman Mao’s appearance in Tiananmen Square.”

He took forbidden ones too – known as “beyond the assignment”.

“Accused of bearing a resemblance to Chairman Mao, Heilongjiang province Governor Li Fanwu’s hair is brutally shaved and torn by zealous young Red Guards in Red Guard Square.”

When things hotted up photographers had to hand in all their negatives for destruction. Li was himself finally attacked in public and sent to a “school of rectification” for two years but he had hidden his negatives under the floorboards in his one room flat. Much later, when things had quietened down, he was able to smuggle these out to New York resulting in the publication early in the new century of a selection under the title Red Colour News Soldier (Phaidon, 2003).  I picked up a copy of this 300-page volume in my local secondhand bookshop for a few pounds. 

I felt a curious reluctance to read it for a few weeks, perhaps because it felt so monumental.  Then in the same bookshop I happened across a small tome entitled My Bodhi Tree by Zhang Xianliang which is the second volume of the author’s account of his life in a Labour Reform Camp during the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties and early sixties.  Now I had point and counterpoint: the ground-level view from the labour camp and the high-level reportage from the photography. 

The strange thing about both Li and Zhang is that they were not what you could call counter-revolutionaries.  At first, Li was a great enthusiast for the Cultural Revolution; and Zhang says that he took the notion of struggle and self-criticism sessions very seriously.  At that point, neither of them doubted that Mao Zedong was leading the country to a glorious future.

Anyone interested in the history of these turbulent times in China can easily read it up.  The Great Leap Forward was a disastrous attempt to modernise the Chinese economy in the late 1950s and early 1960s resulting in a famine which killed millions. The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to reassert his power in the late 60s and onwards through the destruction of the Communist Party structure by young Red Guards. What interests me though, as you might imagine, is what the photographs and words show and how they record events.

The life of a photograph can be a funny thing.  Here we have images from negatives once so secret and so dangerous that had they been discovered under the floorboards of Li’s house the results for him would have been catastrophic.  Yet no more than 30 years later they emerge, blinking, into the daylight, mute yet somehow loaded.  Back then they would have been counter-revolutionary lies: now they are testaments to truth.  Yet the photograph has not changed: only the circumstances are different.  So what is the “truth” that a photograph is supposed to represent?  It seems to be little more than a mirror into which we gaze to see reflected back our own shadowy gaze.

The caption to this photograph – taken just after the death of Mao Ze Dong - is: “A woman sheds a tear in People’s Stadium during the official memorial on 18 September”  Even that expression “sheds a tear” is ambiguous.  Was she forcing a couple of drops out, or was this an unstoppable damburst on the death of her hero?  We tend to think that these are contrived performances but, real or orchestrated, are they in fact so different from the public displays of grief in the UK on the death, for example, of The Princess of Wales in 1997?

The structure of My Bodhi Tree is not dissimilar to that of the photobook.  It is a commentary on the author’s 1960 prison diary.  The diary excerpts are snapshots, the verbal equivalent of Li’s photos and the commentary fleshes out the background to the diary much as Li’s commentary fleshes out his photographs. The diaries are strictly factual and record a life of hard labour and starvation rations.  Yet the author comments that it wasn’t that unpleasant if you adapted.  At least you got some food, while on the outside a mass famine was killing some 20 million people. So even the words can’t nail it: the diary records dreadful conditions but the author says maybe it wasn’t so bad.  The idea had been to replicate the Soviet Gulag system but there weren’t the materials to build prisons like that in China; and the cadres running the Chinese camps were themselves peasants who had no experience or interest in the organisation of repression.  Yet more ambiguity.

In a foreword to Red Colour News Soldier, Jonathan D Spence, (Professor of History at Yale University) writes that most historians believe that the longer the time elapsed after a given event, the easier it will become to interpret that event.  Yet that is not true of the Cultural Revolution in China, he says.  As time has passed it has become harder and harder to make sense of it: the deliberate unleashing of the forces of chaos; the calculated setting of one section of society against another; the dizzying change of faces at the top; the endless reversals of policy.  (I won’t draw the obvious parallel.)

He goes on to say that Li’s photographs (and presumably he would include books like Zhang’s) may be able to help rectify that.  Maybe they will, which is great for professional historians. For the rest of us they seem to me to be more evidence of the slipperiness of experience.  It’s here and it is gone.  Historians may try to cram it into boxes but somehow it always seems to wriggle out again. The photographs and the diaries, the raw material, survive for us to make of them what we will.

THE FRAMEMAKER'S LOT

When I was going down to Leicester regularly for my photohistory course my route from the railway station to university took me past the city’s New Walk Art Gallery.  Like many municipal galleries it still has the truly wonderful free entry policy.  (In Hull, when I lived over that way, municipal budgets having been decimated, the City Fathers reluctantly took the decision to charge for entrance to the great Ferens Art Gallery.  Then they decided to make exceptions for the young, old, unwaged, students and various other categories.  In the end it turned out that the cost of administering the exemptions would be more than the income from charging for entry so they went back to free-for-everyone.  Good on’em.)

If I’ve paid twenty quid or so to get into a gallery I find that a heavy feeling comes over me because I’m going to have to stay for an exhaustingly long time to justify the cost.  But with free entry you can just nip in, have a quick look at one or two of your favourites and be on your way.  It’s a bit like saying a quick prayer in church, if that is your bag.

So, in Leicester, if I had a few moments to spare, I would nip into the New Walk Gallery and up onto the first floor where they had a good collection of German expressionist works from the interwar years (link here).  I liked many of the paintings but I was particularly struck by the mounting and framing. It was very simple and had aged beautifully.  They were mostly light-to-mid shade slim wooden frames which had been stained and polished or varnished and then left to develop a lovely patina over the years. You can get an idea at about the 30 second mark in this video.  It seemed to me that this worked well because the images were small and a bigger frame would have rather overwhelmed them.

Photograph of Sir Elton John by Irving Penn, part of Sir Elton John collection. Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

I had long thought that the standard white mount and black frame did very little for the average photo: too stark, too unimaginative, too one-size-fits-all.  It’s very common but that is probably because it is inexpensive.  It is also very  easy to do as I soon found out when I started my own framing. If you don’t get a perfect 45 degrees for each corner angle you use a black felt-tip pen to ink in the exposed wood in the angle and that covers up inaccuracies in your sawing. 

As an alternative to the plain black frame, you can always go down the Sir Elton John route of course (right). But while that is a beautiful frame it seems to me to be rather wrestling with the very strong image of Sir Elton. In fact, I find my eye resting more on the frame than the picture.

So when I started framing again after the upheaval of a house move I still had those Expressionist works in my mind’s eye and I decided to move to bare wood frames. The first one I did was not of a photo but a print that I made at a pre-Covid Hot Bed Press which I wrote about in a post last February  The frame is flat half-inch square oak.  Once it was made up and ready to assemble with the mounting I gave it a light stain with antique brown wax polish and then a touch of beeswax for a slight sheen.  Though I say it myself, it has come up very nicely.

Image © Mrs Barker whom you can just see in thereflection there….

The next one to get the treatment was this yoga poster which I did for my daughter out of 7/8 inch ash dome with a wax polish and beeswax again.  The polish gives a beautiful grainy finish and a gorgeous deep tobacco-ish scent as well.

Finally, below left, is the René Burri photo which I wrote about in this month’s other blog post. It’s a 5/8 inch oak frame in what as known as a ‘hockey’ section – presumably because it mimicks the shape of a hockey stick. I made a mistake with the mount here as you might see.  With a poster-size image such as this it would be usual to leave in the mount window either the title or the artist or both but they were squeezed in right at the bottom of this artwork.  I left in the photographer’s name but it has left too big a gap under the photo itself and upset the overall balance so I will have to cut a new mount.

