Faces of Gods
For my third book project with Alain de Botton, Religion was one of the most personally uncomfortable of subjects I felt I could tackle for him.
If he was the recipient of a fiercely secular home life then I was the casualty of regular church weddings, Christenings and funerals. But then there was the Salvation Army.
From the age of eight I decided I wanted to play a musical instrument. Perhaps, I reasoned, if I went to Sunday school they might invite me to blow a bugle for the band I heard in the precinct – carol tunes under the Xmas light bulbs, chilled hands hooked around the bells of cold brass. In readiness for that forthcoming job offer, I even bought a packet of balloons in the belief that I needed to strengthen my pre-pubescent pulmonary vessels.
I remember the chest-bursting chorus of Onward Christian Soldiers. But instead, I was offered a tambourine to rattle.
What still bothers me is the faded portrait of Jesus that hung from the wall – a sad portrait of a sickly young man not too dissimilar from my then teacher though with added drops of blood descending the pale face caused by the prickly thorns that encircled his lank, centre-parted hair. So obviously European and middle-class was he, this Son of God. He seemed recently more laughable at his resemblance to bin Laden whose gentle soft portrait of the Saudi outlaw was splashed across the New York Times in the days after 9/11.
Work on the book coincided with Pope Ratzinger’s visit to Britain and I used this timing to follow his holy entourage accompanied by protesters whooping their parodies, parading their alternative doctrines. His Bishop henchmen juxtaposed beautifully with gorgeous models from Monsoon and the victims of celibacy gone wrong displayed their former selves as child/priest victims of rape.
Over in Feltham, west London Father Chris Viper in St Lawrence’s kindly accommodated me for a few days, allowing me to photograph his daily Mass and private moments in his sacristy. The Croydon Buddhists put me in touch with the Rivendell retreat where I passed a most agreeable day with resident monk Nagasiddhi and his followers, in a solitary former rectory. But some weeks spent negotiating a Sabbath with Jewish Liberals turned to dust. Somewhere, the wrong bells were sounding and I smelled a collusion, our requests dwindling within that synagogue after the seemingly unfathomable practice of documentary was explained.
More confusingly, Alain also asked me to infiltrate London Metropolitan University’s Holloway Road campus though at the time I saw no relevance to this idea of atheism – or religion for that matter. With Alain, you might at first look to the brief without worrying too much about context – his initial thoughts morphing to newer ideas. One then hopefully offers far more peripheral material, if the opportunity arises.
Looking back 25-plus years, I remembered a project I’d endured about Evangelism and Born Agains (plus others). Try as they might, attempts to have me speaking in tongues on the floor of the Prince’s Ballroom at Butlins during Easter Bible Week or between giant rolls of shag pile in a carpet warehouse, frustrated the more determined pastor.
Without realising it, I seem to have covered – with the exception of the more obscure ones such as Cheondoism or Aladura – a modest archive of worship and idolatry, devotion and pilgrimage. It’s just that the faces of Gods are no more real or plausible to me than Sheik Osama or Gorn Captain.
‘Religion for Atheists’ is published on January 26th by Hamish Hamilton.
See also Song for Occupations and A Week at the Airport.
Filed under: England, Photographer, Photography, Religion | 2 Comments
Tags: Alain de Botton, atheism, atheist, book
Bling Humbug
A private conversation I want to hear, via covert Christmas tree bauble eavesdropping device, is between a husband and wife discussing the merits of flooding their anonymous south London street with santa bling.
‘Tis the season of austerity and wanting to sound humbuggery – there really should be EU laws against this.
Filed under: England, London, Photography | 3 Comments
Tags: christmas, lights, street, waste
Contact Sheets
Roll 1, contact #386 dated 7th September 2004
Roll 1, contact #385 dated 7th September 2004
Roll 2, contact #408 dated 24th September 2004.
After the success of the book Contact Sheets, it occurred to me that the very existence of this editing process of film photography, on the wane since many of us migrated to digital thereby side-lining the darkroom ghosts of one’s film, might entice the uninitiated to us non Magnum members. Within a very short period, the role, personality and purpose of the contact sheet is for many, quite unknown.
In the first of what may become a series of published contacts from my archive, I hope to explain what was happening to me en route from the tongue to the last frame.
The targets and accidents, the miseries and the triumphs!
The three sheets displayed above are actually from 2 rolls of 220 NPC. It is late summer in 2004 and I had been spending the best part of nine months with the Red Arrows from when they trained new crews and ground engineers over winter from the most basic levels, to eventually flying their elite aerobatic displays across the nation’s beaches and balconies.
