Morning folks - hope you are all a rootin' and a tootin'!
As per normal at the moment not a lot has happened photographically as (incredibly) I am still refurbing windows - oh for a cave with a single entrance, or a nice low-lying Scottish butt'n'ben cottage!
Long time readers may also remember that exactly a year ago I developed a PVD (Posterior Vitreous Detachment) in one eye swiftly followed by one in the other - this mad swirliness is a weird thing and I am still waiting for my brain to catch up and deal with the blurs as a matter of course.
"You'll be amazed," the optician told me, "it'll change overnight."
Well, I am still waiting and it goes from semi-clarity to an early morning pre-pot-of-tea fog, which is both dispiriting and debilitating.
It does (eventually!) clear though and I find the clarity of my eyesight pretty damn good considering my age, but all the same it would be nice to sweep it under the table and get on with things.
Of course, allied this with a major window refurb (11 windows and 3 doors!) and you have a recipe for very little done on the photographic front.
It's not that I can't, it's more that I find it hard to justify spending time on something that is hardly vital.
This being said, what price does one put on mental happiness, enjoyment of life and light and a sense that one is trying to stretch one's creativity in a positive and life-affirming way?
They're just photographs!
 |
| The River Of Time |
I've had the above negative and print for about 10 years - the data written on the back of the print states:
Adox Vario Classic
Grade 3 - 40M
36 Sec, f16
4 extra at edges
29/01/2011
Dektol
The negative was taken at a wedding by me, on TMX400 with my trusty Nikon F2 with an old pre-Ai 50mm f1.4 lens. They're largely discounted as a decent lens these days, but I love the character of mine.
Anyway, I've never known what to do with it, until now.
Happenstance (oh how I love that word) and a good filing system have helped me find something that seems sort of appropriate to the subject matter in hand.
To-wit (no, not you, Twit) I've had a good haul of coal delivered and fired up the steam-powered Scheephausian Time Machine to travel back decades, beyond when many of you were born.
So grab yer Demob Suit and get the Brylcreem on, we're heading back to 1940's Britain (courtesy of my Mother and Fathers' letters).
It was/is a hell of a responsibility I can tell you and yet in dealing with them it has made me think that the photographs we're producing now (whilst we still can, before digital everything overtakes us) might (if carefully printed, annotated, archivally stored AND if they survive) provide some illumination into our lives, to someone further down the line.
 |
| 70 Year Old Archival System 1 |
 |
| 70 Year Old Archival System 2 |
It was utterly remarkable to me, to read my parents' letters.
My mother was 23, my father 28, they were young-ish people involved in the greatest human conflagration there has ever been.
And yet here they were, not Mum and Dad as I knew them from my youth, but people, with all the hopes and fears, joys and passion all humans feel no matter the era.
I was lucky enough to be able to hear them, committed to time via. the portal of a letter.
Even after the initial surprise and joy, their voices stayed with me.
It was hard work - no really, it was!
I carefully scanned and carefully filed all 183 letters of remarkably thin, yet robust, wartime paper.
I laughed and cried and chuckled.
From January 1942 until May 1943, at times they were exchanging three letters a week each!
They ended their correspondance because they got married; Mum preferring my Dad's company to that of a rather officious Matriachal system in the hospital; my Dad was sick to death of the constant bus visits and cycling . .
You wouldn't believe how well-run Britain's wartime public transport was - remarkable, and besides the everyday warp and weft of wartime life, other things surfaced.
My father's dry humour came to life again 40+ years after his death. His comments made me laugh and also realise just what an influence he has had on me (though I knew it not at the time).
My mother's concerns were remarkably career-based and bang-on modern; they were quite astounding when one put them into the context of the times.
In short, this young woman surprised me!
I desperately yearned to meet with them again, but they are long gone, cast over the edge into black eternity.
So the letters were a surprise; a found treasure and a gift from time and the cosmos.
They could quite easily have been tossed out decades ago or lost in removals.
That neither mice nor insect affected them was all the more surprising, stored as they were in a crumbling paper folder, in an open tea-chest, in a loft - well, two lofts actually.
There's nothing archival about that.
It was like finding a diamond in the middle of a field - the field being the vast open spaces of ones life, where stuff happens, but is inconsequential.