I don’t use plain white mounts.  Horrible things.  I keep a range of off-white/ivory shades and then put up the individual artwork to each one to see which suits it best.  It’s very surprising how even a slight variation in mount tone can make a big difference.  I also tend to use mounts with a slight waffle pattern because to my eye it sets off the grain of a photograph to good effect.

How wide the mount should be and exactly where you place the window is, quite frankly, a matter of some sorcery. There are probably rules but I’m afraid I don’t know them so I just rely on my eye to tell me what’s right.

Once you get into it, frame making is deeply contemplative.  Cutting a 45 degree angle by hand, even with the help of a mitre and trimmer, is a rabbit-hole down which I can disappear for hours on end.  I like to think that I enter a state of zen-like clarity but, in truth, the air can be blue. I often think I’ve nailed it but by the time I come to joining and gluing the fourth corner I realise that a true square 90 degrees has yet again eluded me and I am condemned eternally to that imperfection which is the human lot.

Domestically, at least, it is the smaller picture and frame which looks best. I’ve had several up in the house of around 40 x 50 cms in total (ie an A3 image plus mount and frame) and I am beginning to think it’s a bit too much. You might need that at an exhibition where the space is much greater but at home less seems to be more.

A QUESTION OF DIMENSION

I’ve not been much of a fan of the Zoom or Skype conference or the Webinar which have become so common over the lockdown period.  The domestic technology often doesn’t seem up to it.  All that buffering and freezing, the sound breaks and odd pixellations, make me think of Brecht’s Alienation Theory; the idea of disruptive artistic effects to keep the audience at a distance from the theatrical action so they will understand it better.  But when you aren’t in the theatre the effects become unintended – so at a Zoom call I spend a lot of time distracted by the technology and its strangeness.

So when I read the 20th Century Society's most recent newsletter with a plug for a webinar about architectural photography my first thought was to give it a miss.  But it was free and convenient so I decided there was little to lose and I’m pleased I did because I really enjoyed it.  There is something so beguiling about sitting quietly in a room while someone displays interesting images and talks authoritatively about them.

The speaker in this case was Valeria Carullo, Photographs Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and the talk consisted largely of a gentle walk-through the RIBA photography archive.  I hadn’t realised that this is digitised and online (at RIBApix) so anyone can access it – and  RIBA allow use of low-res images for non-profit making purposes so the photos below (unless otherwise noted) are courtesy of that very generous permission.  As ever with photography, it turns out that there is not only a history in the chronological sense but also a sort of history of a history in the cultural sense – the idea that is not so clear whether photography records reality or creates it.

You might say that the oldest known photograph, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, was architectural.  It has that combination of form and light and line which characterises so much of the genre.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce: View from the Window at Gras, c.1826, Heliograph. (Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas).

The talk started with the commercial architectural photographers who had started to operate by the middle of the 19th century when the medium was first used to illustrate structural processes and to keep accurate records. The style was documentary: flat light, vistas, no shadows, as much detail as possible – following perhaps the style of architectural plans, elevations and sectional drawings as you can see below.

Edouard Baldus: The North Wing of the Louvre, Paris, under construction. 1849.

Francis Bedford; Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire. 1859.

The suggestion in the talk was that in comparison to the Cartesian rigour of the French Missions Héliographiques (a French project to record and restore important historical buildings) the British took a rather more romantic approach at the time (such as the image by Francis Bedford, to the right).

Technological developments such as gelatin dry plates and half-tone printing made both the photography and press reproduction of the images much simpler and the medium then became a major vehicle for promoting the idea of ‘architecture’. By the 1920s, as photography tried to find a visual language unique to itself, architectural photographers experimented not only with the dramatic use of light and shadow but also with viewpoints, a sense of geometry and diagonals - like this shot of the Midland Hotel in Morecambe. (The hotel was refurbished and reopened a few years ago and I had a pleasant stay in it shortly after. There’s an Eric Ravilious mosaic in the entrance lobby.)

Dell and Wainwright; Midland Hotel, Morecambe, 1933.

Zoltan Seidner; Tyroler Apartment Block, Budapest, 1930.

People started to feature too. Zoltan Seidner’s image to the right is very suggestive of a new and modern life and could be seen as propaganda, aspiration, futurism or simply wishful thinking.

I’m going to have to put in one of my all time favourite photos here which is René Burri’s 1960 shot of the Health Ministry in Brasilia.  I see this as architectural photography even though the building is implied rather than depicted.  There is such an air of optimism, of standing on a historical threshold.  (I know: the way those guys are looking at those gals is not very woke.  But have a heart – it’s timeless, for heaven’s sake.)  Here photography seems to be communicating ideas and ideals and is used as a vehicle not so much of record as of interpretation. Two dimensions can never equal three, natch, but they can condense them.

René Burri. In the Ministry of Health, Rio de Janeiro, 1960. The ribbons of light are caused by reflections from the surrounding buildings. (The building itself dates from the late 1930s)

This suggestion of a new futuristic life for which modernist architecture was such a standard-bearer ran in tandem however with a rather less noble suggestion in the later 20th century:  that the role of photography is to sell architecture. “I sell architecture better and more directly and more vividly than the architect does,”  is a well-known quote from Julius Shulmann a renowned architectural photographer who took the image below. But that approach is not without its downside.

Julius Shulmann: Case Study House #22

“This tradition represents a highly circumscribed interpretation of buildings: rather than emphasizing how commercial and domestic spaces normally function, the photographs present an ‘architectural’ idea, one in which light is used to articulate form and space, and where use is symbolized by the presence of  a few carefully placed objects on the pristine surfaces of tables and counters.” *

I think we will all recognise that description and I am sure we have all permitted ourselves a little snigger at such images – yet no matter how idealised they are, they seem to be entirely unironic even now.  The advent of colour photography in the 1970/80s and of digital imagery over the last couple of decades has put so much wind in the sails of this tendency that we now have the suggestion – articulated by Valeria Carullo at the end of her talk – that buildings are being designed to look good on Instagram.  So the photo becomes more important than the reality. I don’t know whether that is true but I doubt whether the endless idealisation of buildings through photography will serve the interests of architecture well in the long run. A building is a building and a photograph is a photograph. A photo of a cathedral may be very beautiful but it will never be the same as being in a cathedral.

although it’s a bit outside the theme of the talk, what I do find intriguing these days is how often now you can walk past a construction site and see almost life-sized images on the site hoardings of what is being built.  Here’s one I took locally.  You might see it as very political - these young, healthy, slim, active leisurely stereotypes: the dog walkers, the cyclists, the strolling family. I do have my doubts about that seemingly very tall chap in the middle picture window though; he’s a bit off-key. Hasn’t he got anything better to do than ogle the streetscape while he drinks his coffee? I find him a bit creepy.

I was walking past this site the other day and fell into conversation with a lady who turned out to be the architect. The price of one of these pleasant but modest little dwellings is going to be about half a million quid. Why doesn’t somebody design a prefab for the 21st century, I wonder?

(Can’t find a copyright attribution for this)

Then there is the full building wrap, like the one to the right there. Is that a photograph of a building or is it a photograph of a photograph? Either way it seems to be the future. It’s a fascinating tendency.  Sometimes the wrap is of the building which has not yet been built! It is the photograph-before-the-fact, an image which calls reality into being. That suggests rather strongly to me that photography – well, the digital image, anyway – is not recording reality but has a big hand in inventing it.

Great talk by Valeria Carullo and I didn’t even have to go to London for it!

* The Oxford Companion to the Photograph: Ed. Robin Lenman, OUP 2005, p.45

ALL THE GEAR AND NO IDEA

I’ve always liked walking.  Its rhythms seem to set off a dreamy, contemplative mood that lasts well after the walk has ended.  I was well into my thirties  however before I realised that it was something you could do in the countryside as well as the city.  I have been making up for lost time ever since.