By the time I had shot the first two contacts, I had only I think two flights under my belt so the cockpit environment was still as alien to me as might a trainee astronaut treading on Mars. Tied with very restrictive straps and in layers of RAF clobber, I was also encased in a vice-like helmet and with an oxygen mask pinching nose and mouth. The strapless Mamiya 7II was gaffer taped up so I had only 20 exposure to make during each 30 minute flight.
First attempts were hopeless as I struggled with their awkward equipment and the impossible g-forces but I’m using as an example one flight on the 7th September followed by another a few weeks later.
In the first two sheets (which one should read from bottom left to top right) you see what I was hoping for, though with limited success: From a chase plane, the iconic Diamond Nine Hawk jets are in formation set against England’s pastures, sometimes seduced by the extraordinary appearance of another jet within touch above. Thereafter is what I saw forwards through the plexiglass. I liked the idea of using the explosive zig-zags and rear mirrors as frames within frames along with any reflections of my own pilot’s helmet with its large red arrow on top. To the team, I was breaking all the rules for aviation photography. Something pleasing in that.
Back in London every other week to process I found that while they were sharp, the images weren’t telling my story from up there. By the 24th I was feeling more confident and the frame I liked best (which made a double-page spread in the eventual book) is the deepest blue shot during what’s called the 5/4 Split where we climb vertically and at the apex, the aircraft split into two groups. It feels like the outer atmosphere so deep is the blue but we are in fact only a few thousand feet high.
The thinking process viewed here is a way of displaying our successes and our failures too as we fight those minutes or hours, confronting our demons.
For some reason there isn’t much work on that second roll though I do remember feeling tired by the travelling and those g-forces that seemed to drain one’s reserves.
It is possible that by sheet #408, this was the flight on which I blanked out during a tight turn and 10 frames were all I managed.
Filed under: aviation, England, Landscape, Photographer, Photography | 4 Comments
Tags: aerial, analogue, contact sheets, film, mamiya, Photography, red arrows, stories, story
Heritage Glasgow
After returning from my time on Mull, the photographer David Gordon showed me his manor – Glasgow’s South Side – in the hours before my homeward flight.
On that beautiful morning David took me past abandoned warehouses and still vacant bomb sites, followed by the fine detached houses of Pollokshields and Queen’s Park sporting green stained 80s conservatories. As we progressed, David bemoaned his council’s inability to properly maintain road junctions to accommodate pedestrians or to clear blocked drains that spawn lakes of oily water. Latterly, we headed to the still handsome Scotland Street School Museum designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and currently showing the Partick Camera Club’s b+w work from the 1970s. In places, the toil of these roving amateurs was what I’d expect McCullin to bring back – so inquisitive and intimate was the gritty documentary.
Opposite the school, many of those typical scenes have gone. The new M8 motorway’s concrete has gobbled the tenement lives of families and children and only the school bell still in situ still emits the sounds of bygone Glasgow.
To street photographers a city like Glasgow is less frantic and chaotic but nonetheless a more confrontational city than London - a capital known for its English frostiness to northern trippers. I recounted how in the West End that I’ve frequented a lot this year, one can melt away and rarely be noticed among tourists and their ubiquitous photo-gadgets. In Glasgow, David feels constantly exposed to the directness of the Scots.
Outside Lidl I saw the tourism poster showing the Glenfinnan Monument where Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard to launch the 1745 Jacobite Rising. As I photographed the poster and incidental corporate colours, a woman shuffled past me muttering about my invading peoples’ privacy and I once again recalled the idea that only the photographer understands what information is being considered via the viewfinder. The outsider, often the subject itself cannot possibly guess at content or context.
Filed under: Landscape, Photographer, Photography, Scotland, Street Photography | Leave a Comment
Tags: glasgow, goven
Locking Horns on Mull
I feared more for the excess on my hire car, than any personal injury. The rain had stopped on this part of the Isle of Mull just in time for my ferry back to the Scottish mainland.
The Longhorn came round the bend of the single-track road and carried on towards me expecting food, as had others. A day earlier my presence started a stampede from two open fields as a dozen cows ambushed me but parted lazily as I let out the clutch with eyes half-closed.
Anedul had asked me to come up with a master plan to photograph a region, a land within a land for a feature on rural architecture. Off the boat from Oban days earlier, the weather was horizontal and it lashed my lenses for the first 24 hours. Trying to think of positives that first night, my thought was that winter is a more authentic time to come up this far, no blue skies and endless horizons. And no tourists.