Time is a curious thing, the moment passes and is gone; the joke, the comment, the joy and pain, passed by in an endless rush to the end of things - arrow-like.
That is the way it seems when you are young.
Once done it cannot be undone, and on the whole, this is a true and finite definition.
Time is a fatal cliff edge and each thing in your life is cast over that edge where it hurtles for all time, never reaching an end.
So that makes the creation of photographs (or the discovery of a bundle of letters) all the more remarkable, for they have taken time and made it substance.
Pieces of your life - where you were; how you were feeling; what you wore; how you looked, and deeper: what interested you; what your eye valued; how you thought a photograph should look; what you felt it should contain - they are frozen in time.
If you use film and make prints on silver gelatin paper, you are creating little boats of the substance of THE NOW to send off on a voyage to an unknown end.
Rather like the great explorers of history, your prints are sailing off to a distant horizon which we have never seen and will never see.
With luck there is a chance that they might be (to quote Kenneth Williams' remarkable Rambling Syd Rumpo):
" . . . passed down from father to son, 'til the 'andle dropped off"
If fate and chance are on their side it is quite possible that 100 or more years in the future (if stability isn't cast asunder by global process) someone, somewhere could be looking at your stuff!
(I was going to use the word 'work', but as I have said before, it isn't really 'work'; that is such a hand-wringingly awful art-speak word, that it is banned from FB).
Your stuff could be an eye onto a time.
It doesn't have to document strife or alarmes, it can just be a snapshot of the things that please you in life, a reflection of your nature.
You, are going to die, but you could also live on.
I find that wonderful.
Whilst I was doing all this (well actually scraping paint, up a ladder, with a heat-gun, safety glasses steamed, hoodie soaked from a heavy hail shower) I tried to quantify the value of what I had and the value of anything really, but particularly creative stuff *.
I had always known how special the letters were after their discovery by me in my Mum's loft in 2009, but I had been wary of delving in.
After all, who knew what skeletons might be uncovered?
Fortunately there were none, but the weight of responsibility to my parents' memory hung heavy and I knew I had to do something to preserve their (albeit small) legacy.
So, some one hundred pounds lighter, I have two Secol Archival Storage boxes and 200 8x10 Archival Polyester sleeves.
Basically this is the same stuff museums use - it is incredibly well-made in a sort of un-slick, British way.
There's no fancy-pants packaging, it is as utilitarian as a 1940's wardrobe.
It is far different to my normal American-sourced negative storage.
Yes, I could have just bunged them in another paper folder and filed them away, but no, I feel that what I have uncovered is not just an important social document (as well as a love story) it is a thing that might tell any future generations of our line, that somewhere back in time, at an important turning point in world history, two people (their ancestors) addressed just a tiny bit of what it is to be human.
It's a great weight and responsibility that hopefully they, whoever they are in the future, might care to shoulder.
The letters might well transcend time, so museum-grade storage it is.
I have also decided that I am going to include a note to the future from me detailing what I have done, a bit about us (in the here and now) and also will include a memory stick with the letters scanned as pdfs, just in case.
I am hoping to source a photograph of their wedding day too - my brother has it somewhere.
My mother looked beautiful and glamorous, my father slick, boney and handsome - together they looked (the photo, if I remember rightly, is a sort of snapped walking shot on a 6x9 negative) very 1940's Hollywood, albeit in a very British make-do and mend way (though that doesn't belittle anything, 'make do' was green before green was ever thought of.)
Mum's dress material (as far as I can work out) was sourced from the black market and stitched by her friend's mother.
Their wedding was kept secret from the Sister and Matron on her ward at the hospital, for fear of it jeopardising her career chances. See what I mean, it gives me the thrill of discovery again even just thinking about that.
So with a thought to the future I am going to push this little Pooh Stick out into the current and wish it luck as it travels further on down The River Of Time.
I'll never know how far it will go, I can only wish it luck.
And that is it folks - thank you as always for reading - I am sure normal service will be resumed shortly, but until then keep going to the clinic and tell them Sheephouse sent ya!
* And this is the definition I came up with:
Art (sic) can be something that had no intrinsic value until someone decided to purchase it; whereupon, it became something that someone valued enough to buy and (down the line) becomes (possibly, but not always) something that other people might not necessarily like, but decide they have to get, because it has this new intrinsic value and might possibly be a good investment.