What I don’t really recognise from my experience though is the kind of outdoor brand advertising puff you see to the right. You can find these images anywhere: they are unavoidable now.  At a basic level, everything has to look ordinary enough to be achievable (models; kit; terrain; colour; weather) yet extraordinary enough to lure.  It’s a tightrope that the photographers and copywriters have to straddle and I guess these are pretty successful as sales images. At the next level they promote certain values to restless urban populations: here, simplicity, perhaps, and self-reliance (also possibly the sheer ruggedness of eating straight from the packet). Yet, like car adverts which never show any traffic, they are a form of mythology, too.  If you look a little more closely for example you may see that there is a carefully constructed use of religious iconography in the image. We have the bare feet of the penitent, the faraway look on the model’s face, the monk’s brown cowl about the head, the icon or pilgrim’s badge on the shoulder, and the essential sustenance (i.e. Holy Communion). That may even be a stave to the right. Transcendence is the name of the game, though wordlessly packaged as a consumer activity.

My walks are nothing like that.  Just before lockdown I set out on a walk above Bolton, north of Manchester.  There are several of these old cotton towns above the big city and the Pennine hills sit above them bringing in the damp weather and the lowering skies that create the characteristic mood of the area.  On a bad day it can be awfully bleak, and on a good day it is God’s own country. There is something which draws me to the area and I have no idea what it is.  I was born in Rochdale, one of these cotton towns, but my family left when I was a toddler and I have no memories of it.  All I can imagine though, is that the tones characteristic of the area – an extended range of greys and greens mostly with small patches of beautifully washed out colour, imprinted themselves on my infant retina and I somehow still recognise them all these years later.  I was looking at a blackthorn bush in a hedgerow recently and thinking just how beautifully the purple-blue sloe berries sat with the grey/green and orange lichen that dressed the bush’s bark.  Maybe these childhood impressions stay with us for a lifetime not as memories but as dimly conceived preferences.

This was the first photo I took on the walk - a magnificent beech tree that soared straight up into the canopy maybe 100 feet above.  The paleness of its root system caught my eye but as I clambered down a slope to its level I could see that the erosion under it did not bode well.  Some of the roots have done a right-hand turn to embed themselves back in - which looks like intelligence at work. Beech trees can easily live to over 200 years so they must have their survival strategies. Being close to something so massive and alive is curiously reassuring and if you put your palm against it the sheer solidity is almost overwhelming.

 The farms round here don’t look anything like the lush pastures of East Yorkshire where I used to live.  There is little arable and the small fields and scattered sheep suggest a hard battle against the elements.  As I continued uphill I came across this pony all alone in a field.   

Two horses in a field look companionable but one, especially on these uplands, without any sign of human activity, always looks so lonely. They turn away from the wind and rarely show any interest in my passing.  A pet; a mount; a trotter?  I have no idea.

You do see the odd farm vehicle out and about, a landrover pulling a trailer or a quad bike, often with a very cool-looking collie behind the driver, rounding up sheep. But the landscape has an inherent loneliness about it.  Farther on I passed by this seemingly abandoned farmhouse. 

 An empty house like this, with an empty yard, broken windows and flapping curtains, sitting above a wild landscape is a great place to stop and stare and listen to the wind and wonder: what happened?  Who lived here and why did they leave?

I have been back a couple of times since that walk to lengthen it and to get right up onto Winter Hill over the town where there are massive communication masts and two memorials: one to a mass trespass back in the day when ramblers had to fight for the meagre rights they are accorded even now; and another to an aircraft flying up here from the south coast which crashed without survivors in the 1950s

The outdoor clothing companies with their breathless prose and their photoshopped imagery can suggest none of the sheer ordinariness of these surroundings yet their inherent interest: a slow drama playing out at an infinitesimally slow pace.  The advertisers do their best, I suppose, to enthuse but they can never approach the reality of step after step across a small piece of your own backyard.

THE UNKNOWN CRAFTSMAN

Funny how one thing leads to another, isn’t it?  Over the summer I was reading a biography of Joseph Campbell the renowned American mythologist.  Who should turn up in these pages but Daisetz Suzuki, the Buddhist scholar and at his side his secretary, a young woman named Mihoko Okamura.  She seemed an interesting figure so I looked her up and came to the potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. She helped them to translate essays by Soetsu Yanagi about craftsmanship and the nature of beauty, published under the title The Unknown Craftsman.*  Right up my street: so I found a copy on the net – and a good job I did.  It’s a kind of creative manifesto for the common man and a rare counterbalance to the cult of the Artist Genius.

I have never understood why I seem unable to appreciate the works of high culture that are so venerated.  When I hear a full orchestral symphony I feel only confusion.  When I look at the paintings of the old masters my head spins unpleasantly.  When I try to read the Great Novels my eyelids begin to droop within minutes (Moby Dick, anyone?). I find it all too much, as though I were being pummelled.  That is not to say that I don’t appreciate beauty.  It’s just that I find it hard to perceive it in such works.

If you have ever felt the same then Soetsu Yanagi may be your man. He lived from 1889 to 1961 and seems to have been to some extent the William Morris of Japan, founding the Japanese craft movement and the Japan Folkcraft Museum in Tokyo.**  He was a great and almost lifelong friend of Bernard Leach – whose ideas and style he influenced greatly.

His ideas, and consequently his essays, are deeply immersed in Buddhist notions of beauty.  While he does not deny the genius of the Great Artist he finds the work of such figures to be personality-based and therefore limited – anything signed is suspect.   In Buddhist terms it is dualistic; it is a direct pursuit of beauty and that must therefore include ugliness. Beauty cannot exist without ugliness just as up cannot exist without down.  One of the words he uses to describe this kind of work is “eventful”.

The alternative is the work of the unknown craftsman.  Back in the day when the hand-crafted object was the norm, the craftsman had to work quickly and unselfconsciously.  He was creating objects for use within a tradition: concepts of beauty and ugliness were not in his mind.  In Buddhist terms this is non-dualistic or “eventless”.  One example to which Yanagi refers constantly is that of sixteenth century Korean Ido tea-bowl. 

Kizaemon Ido teabowl, Korea, sixteenth century.

Produced on a large-scale in their day and cheap as chips then, these are  uncalculated and straightforward, their beauty lying, says Yanagi, in their very ordinariness.  Many other examples are given in the illustrations which form the first 90 pages of the book. In Yanagi’s words these are objects which are “born and not made”.

It is not easy to transfer these ideas to the modern world (he was writing these essays before and just after the second world war).  Even then machine-made products had taken over in the West and Japan was not so far behind.  The advent of mass production and the profit motive signalled the end of grace and feeling in the production of everyday goods. In his view it is the designer who has inherited this responsibility.  Maybe that accounts for the popularity of shops such as Habitat, Ikea and Muji today whose products seem to have emerged from some similar ethic even though they are all machine-made.

 I know that not everyone gets their rocks off on these kind of ideas.  (When one of my daughters saw me reading this book she rolled her eyes and mimicked falling asleep.  See what I have to contend with?)  When I was studying photographic history I, too, found most theoretical approaches induced a mental state bordering on catatonia.  But for me this book took some previously fuzzy suspicion and really snapped it into focus.  Why do I so like a mass-produced glass bowl in our kitchen which is chipped and scarred and which I can’t even remember buying?  And why have I always hung onto a couple of small wooden boxes that I remember lying around in my grandparents’ house fifty or sixty years ago.  I think they might even be somebody’s school woodwork projects.

English earthenware pitcher, eighteenth century.

Obviously, I try to apply these ideas to photography but it’s not easy.  A photograph is not the result of craft these days and is not in any way the equivalent of these hand-produced objects from the past.  I did however once go to a small photograph exhibition given by a local photo club.  Just at the entrance to this exhibition was a table with photographs made on simple digital cameras by young children at a nearby primary school.  They took my breath away with the directness of their seeing.  The children had clearly made no attempt to produce beautiful photographs as we all had in the main exhibition.  They just pointed the camera at whatever interested them and clicked: “good” and “bad” were of no concern to them.  The results really were on another level.