Scotland was still in my mind after a trip to Glencoe when I was asked for a favourite destination to photograph. I looked at Arran and at Skye. But this was November and Google Earth gave me valuable insight from the glow of my office screen. Instead of burning pointless fuel at £1.49 a litre, I first mouse-dragged the virtual A849 route around the Ross of Mull and B8035 towards Calgary – possibly the most expensive carbon-emission in Britain.
What grabbed me most were the near-empty highways around the Gribun headland and Loch Na Keal where cliff top panoramas – between low cloud and the next approaching squall – were spectacular. I was told these roads are purgatory for locals when the tourers arrive en mass in high season. But then, the economy relies on their crisp English Pounds and even their fading Euros.
Even in this bleak month, the grandiose guesthouse in Craignure was asking £55 a night though on average much asked for less – and with enormous porridge and fresh organic egg breakfasts. One visitor accused a landlady of adding food colouring, so alarmed was she at her yolk’s unnatural orange pallor.
But more astonishing for this London townie used to locking every door were the open invitations into kitchens of cottages and bothies, lodges and boats for coffee and cake. After 5 minutes of parlour chatter I had on one occasion a quick, ‘Oh, I have to be off in a minute – make yourself at home and let yourself out when you’re done with your photographs’ which seemed impossibly trusting. Of perhaps the 20+ locals I spoke with, I can count on one hand those who spoke with a genuine Scots accent, rather than the dominant English.
Sheila from Northampton; Tilly from Lewes; Karen from Washington, Tye & Wear. Niall from Ulva, Isle of Mull.
Towards Carsaig on the southern limb of the Ross, I drove down the slimmest and muddiest of mapped roads in pursuit of the thumbnail reality I had brought along on paper. Google had more confidence than me but I carried on regardless over cattle grids and narrow stone bridges towards the imagined prize that lay at an abandoned pier head, a dead end cove. There in the remote, damp woods was an apparently abandoned cottage with fishing nets hanging from nearby branches.
Around another corner too, I saw the skulls with antlers resting against the estate farm wall dripping in the rain as the cocks and hens pecked the eye sockets for rotting flesh. The cull was just over and a rather harassed estate wife begged me not to identify the prize kills with their Italian or Spanish owners’ tags. That would be bad for business.
It seemed like a week of the long horns and nothing Google could have predicted.
Filed under: Photographer, Photography, Scotland | Leave a Comment
Tags: anedul, google, isle, of mull, photographer, Scotland
16.05pm
15:48:49
16:05:19
16:05:21
16:05:22
16:05:23
I have recently identified certain street corners that are otherwise unworthy stopping places but which often become traps for late light.
The time of day has been of little importance lately compared say, to a late autumnal afternoon before the clocks go back, when the habits of pedestrian traffic changes for the worst.
For now, the most interesting occurrences do happen. When Londoners emerge from their jobs and hurry home en masse and in daylight.
It is a Friday and the sun pours down the East / West Piccadilly corridor, grabbing the culture of window displays by the throat while abandoning the rest to the dark of retail recesses. But I have waited for these shadows to advance enough to border the left of my intended frame where the statue (credited to the 19th century Florence-born artist Raffaello Romanelli) looks out with a seductive glance at noughty commuters.
Several incidents seem promising. A woman carries awkward boxes; a courier pedals on the pavement; a beauty walks past while an admirer looks across adoringly and a St James’s dandy looks every bit the Beau Brummel. The shapes on the reddish stone pillar are curious too as people wait at a crossing and the background of pacing walkers is unpredictably okay too.
So then the blonde in red comes along and drops her Oyster card and I hope she’s going to notice, going to turn around and stooping in those heels, do what I yearn will be something spectacular. And something does make her stop but what follows is all done and dusted within a few seconds.
The creeping worry starts before I scroll the screen – whether I’ve managed to get the moment amid all that can and (statistically, should) go awry. The screen lends such a nasty rendering that it ought to be taped over completely – for the experience of pressing the button to remain intact until one reaches home. But adrenaline kicks in and I search it excitedly.
Looking more closely, there is something wrong with each frame. In the first we see the lady in marble seemingly looking at the dropped item though the beautiful shadow on the wall shows us the lady in red is more occupied with a smartphone. We might decide it isn’t her item at all and is not the key ingredient to the sequence. In the second, we are too aware of another pedestrian with a red bag interfering with the nearer figure. In the third, I am worried about the dominant, emerging male. And in the last picture, despite the hard-core red coat, does the background detract from the moment once again?
