Morning folks - hope you are all keeping well and positive.
Today's little ditty is about a thing that (strangely) over the years I have come to care about deeply:
Dundee's Closes and Pends.
Er, Wot? I hear you say.
Well, basically they're little lanes and cul-de-sacs in the interstitial spaces between buildings - a throw-back to times when medieval cities grew exponentially as populations increased.
They were/are messy, tight, dark, surprising and, to my mind, utterly wonderful.
Many cities still have theirs - I am thinking particularly of York and Chester and lots of European cities, though theirs are as nothing to here.
Well that's not quite true actually.
Ours might well have rivalled them all had this city not been subjected to, erm, how shall we put it politely, 'improvements'.
Tear-downs; new this and that; bolstering up; neglect; architectural laissez-faire - you know the sort of thing.
Granted, from reading the evidence, a vast amount of upgrading was required, however, to my mind, and certainly to my mind's eye, one can only imagine what this place would have been like had the medieval/post-medieval city been allowed to remain, AND we hadn't had "the most corrupt council in the UK in the 1960's".
Oh yes, architectural gems, slums, monuments, you name it and it got pulled down
If you are in any doubts about this bold statement, just ask Brian Cox - you know, the gruff Scots actor (not the physicist).
Brian can remember a time when this city still wore its poverty with a fierce pride and a distinct bonhomie that was as both surprising (to a newcomer to the city) as it was accepting.
It wasn't for nothing that Jackie Leven penned the ditty "The Bars Of Dundee". I seem to remember him saying somewhere that the city's hard-drinking culture was a special, but ultimately destructive, thing, but that it had helped him out when he needed a friend.
There is quite a lot of written and photographic evidence of the old city; I actually think there's probably been more books written by Dundonians about their city than there has by anyone about anywhere else. It's that pride thing methinks.
If you are interested, there's a wonderful archive called Photopolis. The majority of the photographs were taken by Mr. Alexander Wilson with his plate camera over a period from the 1870's to 1905!
If you have leisure time, you can find them here
They are wonderful.
Anyway, back to closes and pends.
Sadly these days, they've mostly been closed off, or left single open-ended for access, resulting in the look of the photographs below - it isn't a happy state.
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| Pullar's Close 1 |
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| Pullar's Close 2 |
These were taken in Pullar's Close.
It is literally across the road from the wonderful McManus Galleries and yet within the space of a few hundred yards you have gone from somewhere that people care deeply about (the McManus is a fine place to visit - I love it) to a place that literally nobody gives a shit about.
Indeed, broken waste-water pipes at the back of one of the tenements overshadowing the close is resulting in a proper, medieval shit and bath water pool, the likes of which were banished from the kingdom, oooooh, at least 200 years ago!
But that's the thing - nobody cares.
The bits where the buildings have been shored up have been dealt with in a mess of security gates, razor wire, CCTV, and, perhaps the most heinous of crimes . . . cement pointing.
[The latter just means that because Scottish sandstone is relatively 'soft' (in stone terms not soft, but you know what I mean) and cement is inflexible and impermeable, when the stone around a cement-pointed joint wears (because of weather erosion - and it will, that is the nature of the beast) water gets into the small gaps between the pointing and the stone.
The stone gets wet, stays wet and when a hard Winter comes, the water freezes causing ice bulges, which split and crack the stone.
It is a natural process, but cement really hastens it along.
These joints should have a lime pointing which is flexible and breathable.
It is kinder to the building.
Here endeth today's lesson!]
Anyway, documenting what is left of these wonderful medieval hangovers is something of a project for me and I am thoroughly enjoying it . . . I just wish I had a time machine.
The above negatives were Delta 400 processed in Pyrocat-HD, but I think my metering was well off that day as most of them seem underexposed. I had sort of resigned myself to filing them away and forgetting about them.
However help was at hand in a bit of wayward thinking.
I have never in my life printed anything on Grade 4 - have you?
It never seemed necessary, and not only that, on a 'normal' negative, you'll just get pretty much soot and whitewash, so harder grade printing was filed away as a WTF's The Point thing.
However, having recently had Bruce (from The O.D.) enthuse about Wynn Bullock's Stark Tree print - a masterpiece of printing - I revisited his section in the book 'Darkroom' where he mentions using hard grade papers for underexposed negatives.
A big 'Duuuuuuuuuuuuuur!' thunderclapped over me, of course, that's the whole point of harder grades.
I'll put my forgetfulness down to the fact that most of my negatives are perfect all the time - naturally (he said, tongue in cheek).
So, both of the above were printed on Grade 4 at very short exposures (8 seconds at f22 on the DeVere/Vivitar combo) with about 4 seconds extra for each edge and the skylight bits (which were hard sunshine) got an extra 8 seconds.
I could see, as they emerged in the developer, that they looked lovely, with a glow that made me feel quite proud.
The scans don't really do them justice, but they work as prints.
The paper was bog standard Ilford MGRC and I'll need to print them properly at some point.
The camera was the SWC/M on a monopod.
Seeing as it worked this time I also intend to go back over other underexposed negatives that I have given up on and try the same technique - it was an eye-opener.
And that as they say is that!
I've loads more stuff to come, but am still mid-decoration, so am having to balance time and ladders.
Until we next meet, be good, take care and stop feeding those seagulls.
H xx
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