It’s quite possible for an adult to do this but it takes practice.  You are simply trying to see without responding as you habitually do.  We look and we consider things to be beautiful, or ordinary or unusual or whatever yet there is a space between the looking and the labelling and we can expand that space if we practise.  Here is Yanagi’s advice.

“First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second do not treat the object as an object for the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive passively, without interposing yourself. If you can void your mind of all intellectualisation, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better. This nonconceptualisation……….. may seem to represent a negative attitude but from it springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively.”

* The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight Into Beauty.  Soetsu Yanagi. Kodansha Publishing, 1972. I’ve just noticed that Penguin also published “The Beauty Of Everyday Things” by Yanagi in 2019 though I don’t know how much overlap there is between the two.

** There is an interesting longterm project afoot to collect and restore a film archive documenting these years of the Japanese folk craft movement and Leach’s involvement: http://mingeifilm.martygrossfilms.com/

THE BLACK AND WHITE WORLD OF COLOUR

All change on the Photographs page!  I hope you noticed…….

It was about time, I have to admit a little shamefacedly.  Most of the previous photos had been up there since I started this website over three years ago.  It’s not that I hadn’t been doing anything photographically in the meantime – I just didn’t have a very clear idea of where I was going.  I was a bit stuck.

By a process that I cannot now remember, sometime just before Christmas 2017 I found myself in the office of a property developer in Stockport.  It was a Gumtree deal and I was handing over six used twenty pound notes for a very good condition Olympus OM1 and lens.  I was taking the plunge back into film.  I had also decided that I would use just this one camera and lens for a year. 

My first attempts were pretty disappointing: murky, soft, unremarkable grey little things.  I persisted though because I had the time and the interest: and also because I needed the discipline.  I did lose heart a little bit sometimes and then, in the way of these things, I came up with this one. 

Three Women Smiling; Paris.

I was in Paris for a couple of days as back-up driver for a few friends doing the Paris/London cycle route.  I was strolling along the Seine when I came across this impromptu dance event.  Someone had strung up a pair of speakers and the dancers were jiving away to forties and fifties standards.  I had one frame left on the roll and no more film in my pocket so this is all I got.  You’re not supposed to praise your own work but I was happy with it.  I felt, and still do, that it transmits the atmosphere of enjoyment on that warm Parisian evening.

I pressed on.  A friend was selling a Hasselblad.  I don’t go out looking for kit, but if one crosses my path, literally or metaphorically, I might have a second look.  It was medium format (bigger negatives; more detail), a bit of a lump, but I took the plunge.  I bore in mind the words of a Japanese photographer whose work I much admire.  He is Hiroh Kikai and he became well-known for a remarkable series: The Asakusa Portraits (I don’t think he’s got a website but you can get a flavour of the work in this interview.  Scroll down for the photos).

His philosophy professor lent him the money for a Hasselblad when he was starting out and which he still uses.  What he said about this camera was that once he’d got it he didn’t feel he could take certain kinds of photos with it that he might otherwise have been drawn to.  So he decided that he would let the nature of the camera dictate the photographs that he would take.  That struck me as an interesting discipline and I try to bear it in mind with both the Hasselblad and the Olympus.

(The Hasselblad does take beautiful photographs, though.  Some people will tell you that it’s to do with the lens optics but I know that it isn’t.  I know that it’s Magic.)

Obelisk, Sheep, Boat Shed; Lindisfarne. Photo courtesy of one middle-aged Hasselblad and standard lens.

At the risk of courting controversy I’ll say that in my experience black and white film photography is harder than any other type.  A modern digital camera will do everything for you.  It throws up grids on the viewfinder to superimpose composition; it focuses automatically; it gives you not only exposure readouts but also a histogram; it has touchscreen displays and endless image adjustment menus.  It’s a computer with a lens on the front. All you the photographer have to do is decide where to stand and when to press the button.  With an old film camera it’s not about the kit – it’s about looking. Your approach has to be more rigorous and you need constantly to stay open.  You rarely get the spectacular photos that digital is capable of but you do get something else, which you might not otherwise have been aware of.

Most people would probably say that a modern digital colour photograph is a more accurate depiction of the world around them than a black and white one made on film.  I don’t think so at all, though.  I see the colour photo as a piece of rhetoric: it persuades you that it represents reality.  It’s sharply focused; it divides form up into nice clear colours; so it makes hyperclear distinctions for you, takes the complicated old world apart and puts it back together in a nice shiny arrangement.  It’s very reassuring.  Black and white does no such thing.  Black and white is the twilight zone: murky, indistinct, ambiguous, nothing more really than a nudge.  I think of Roland Barthes: “I always have the impression…..that in all photography, colour is a coating retrospectively applied to the original truth of black and white.”  It’s very difficult to accept that it is the colour photograph which is the trickster. I see it as whistling in the dark.

It’s taken me the last 2+ years to find some kind of a path with black and white film work and what I’ve  posted up are some examples of that, loosely grouped under single-word themes.  I see it as much less spectacular than what I’d done before.  The change in view or outcome that these two cameras have dictated is clear, I hope, from the results.

(No disrespect to colour photography intended, of course. I’ve always had a soft spot for the one below which I took in Aarhuus, Denmark some years ago. It was once on display at an exhibition and someone looking at it commented that it must be Photoshopped. I intervened to say it wasn’t but they were clearly unconvinced. I suppose I should have been flattered.)

Three People With Slightly Different Views Of A Sculpture; Aarhuus.

OSCAR MARZAROLI

I’ve been to Glasgow twice only and both visits were brief.  The first time I was picking up a party of 60 Mormons which I was to lead on a 7-day whistlestop tour of Edinburgh, The Lake District, Chester, Stratford, London and Paris. I was petrified some of them would get themselves lost on the Tube in London so I gave them a long briefing – how the Tube works, how you pay and so on.  At the end I asked for any questions and a voice piped up: “Say, Peter.  What’s a Toob?”

On my second visit I was leading a group of one (Mrs Barker – my nascent professional career as a travel guide having crashed and burned when the above American group missed their plane home).  We were on a significant birthday jaunt to The Outer Hebrides.  At Glasgow airport, a lady whom I assumed to be cabin crew, led us across the apron to the twin-engined Cessna, examined our boarding cards and did the safety routine.  Then she entered the cockpit, started the engines, taxied down the runway, flew us over and landed on the beach on the Isle of Harris.  Very cool.

So when I saw that Glasgow’s very excellent Street Level Photoworks were putting on what looked like an interesting exhibition by a photographer unknown to me, Oscar Marzaroli, I thought it was a good chance to kill two birds with one stone: see the exhibition and explore the city.  Alas, it was not to be.  Mother Nature intervened, we were locked down and it seems that Glasgow and I are destined to remain strangers for a little while longer.  I did however order a small book from Streetlevel “Oscar Marzaroli” to get a better idea of the work and which, at £15, came in well under my self-imposed limit of £20 for any book of photographs.

Obviously, for that price you are not going to get top quality reproduction but the book gives a good idea of the man and the work and I must declare myself drawn to both. This is just the kind of photography I like: somehow underplayed and unpretentious yet carrying a social and psychological impact that I started to feel only on second and third viewing.  The book mostly lets the photos speak for themselves – which is always a relief.  There is a scene-setting introduction with biographical details; an interview with Oscar from 1986; and the photos are interspersed with short observations from commentators over the years.

You can read Oscar’s biography on Streetlevel’s website here.  In short, he was the son of Italian parents who immigrated here in the 1930s when he was two years old.  Apparently, he moved back and forth between the countries during his childhood and never felt he belonged to either.  He became a documentary photographer and film-maker who spent much of his career capturing the changing Glasgow streetscene from the 1950s to 1980s.  This was a period of vertiginous decline for Glasgow – as indeed it was for many other British industrial cities: its population just about halved in the decades after the second world war.  Tenement blocks were demolished, communities were displaced, road systems invaded the city and industry disappeared.* It’s all there in the photographs which capture so much of this change.