And what is it I’m trying to sell from any of the four candidates? Is it the suggestive, the mischievous or the obvious?
And why is there no fifth, final frame?
Filed under: England, London, Photography, Street Photography | 6 Comments
Tags: choice, chronology, dilemma, sequences, series, time, timing
Utopia
I made a return visit to Stratford to walk the line of the former blue fence that separates the east London DDR and the airport landscape of the New Olympics.
Alas, my circumnavigation stopped abruptly on the A12 Eastway with No Pedestrians signs by the vast media centre and I turned back south along the River Lea to re-enter Lord Coe’s country, ringed by PulseSecure’s electrified ring of wire.
The Greenway looks less green and more white concrete these days with early displays of graffiti on the first pillars. Over on the western border once stood the beautiful Manor Garden Allotments, the parcels of land where passionate community gardeners grew their veg – bulldozed for a warm-up track where Usain Bolt can stretch his hamstrings.
And then back to Westfield where on opening day a few weeks before, I rode on the tidal wave of shoppers entering this cathedral to consumerism. Expectant families arrived in cars as if, in another era, they could smell the sea – a day of rock pooling ahead. Instead, we were swept together like 2012 day trippers into a sea of greed.
Filed under: England, Landscape, Photographer, Photography, Street Photography | Leave a Comment
Renaissance
England’s Pleasant Pastures was originally about random occurrences and musings, grabbed incidents during journeys from my work as a photographer approaching his 50th summer. On average, one post per month.
The 68 posts attracted a migrant bunch who appeared to find all the subjects I covered through Google, seemingly trending as their teacher set new assignments. If it were February, Language would be the hot topic; September was castrato season and November the time for Guido Fawkes and the Somme. A quick cut and paste of my blurb into the homework allows them more time for Xbox before tea.
And along the way I gave away a few secrets while working with noted writers on the books we made.
But it was taking me so long to research and write each post (though huge fun) for such a temporary audience that I decided to put the page aside, enjoy some annual R +R and return with a different touch.
You may find this grandee still puffing himself up as before but as my personal work is becoming more centred once again on street photography and the quirks of urban landscape, I imagine that from now on, these will form the basis of this blog.
And so on this occasion I offer you a recent interpretation where the street subversive Nathan Bowen has left another of his cartoons, this time outside a London fire station.
Filed under: England, Landscape, London, Photography | Leave a Comment
Tags: art, bowen, cartoon, graffiti, London, nathan, Photography, street
.. the Street, Running
After the post entitled “Working the Street” where, after some diversions, I talked of a newfound sense of purpose in photography, things have gathered pace for me creatively.
Since the last weeks of autumn and throughout the winter, the street has welcomed back me into the grip of its own genre. Admittedly, Street Photography has become the populist way of seeing the everyday and the ordinary. Where reportage photographers routinely look for the special, I have again become obsessed with the humdrum.
This is a return to form for me. Back to the virtual promenades and seafronts such as Southend-on-Sea where in the mid-70s, I learned how to duck and dive, a sort of Essex pavement two-step. The first photography book I acquired in my early 20s was A Day Off by Tony Ray-Jones at a book sale in the precinct (1974, New York Graphic Society, Boston ISBN 0-8212-0708-3). Looking through the yellowed copy now, I see I’ve underlined two sentences in the intro by Ainslie Ellis. The first:
“When (I) look at the ground glass, I see not only the picture, but four to eight pages.” And,
“I’m concerned with pushing images to the edge of sanity.”
Ray-Jones loved Fellini and Jacques Tati who would both have loved A Day Off. The same visual comedies of Tati’s Jour de fête (1949) seem to leap out of its pages but both voyeurs of the same slapstick antic still have me spellbound.
And so to England’s Pleasant Pastures! This blog may end here, at this post. Or I may post more from here if it seems appropriate. For now though, I would encourage you to traverse this field with me; take a leap over the stile; cross the road and approach the city limits where I am rediscovering in photography, the ridiculous metropolis.
The UK Street Collective is a foundling alliance of myself, Paul Treacy and Justin Sainsbury, each of who have a subtle wit that sits well with my own sense of insanity. We shall henceforth be blogging from http://ukstreetcollective.blogspot.com so join us there, if you will.
Filed under: London, Photographer, Photography, Street Photography | 1 Comment
Tags: funny, humour, Photography, pun, SE24 0AB, street, theme
