moving out

Coasts on continents; half of it english and half canadian.

pinhole squall

pinhole squall, originally uploaded by cath9 for roamin.

Things we’d rather do, places we’d rather be in.

If I wasn’t at work/packing/moving/marking/sleeping/eating/whatever, I wouldn’t mind being here, wandering about or watching the sea, listening to the silent groan of those cottages edging closer to the sea as the cliff disappears beneath them. One of my favourite places; more history and links to the past.

It used to be that nobody updated the houses here at all, knowing that nobody will now pay for sea defences and that sooner or later the buildings will be demolished or pitch over the edge. The cafe, not notorious for it’s acute business profile, feels like a wormhole into the fifties. But recently, someone has painted one of the cottages a bright sea-green, which signifies optimism and a love of beauty, if nothing else.

I took this with the camera wedged against the railing of the stairs, hoping it got the fisherman in and didn’t get battered in the wind too much. Things being battered by the wind seem to do really well in pinhole.

Scan your veg

Old orange marrow, although my friend swore blind it was a courgette. Look at that colour…..

war city surface

Another recent double exposure, made with the squat-looking Ensign Fulvue (cyberman-like, five quid in a junkshop, someone’s replaced the metal mirror).

Back to a fake wartime in this one. I overexposed it and it needed extra time on the scanner to press some light through it, and the mottled smoke and grain resulting reminds me again of that Coburn effect; grainy bridges and receding London skylines. Made me think of the second world war specifically, which I’ve taught about to children and was completely gripped by (as they were), but I’ve no real experience of. We took them to a local historic fort where they had made models and bomb shelters and so on; there were some loud noises and bomb sirens, and a (voluntary, I should add) exhibit where we sat in a bomb shelter in the dark and listened to the sounds of a raid.

Nostalgia or history? I think this time the picture is more nostalgic, though not in a ‘fluffy’ way. I’m a long way from saying ‘war was lovely and cosy for the home front, and those were the days when people all stuck together and helped each other out etc etc etc’, but I’m saying this gives me that minor apocalyptic feel in my own (sort of) town, when all I could see with my eyes was Brighton seafront, a bit grey and dismal, with the sea on the left and the road on the right, and nothing much happening. Obviously though, I haven’t experienced this town in wartime, and so I may be way off.

The historic fort is saying, while still using art as well as artefacts, ‘this was the war, which your grandparents may remember’ (they sent all sorts in to show us, no live grenades or anything luckily) ‘and it helped grow the present, and was day-to-day as well as long-term, usual as well as treacherous, terrifying, and never easy’. I don’t think that’s nostalgia at all.

Edge

Gritty unreliable pinhole photographs for gritty unreliable moods. This one does not make me think we have stepped back a few centuries in time, although it could do I suppose (I remember an incredible shot taken in the Crimean War by Roger Fenton ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, 1855; which it very very slightly reminds me of, although very much less intense and focused, and moving. In Fenton’s shot you can actually see the spent cannonballs). It’s still more of an emotion, or, in my humble opinion, the atmosphere of a place.

There’s a passage in one of the Phillip Pullman books, ‘The Amber Spyglass’, which has been haunting since I read it. It’s a book for children, but one of those which adults read too sometimes rather like the Harry Potter books. Personally I’m a bit sick of Harry Potter, but I always end up reading them anyway, even though they seem a bit overdone these days, and familiar. There are parts of them which seem to reference some of the darker elements of history (the Nazis) and if you were to believe in the characters enough and know about the history, it could definitely have the force to hit you emotionally. Unfortunately, while the history on it’s own can certainly hit me, I’m not bothered about the characters any more and it just doesn’t work for me. Then again, it’s been a while since I was a kid.

On the other hand, Amber Spyglass similar in it’s a way; it still references some cruel and shocking elements of history, but it seems to convey these more vividly and be less ‘cosy’ elsewhere. Maybe it’s still fresh for me or perhaps it’s the chill of the way it is written, or the entire visual idea of it does it. I’ll let you know when it wears off. but for the meantime, here’s what happens.

Basically the characters find a man in a rural, possibly European farmhouse who has just been murdered by some soldiers, as part of a wave of genocide in the country. He is a ghost, but doesn’t realise it or believe it, even really after he sees his body. He knows he has to go somewhere, but doesn’t know where, and he and the characters set off. Soon they find other ghosts (whole families) also drawn away, and as they get nearer to where they are going, they see the countryside around them is getting darker and losing detail, the sky is also darkening and the colour in it is fading, and the book suggests it is because the ghosts are forgetting what it was like when they were alive.

Call me a miserable b*stard (and people have), but I find that entirely moving and nightmarish, and as far as i’m concerned it’s about genocide in Europe in fairly recent years (it’s the farmhouse and the initial description of the country that gives me that) but to my mind areas of the Nazi past resonate too. Elements of it seem chillingly realistic. The combining of truth, horror and fantasy, skilfully done. I’d quote it, but the book is lurking deep in a box somewhere, waiting for me to move.

Anyway, the upshot of that most enormous aside is that from reading that book I have an image in my head of what that desaturated scene would possibly look like, and pinhole cameras (with the darkness and grain, and random damage) are the way to capture it. This is the closest yet, unintentionally.

double sea

There’s a lot to be said for living near the sea, reminding you of timescales far more slow and enduring than your own. This is an older polaroid, about a year and a half ago now, taken in the cold in the hope of this bluish effect.

photogram flowers

What happens when you lose the camera altogether.

Photograms here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogram

I have been making these in my tiny bathroom, securely taping myself into the dark to prevent light leaks (reminds me of those movies where people hide themselves away, or enter a coma and then emerge after time to find the world devastated by nuclear attack or zombie virus or something. Although so far that hasn’t happened). I found out that you can make some interesting ones using plant outlines, something fragile and a little transparent, but that it is also possible to make some absolute rubbish. I try hard not to.