But look – what’s this?

Women at work in the Communal Wash House (The Steamie), Townhead, 1968.

Lone Boy, Gorbals, 1963.

Yes, of course we know when these photographs were taken and where.  Both figures are physically in one place but psychologically look somewhere completely different. So don’t these two photos actually transcend time and place? Couldn’t they just as easily be characters from Dostoevsky, from Gorky, from Zola, from Flaubert - human types lifted from 19th century Nevsky Prospekt or the Marais and plumped down in late 20th century Scotland?

And what about this, below?

Expectation, Celtic End, Cup Final, Hampden Park 1963.

What better riposte could there be to the remark that there is no such thing as society? If that were so, this wouldn’t be a football crowd either - just people standing on terraces. (Unfortunately for Oscar, who was a great Glasgow Celtic fan, the victors that year were Rangers who won the replay 3-0 after a 1-1 draw first time round - before a crowd of 129,643. One hundred and twenty-nine thousand six hundred and forty-three souls. This section is only a tiny fraction of the whole…..)

There are many images of demolition and rebuilding (the construction of the Red Road flats, for instance, which were themselves demolished in 2015); of industrial skylines; of impoverished children at play; of dimly lit boozers; of the city’s artists and writers; of shipyards and markets, backstreets and courtyards. These are photographs of record but in that sense, though accomplished, they are probably no different from many others documenting the decline of the British industrial city.  They aren’t your high-contrast, grainy, poke-you-in-the-eye photographic tours de force.  It’s more the accumulated impact. They seem to be the backdrop to some vast and sprawling epic which has no beginning and no end.  As though, even while the form is changing before our very eyes, the substance remains the same. 

On the one hand you might look through these photographs, shake your head and say: “Aye, well……it’s all gone now.”  Well, it has and it hasn’t.  Maybe there are many more distractions these days – especially the hypercolour of the modern digital photograph.  But I imagine that if we were able to spirit Oscar back to today’s Glasgow, to hand him a camera and ask him to  get cracking then he would come up with something not dissimilar. The rituals of the street have changed sure enough: the rag and bone man, the milk deliveries, the funeral onlookers and the shiftworkers.  But in the end it’s all in the looking.

What catches your eye in this photo below?  The angle of their bodies? The sleet?  Or the posters for a then-unknown Winifred Ewing in a then-marginal SNP?  Context, people, history.

Sleet, Gorbals, April 1968.

I wonder if Oscar’s background might account for some of this quality in his work.  His home life growing up must have been partly Italian and partly Scottish.  And presumably he was bilingual.  (They do say that to speak a second language is to have a second soul.)  Such a life must make you observant of difference and perhaps also tolerant of it.   It may not be so glamorous, but to turn your gaze again and again onto the same subjects will in the end, I believe, reveal rather more than a constant search for the new and spectacular. I understand that the plan is to extend the exhibition after lockdown and I will certainly be making every effort to go and see it. 

An era captured in a cracker of a Glasgow novel I once read, by Jeff Torrington: “Swing, Hammer, Swing.”

 You can learn a little more about Oscar in the following YouTube link, narrated by one of his daughters, Marie-Claire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1SIN2GuouQ

 All images Oscar Marzaroli, © The Marzaroli Collection, courtesy Street Level Photoworks

RODNEY KING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF TRUTH

Several of my past blog posts have looked at the nature of digital images and just how they differ from traditional photographs.  I’d say it’s pretty clear that a digital image is not simply an updated version of an analogue photograph but a completely different animal.  Current events put me in mind of a legal case I looked at quite thoroughly a little while ago which demonstrates this difference.  It’s the case of Rodney King.

First I’ll ask you to watch this sequence and I have to warn you that it is very unpleasant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HOalToMtg .  If you prefer not to watch it then this still will give you an idea of what it is about. 

Next: I want you to ask yourself exactly what it is that you have just seen on the video – or what you see in the still.  Just say it to yourself or write it down in simple English before you carry on reading what follows below.

Here is the background.

In 1992 a man named George Holliday used his video camera to record an incident in which several white Los Angeles police officers surrounded and repeatedly struck and stamped on black motorist Rodney King.   Holliday offered the video to the police as a record of the incident but they showed no interest and so he took it to a television station.  When the images were broadcast there was widespread sympathy for Mr. King and condemnation of what on the face of it was a brutal and unjustified beating.  The police officers were prosecuted for use of excessive force and when the case came to court the prosecution attorney invited the jury to “Just watch the videotape”.   He proposed the sequence shown by the video to be unchallengeable. “You have the videotape. Watch it, ladies and gentlemen. What more do we need?” 

The jury did indeed watch the tape of the police officers beating and stamping on King – just as you have done.  You may think you saw a vicious assault, but the jury didn’t: they acquitted the defendants. 

How did that come about?

The defence strategy was to digitalise the (analogue) videotape and then to use the new technology to choreograph an entirely different event through techniques such as slowed projection, freeze framing, blow-ups, digitised mark-ups and frame grabs. This broke up the ostensible narrative and constructed an entirely different one.  They argued that the police were trained to subdue those resisting arrest by instructing them to lie down.  It was only when Mr. King rose up from the ground in defiance of their instructions that they were obliged to use their batons. When he lay down the officers’ batons rose away from him, they said. He wasn’t being knocked down at all.

So the prosecution’s innocent black man being beaten by racist police metamorphosed in the defence’s digital account into a violent offender being lawfully subdued.  By disrupting the sequence of the images digitally the defence suggested a complete reversal of causation.  Through the use of still images drawn from the sequence, and by slowing down the tape, the defence were able to make the blows look slower and more restrained and to mute effectively a readily intelligible soundtrack. 

While it might not have been impossible for the defence to mount a similar case using analogue images it would have been nowhere near as persuasive because their strategy of disrupting the narrative flow of the video would have been much more difficult technically.  The officers were acquitted, the prosecution paid the price for a simplistic approach rooted in the analogue tradition and, many would say, justice was not done. In the resulting riots 53 people were killed, some 2500 were injured and around 1500 buildings were destroyed or damaged.

To my knowledge this was the first legal case in which digital imagery was used as evidence. It shows how digital technologies – and especially images - construct truth.  They are fast; they are slick; they get everywhere in a flash; they are easily arranged into sequences; you can stitch them together with other data forms in a trice; and they are untraceable - here today and gone tomorrow.  They have a rhetorical potential unmatched in the modern world.

I think that’s really why I myself went back to the traditional methods: the reassuring physicality of film, canisters, winding mechanisms, negatives, chemicals and darkrooms. Digital is a convenient truth but, as the above case shows, not a very reliable one.

SUFFOLK AND SATURN

My second-hand book-buying habit having been curtailed by the lockdown, I have been going through my bookshelves taking the opportunity to re-read some of my favourites - such as WG Sebald’s The Rings Of Saturn.  I first read it shortly after it came out in English in the late 1990s and was so intrigued that, having reached the last page, I went back to the beginning and read it all through again straight away.  It’s a strange and melancholy novel. Ostensibly an account of the narrator’s walking tour of the East Anglian coast the narrative thread loops and wanders and doubles back and zigzags like a dream. 

And the author uses photographs.  He’s not the only one who has done that in fiction and there is much scholarly writing on the subject – both about him and other authors. What immediately struck me about the images in this novel though is how poorly reproduced they are. They are mostly nondescript and it’s hard to make out any detail at all.  Maybe the originals were badly printed; or maybe there was a budgeting issue for the publisher; or maybe this aspect was intended. There are no credits: apparently they are a mixture of found images, archival ones and others taken by the author.  There are no captions.  The photos are held fast in the text simply by the words all around them, a bit like cobbles set in concrete.

Much significance is attached to all of this by scholars as though the book represents some kind of photographic watershed.  Personally, I can’t see it.  The best I can manage by way of interpretation is that the photographs are generally as inscrutable as the text.  But I don’t really think that they serve any function beyond that and the book would have been just as remarkable, perhaps more so, without them.  Text requires one kind of imagination and image requires another so narrative studded with image is a bit of an imaginative minefield.

My personal walk with the book  doesn’t stop there though for on his journey the narrator visits Shingle Street.  Yes, I can almost hear the sharp intake of breath from regular readers of this blog since I published a photo of mine of that very place in the blogpost Force Majeure in March (below).  On holiday last summer in East Anglia I had noticed on an OS map this mysteriously named spot on the Suffolk coast and we cycled out there from our holiday campsite.  It was a beautiful day – which does help – and the place seemed deserted.  There is a short terrace of houses, a couple of Martello Towers, a long stretch of shingle beach and a lot of sky.  Here’s one of the Martello Towers. 

It was blissful -  one of those places where there is such a sense of space that you sit down, look around, and the world seems to take on a slightly different, almost mythical, aspect. 

That’s not how WG Sebald’s narrator saw it though. He recounts rumours of wartime biological weapon experiments there and describes it as “ just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages where I have never encountered a single human being….”

Unreliable narrator?  Reliable holidaymaker?  Or the other way round?  Well, his narrator may not have spotted anyone but I eventually did.  The distant figure below approached briefly then disappeared along the shoreline leaving us alone with the waves, the shingle and the sky.

Shingle Street, Suffolk; July 2019.

IT AIN'T WHAT YOU SAY........

I’ve watched two programmes about photographic history in the past few weeks.  The first was BBC Four’s The Age Of The Image which was fronted by  James Fox and was a four part series about “how the power of the image has transformed the world” (and which included film and some art as well).  The second was the same channel’s Lucy Worsley's Royal Photo Album in which she aired her theory that the British royal family has survived by “harnessing the power of photography”.

These are major claims but what I thought was really striking about these programmes was their format.  I start off from my own personal TV history baseline which is the historian AJP Taylor.  In the 1960s and 70s he often appeared lecturing on television.  He would simply stand in front of the camera, without any notes, and start talking.  Even as a youngster I thought it was pretty impressive.  Here is an early example.  His style relied really on the power of the spoken word.  It also relied on a certain level of concentration and imagination on the part of the viewer.

Fast forward to today and you find that TV history is almost entirely visual.  The programmes are very much part of the process that they are describing.  When Lucy Worsley wants to talk about Cecil Beaton’s revolutionary portraits of the Queen what does she do?  Here’s what she does.

She recreates one with herself as Queen.

When Dr James Fox wants to talk about prehistoric paintings at Chauvet Cave what does he do?  Here’s what he does.

There’s no need but he and his team go there. (Whatever happened to voiceovers?)

Nothing, but nothing, is left to our imagination.

Not only are our screens filled by this hyperreal, hypercolourful digital imagery - we now have an extra ingredient: music.  Music!  Pop; classical, electronic: you name it and you can almost certainly find it as an almost incessant aural backdrop to this visual stimulation.

And while history in AJP Taylor’s time appears to have been roughly chronological it has become curiously disjointed by the time it has reached our 21st century screens.  The approach now is thematic; time is chopped into bundles and we leap back and forth over the years dizzyingly. 

Where does this leave language, the traditional purveyor of history?  Languishing a poor third, I’m afraid.  It’s a pity.  Language here is reduced to a kind of outlier, an audible but distant stimulus to which we might turn when the music and the colour and the presenter threaten to bore or overwhelm us: a sort of handrail on the moving platform of visual and aural stimulation.

James Fox, talking about Google maps, says at one point that once pictures were of reality but now the picture is reality.  As a remark it a bit of a commonplace these days, I’m afraid – and perhaps more importantly, it isn’t necessarily true.  The image represents reality only to those who have not been taught – or taught themselves - to deconstruct it. Reality –that which is – can never be replaced by a photograph or any other image.  What I think he is not quite saying is that it’s that old devil digital again at work.  It’s a highly promiscuous medium: it will go with anything.  You could always put words, music and images together of course but with digital technology it has become so easy as to be almost a modern requirement.  In the end, though, what you get is porridge.

The AJP Taylor lectures were originally broadcast by ATV who billed them as an experiment: “Can a brilliant historian, talking about a fascinating subject, hold the attention of a television audience of millions for half an hour?” they asked.  Here’s the great man triumphantly proving, in my view anyway, that he could.

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.

ET IN ORCADIA EGO

I thought that I’d do something a bit different this month: one longer piece rather than three short ones.  And it’s a travel piece – to kind of throw a virtual window open since physical travel is so restricted for the moment.  So what follows is an account of a journey I made to Orkney many years ago on a little Italian motorcycle that I had just rebuilt.  I sold the article in advance to the editor of a now-defunct motorcycle magazine by pointing out the historical Italian/Scottish connection and by making the chapel built by Italian prisoners of war on the island the destination.  The payment for this was a princely sum: £800.  That was enough to fund the journey and some over, so off I went.  I took slide film, a 35mm SLR and a circuitous route. 

Since I am reproducing it here for a readership that is largely non-petrolhead I will take the opportunity to point out some of the conventions of motorcycle journalism as it goes along.  The motorcycle travel piece tends to be an uneasy triptych of technical detail, daredevil riding and the occasional geographical reference. Mine, I like to think, tended to break this mould because to me a motorcycle was simply an exciting way of getting somewhere interesting. So the destination was central.

I’ll start off, nonetheless, with the convention of the machine establishing shot: this is a standard in which readers are invited to gaze upon the epic beauty of whichever particular machine has been chosen for the journey.  Ideally this is taken on the open road but for some reason that I cannot now remember I took this one on my drive.  The bike is a 1976 350cc Italian Moto Morini .  I had spent the previous year neglecting all domestic duties in order to rebuild it from the ground up.  I did some sea trials and deemed it to be of merchantable quality and fit for purpose i.e. reliable and fun.  The account below is exactly as I wrote it twenty-odd years ago and as it was published.  I threw away my own slides a while ago so the pictures are scans from the printed article. Title and subtitles are courtesy the magazine subeditor. The picture captions are my own and written for this blogpost.

The Machine Establishing Shot. To my eye it is a very pretty little motorcycle And look at that crankcase (the lower part of the engine). Art Deco or what?

 THE ITALIAN CONNECTION

Aaaah, la dolce vita!  I am sitting back in the late afternoon sunshine outside the kind of café that only the Italians do properly.  As I sip at my cappuccino and demolish a gelato I consider the Art Deco lines of my Morini’s crankcase at the pavement’s edge.  Around me the locals chat in their incomprehensible dialect.  Over the road is the harbour, boats cheek by jowl along the jetty, and in the distance blue hills rise in a warm haze.

Where do you think?  Naples, maybe?  Or a little coastal village in Tuscany?

Guess again.  This is Troon.  That’s Troon, west of Glasgow.  The blue hills in the distance are on the island of Arran.  This café is one of hundreds dotted about Scotland and still run by the descendants of Italians who migrated here in the 19th century.

What better way to spend a few spare days than to take another Italian classic – the Moto Morini 350 – and investigate this connection?  And it doesn’t end at cafés because further north – much further north – there’s another enduring monument to Italian culture.  It’s a little chapel on a barren strip of land looking  out over the silent waters of Scapa Flow…..

Café Society

The Morini is a 1976 Strada which I bought as a wreck and rebuilt over a couple of years.  This is its first long run and I’ve spent the first day whizzing up through Northallerton, Richmond, Penrith and finally over the border by Dumfries.  Many years ago I stayed a night in Dumfries.  In a pub that evening I asked the barmaid what sort of a town it was.  It used to be very quiet, she told me, “until they opened a branch of Marks and Spencer.”

I end this 300-mile day with a wonderfully sunny 60-mile ride up the Galloway coast, spending the night in Troon, where I search for the legendary Togs Café. It’s not hard to find and it does not disappoint.  The frontage is classic coffee bar and a sign announces that it was established in 1901 and is “under the personal supervision of Wilma Togneri”.  The window display is a monument to confectionery pleasure, featuring jar upon jar of sweets with names like Soor Plums, Rhubarb Rock, Liquorice Satins, Floral Gums and Midget Gems.

Next morning I saddle up under threatening skies and the first drops of rain fall as I set off for Cavani’s West End café in Saltcoats.  Its frontage is less impressive than Togs but the window sweets are even more imaginatively named: Polly Pastilles, Mixed Oddfellows, Clove Rock, Rich Butter Perfections and, my favourite, Mixed Boilings.  By now the rain is heavy.  The Morini takes this in its stride and I am rather pleased in retrospect that I rewired the whole thing with the north European climate in mind.  A total rewire may sound impressive but in fact the Morini’s electrics are not all that complicated.

It is a further convention of the motorcycle article that there must be periodic detail shots of the machine in case any reader had forgotten that it is, as one editor once said to me “all about the metal”. This is the kickstart. Remember them?

In Largs, Nardini’s is perhaps the best-known of all Italian cafés in south-west Scotland. 

But why is there such a  proliferation of Italian caffs in this far north-west tip of Europe where the climate is generally less than Latin?

The great Italian migration started around 1860, most of the immigrants being itinerant statue sellers from the regions of Lucca and Frosinone, escaping desperate poverty in their homeland.  They found a greater demand for ice cream and cafés here than for statues and diversified to suit.  By 1905 there were 336 ice cream shops in Glasgow alone.

Nardini’s turns out to be in a different league from those I’ve seen so far.  It opened in 1935 and on its first day served 4000 customers.  In its heyday it was the largest café-restaurant in Great Britain – it even had the first soda fountain in the country.  Then it fell on hard times as the popularity of places like Largs succumbed to the lure of the package holiday.  It went into receivership briefly but is now back in apparently thriving business.

I park the Morini under Nardini’s awning.  Inside, it’s something of a cross between Art Moderne and Palm Court.  Customers sit in gilded cane chairs at glass-topped tables; inlaid screens and cabinets are scattered around the room.  The shop sells patisserie and chocolate specialities made on the premises.  You can even buy bridal mannequins.

The Morini had minimalist instrumentation. A speedometer, a rev counter (above) and three instrument lights, one and a half of which you can see above. None of them was for ignition but one was for main beam - which struck me as being a curious set of priorities. The speedo and rev counter were made by the Italian firm Veglia - or Vaguelier, as they were known here: as you can see above, the rev counter indicated 750rpm even when the engine was switched off……

There is a mouthwatering menu and even though it is not yet midday I know that I have to do my journalistic duty.  I sit myself down, place helmet carefully on spare chair and peel off my dripping waterproofs.  The staff do not even blink – always the sign of a classy establishment – and I order the waffles special with vanilla and chocolate ice cream, the two hardest flavours to get right in my view.  They are delicious when they come, especially the chocolate which nicely balances bitter with sweet.  But - oh the waffles - they are cold and heavy!  Surely the whole point is that they should be light and piping hot so that the ice cream melts over them?  Well,the cappuccino makes up for this and 30 minutes later, restored, I venture out into a rain whose terminal velocity on my helmet almost buckles my knees.

Don’t take the tablets

I consider taking the hideously expensive ferry over to the Isle of Cumbrae to investigate what I have seen billed as the ‘infamous’ Ritz café in Millport but my will is weak in this weather.  It’s twelve quid for the ten-minute ride there and back. “Is it worth it?” I ask the guy on ticket sales.  He looks over his shoulder at the weather.  “Ye must be joking” he says.  So I set off through the sluicing cloudburst of a day to sweep round Wemyss Bay then over the Erskine Bridge and on to the Highlands.  Rain gets a bad press but I am enjoying myself.  It isn’t cold and my waterproofs are well up to the job. 

I shoot up the side of Loch Lomond and it is in the Crianlarich Station Tea Room that I come face-to-face with the infamous Tablet.  For those who don’t know it, this quintessentially Scottish confection is a formidable slab of boiled butter, sugar and condensed milk.  One treats it with the utmost respect.  A journalist once ate two portions by mistake and claimed to have had a near-death experience as a result.  I examine it warily from a distance then order a large mug of tea in preparation for my assault on Rannoch Moor.

And it’s a good job that I do.  Many years ago I walked over Rannoch Moor and agreed with the the old saying that “on a bad day, it tends to promote the view that hell need not be hot”.  Today is a bad day.  Heavy rain, scudding cloud and racing wind are a fitting backdrop for the sheer black rock face and endless expanses of bog and heath; and there’s a ghostly yellow sheen too across this Dantean vision.  I speed through it all, the wind pushing me towards the roadside ditch and rain dashing itself against my visor in sudden squalls.  If a pterodactyl had soared across this primeval scene I wouldn’t have so much as blinked.

The little Morini romps through it.  The Metzelers (tyres – Ed.) are surefooted and the engine drums away faultlessly beneath me.  In any case, the roads up here are Morini-friendly, though very much at the mercy of topography: that it to say, they are good and bendy with firm surfaces but you have to share them with everyone else.  The one I am on now was built by General Wade for the British army clearing the Highlands.  Since it’s virtually the only way through loch and mountain it has to share its route with the railway and a long-distance footpath.  So you are there with the vans and the coaches and the cars and the caravans and the locomotives and the walkers.  It’s only further north and west that much of this drops away and you can have most of the awesome roads to yourself.

Black water

For a few pounds I spend the night in a hostel in Fort  Augustus and then bowl on up the east side of Loch Ness bright and early the next morning.  And bright it is.  The sun is out and fluffy white clouds are drifting across a blue sky.  But, my word, that loch is still very, very black. 

The Kyle of Durness. It is a further immutable of motorcycle journalism that any view - no matter how spectacular - is editorially unacceptable without a motorcycle in it.

The traffic gets thinner and thinner on the road up to Ullapool.  It’s a fine run down into town, lined with rhododendrons and giving great views of the sweeping bay.  Beyond the town it’s mostly single track roads.  They rise and fall past little black lochans as shafts of sunlight thrust their way onto the peat and the moss.  At Kylesku I pass a memorial to WW2 midget submarine crews of XII Submarine Flotilla who trained in the three lochs which meet here.  I peer into the dark waters below the memorial and can foresee only blind terror if I were obliged to dive deep into them in a diver’s suit astride some sort of giant torpedo.  There are 30-odd  names on the memorial.

Further north the road spins down a long glen which finally opens out in the Kyle of Durness.  This is midsummer and the light evenings are otherworldly.  The sun goes down in a spectacular display, bathing the surrounding hills in an ethereal glow.  It’s gone 10pm but everything that can reflect this dying light does: the grass shines, the sheep shine, cars, windows, walls, seagulls, road signs – they all flash like hundreds of tiny flares until the sun disappears and the world returns to its normal three dimensions.

The sun is back next morning and we have an easy gallop to the Orkney ferry terminal.  Over the water, at Stromness, every hotel and B and B seems to be full.   The only single room I can find is at the best hotel in town, so I bite the bullet and resign myself to a couple of days of luxury.

Stromness really is the most extraordinarily atmospheric town.  Settled by Vikings and built around a beautiful natural harbour, it’s a real sea-soaked old salty dog of a place, from its horned helmet down to its trawlerman’s boots.

Traffic is not heavy here.  Glancing through the local paper, as I always do on my travels, I notice that a local man, up before the magistrates for jumping a red light came up with a  novel argument.  Traffic lights, he insisted, are  “ a precautionary measure” and of advisory status only.  The beaks weren’t impressed, and down he went.

A further convention - the scrapyard shot. Shooting classic machinery in decaying or dilapidated surroundings is considered visually sophisticated by editors. It does indeed point up the beauty of the motorcycle but also carries a certain metaphorical heft. There is that suggestion of resurrection or salvation………… And you thought it was all all ton-ups and black leather?

I stroll up the main street of the town – more of a meandering alley really “uncoiling like a sailor’s rope” as the local writer, George Mackay Brown, put it – listening to the local accent which is a beautiful mixture of Scandinavian and Scottish.  At Point Of Ness, looking out over Hoy Sound, I lie on the pebbles in the late afternoon sunshine and watch the seals frolic, honking and barking and splashing.

That evening I undergo an experience bordering on the spiritual in the unlikely surroundings of The Ferry Inn.  On the way up, purely in the interests of cultural research, I have been sampling a range of malt whiskys.  They are all good, but this evening I put the local Highland Park – the softest dulcet little thing – up with a piece of smoked haddock.  Then I am  no longer in the world of ordinary mortals.  It is truly the greatest combination in the world.  To celebrate this exciting discovery I have several more glasses and just about avoid being carried out on my shield.

You are now in a position to appreciate what a daring shot this is. Lobster pots and no motorcycle.

Chapel Works

My final destination, the chapel at Lamb Holm, is an ornate creation that is clearly not at all local in conception.  It is a true Italian connection.   In the 1940s Orkney was home to several hundred Italian prisoners of war, captured mainly in North Africa.  They were shipped to Orkney to work on the Churchill Barriers, a massive series of causeways which seal the eastern approach to Scapa Flow.  It’s not clear who had the idea of building the chapel but it was largely realised through the drive and talent of one of the prisoners – Domenico Chiochetti.  With simple materials and scrap the Italians transformed two Nissen Huts into the beautiful chapel which stands there today.

Relations between the Italians and the Orcadians seem to have been very good and when the prisoners left, the islanders promised to look after the chapel.  It became something of a place of pilgrimage for visitors though the weather inevitably took its toll.  Chiochetti was eventually traced to Moena, a village in the Dolomites, and he returned in 1960 to restore it.  It was rededicated before he left and he wrote an open letter to the Orcadians: “The chapel is yours for you to love and preserve.  I take with me to Italy the remembrance of your  kindness…..  Goodbye, dear friends of Orkney.”

When I arrive the place is crowded with two coachloads of tourists but I wait until they disappear and I have the place more or less to myself.  It’s beautifully maintained and,  like most things on Orkney, very atmospheric.

The Italian Chapel at Lamb Holm.

Last lick

The following day I get the early ferry back, the cheap one from St Margaret’s Hope to Gills Bay.  I have some misgivings when the SS Rustbucket hoves into view but what it lacks in apparent seaworthiness it makes up for in very fine fried egg rolls. I am back on mainland Scotland in an hour.

Early morning sunshine has given way to heavy rain for the long haul back down the A9.  On a whim, I turn left at Inverness and head for Lossiemouth through the deluge.  Standing under the awning at Rizza’s Ices, I enjoy a good vanilla watching a spectacular display of thunder and lightning as raindrops bounce off the Morini’s tank.  I’m tempted to try a gelatofest in Musselburgh or to ride back through Edinburgh where Valvona and Crolla’s delicatessen and restaurant can induce financial ruin. But enough is enough and I kick the little motorcycle back into life and hurtle southwards towards a horizon so dark it seems to prefigure the end of the world.”

I visited Orkney two or three times by motorcycle and had a good nose around but this is the only article I ever wrote about the place. This story didn’t end there though. When I got back from the trip I sent the article and the slides (untouched by any digital process in those days!) down to the editor. The article duly appeared in the next issue of the magazine.I then had to go away for a few weeks. When I got back I found that my bank account had not been credited with the agreed £800. I rang the editor. He was terribly sorry, he said, to tell me that the magazine had just gone bankrupt and there was a long line of creditors…..

(If you are at all interested in the story of the Italian prisoners on Orkney there is a great film directed by Michael Radford: Another Time, Another Place starring Phyllis Logan.)

FORCE MAJEURE

I’ve often wondered what confluence of mysterious forces brought me onto the planet in a particular place on a particular day.  I’m not complaining: to be born in Western Europe post World War 2 was to be dealt a very good karmic hand - in my life I’ve known no hunger, war, plague, want, dictatorship, violence, invasion, civil unrest or even forced military service.

So like most people in the UK I have been pretty taken aback by the speed and seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. My peaceful life means that I have no comparator to scale its true seriousness. As chance would have it though, a week or two ago I picked up The World Of Yesterday (‘Die Welt Von Gestern’) by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)*.  I haven’t finished it yet but it has turned out to be echoing eerily across the years.  I had never heard of book or author  which just shows how random my literary knowledge is because Zweig was apparently very well known in his day and the book cover is indeed plastered with plaudits by several of today’s cultural giants: “one of the greatest memoirs of the 20th century”; “one of the canonical European testaments”; “absolutely extraordinary”; and so on.  Nonetheless, I bought it on the strength of running my eye over the first page.

It’s a personal account of what the author sees as the high point of European culture round the end of the 19th century, and its subsequent destruction.  He was an enormously cultured man and seems to have known anyone who was anyone. He can be a bit pompous (and there is divided opinion about him) but there are some absolutely riveting sections in the book, one of which is about what it was like to live in Austria and Germany in the social chaos that followed WW1.  Half-starved, demobilised soldiers roamed the streets, profiteers lived in luxury and revolution was in the air. In Germany at one point an egg was worth 4 billion marks - roughly the total value of all real estate in Greater Berlin before hyperinflation set in.  Food was scarcely affordable and “Well-nourished cats and dogs seldom came back if they wandered far from home”.

It sounds as though it was absolutely chaotic - and obviously we are nowhere near that - but I found it strangely comforting.  Despite this tumult, as Zweig puts it, the ‘flywheel of the mechanism’ kept on turning: “the baker made bread, the cobbler made boots, the writer wrote books, the trains ran regularly and….people came to appreciate true values such as work, love, friendship, art and nature all the more.”  He saw it as an unhappy and seedy time but it eventually corrected itself - until the early 1930s anyway.

Now I look out at the quietened streets of south Manchester.  Zweig’s phrase goes round in my head: ‘the flywheel of the mechanism kept on turning’.  It reminds me of another phrase, a line of verse actually, from The Lankavatara Sutra – an opaque sutra that I am struggling through with a group of friends.  It’s pretty opaque but this line flashed out at me one day and lodged in my memory: “Life is like an illusion or dream, but reality is relentless” ** - which seems to be an idea similar to Zweig’s: something just keeps on turning.  These are difficult times but I wonder if the words both of Zweig and the Sutra can be of some comfort?

*******************************************************

Talking of comfort, maybe photos can also help.  Photography has a public function of course, but also a private function and looking at photos of happy times or peaceful scenes can be very therapeutic.  So I hope these three from my travels last year are of some help.

Two Orchids, Lindisfarne, Summer 2019.

Obelisk, Lindisfarne, 2019. The end of a 90 mile walk and a welcome sight.

Shingle Street, Suffolk. 2019: a truly atmospheric stretch of coastline. The cunningly placed human interest in the photograph is Mrs Barker.

*Pushkin Press, 2019, trans. Anthea Bell.

** (The Lankavatara Sutra, Counterpoint Press, 2012; translation and commentary by Red Pine.) Actually, the text reads: “Samsara is like an illusion or dream but karma is relentless. As I understand it, in Buddhist terminology, ‘samsara’ is the cycle of birth and death; and ‘karma’ is the law of cause and effect which is the driving force behind samsara - but I changed these terms so as to access the meaning a little bit more clearly.