Village Fate

Down in the village, the dragon of democracy has been unleashed. I decided to take a stroll through the leafy streets and watch the sideshows.

There are plastic elephants sprouting all over Westminster's parks and gardens, no doubt queuing up to get into the smoke-free rooms where the deals are fragmenting. The floors of those grandiose buildings must be bowing under their weight right now.

In the alleyways and passages, the permanent residents are tidying up for the new tenants, whoever they may be.

Meanwhile, the old tenants carry on with their business, a weary look dominating their faces.

The reptiles are feeling hurt: we didn't do what they told us to do, and they're not used to that. Some try to cover up the fact that we still have a government,

while others (like the Yellow Bellied Turncoat) chatter to each other in a meaningless way about subjects on which they have as much information as a passing pigeon.

Everywhere on College Green hair is combed,

buttons are fastened, jackets are pulled straight: the lunchtime news slot is approaching.

While one chats, surprisingly, about the knowledge he can bring to Wembley over the relaying of pitches, round the corner they are enacting old Who songs.

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

It's all so-o-o tiring...

tilting at waterfalls

I've recently discovered the joys of the tilt/shift lens. Anyone who has worked with large-format cameras (head under a cloth) will know all about this. I haven't so I didn't, other than in theory. It took a little time to get my head round it: tilting gives the ability to move the bits that are in focus (the depth of field) into different areas of the image. It can have some weird effects, particularly when deliberately misused, such as making a real scene look like a model.

Its normal use is always in danger of delivering a look like a picture postcard. It's another example of the sophistication of the modern eye: we recognise visual clues even if we don't know their names because we are bombarded with them all day. 

This extreme focus control should put you in the picture. But it doesn't. It keeps you well outside, the detail once more contributing to alienation rather than inclusion.

Slowly, I'm learning where it will improve images, and where it won't. Usually the second is easy to do but useless, the first is difficult but rewarding.

Wave those flags

Of all the spring pop-ups, the one that gives me the greatest kick is seeing the Yellow Flags come back. They seem to have an ability to capture the light and re-distribute it in a way that no other leaf can do. Other iris variants shine like this, but not to the same degree. The difficulty, of course, is in the exposure, particularly now that it's so easy to fake in Photoshop. 

As the leaves flesh-out, I'll post some more...

Sisyphus

Photography can involve much repetition, particularly when practised without additional lighting. When the thing being photographed changes all the time, and even vanishes into itself, repetition becomes the subject. This is the case with the pictures I'm making from small waterfalls, dams in a brook built from stones and gravel.

Out of six built last year, only one survives (no.2, shown in the full moon the other night). While I would be lying if I said that this was always the intent, I realised two things as I began to build them. The first, an absolute principle when dealing with water, is that you can't stop it completely, only make easier for the water to go a particular way - through as much as over. The second was that, when the waters rose in winter, the dams would, most likely, be washed away. 


So I was prepared for the disappearance of what I had built, helped it along when the rains came by opening the biggest. As soon as the water found its new channel, it ripped the surrounding rocks away.


Rather than feeling a sense of disappointment, I found myself with the prospect of sisyphean pleasure. Roll that stone!


I began rebuilding a few days ago. This year, I will try to stop at 4 dams; if they get too close together, the waters rise all the way back to the previous dam, reducing the height of the fall and thus the effect of the whole. Patience is needed to do all this: it's tempting to force the rocks into place while the flow is heavy to create instant effect. They never last if you try that. It has to be done in stages.

The first layer has to be firmly wedged, but easily overflowed. That way, it quickly builds a ramp behind from all the debris (mud, sand, shale, etc.) which will form the base of the dam as it is built back and up. This is the only point at which I do attempt to make all the water go over. It's easier to do all this when rebuilding. The side piles, (shown here at no.4) crucial to protecting the bank from unnecessary erosion, are still there from last year. All that needs to be done is to re-connect them across the middle.


That's where the water will be encouraged to go, funnelled in to a narrow space so that the pressure from behind will force it over and through, producing the spouts and sprays I want for the photographs.


(You can see these over at the website.)


Looking at the water as subject, I've started to realise a few things about why it looks the way it does. When it churns, why does it look white, for instance?  Particularly in direct sunlight, the photographs show the reason clearly. Each droplet that breaks free has a property I remember from school physics - total internal reflection - and those reflections, pointing in every direction, are bound to pick up on the light source - the moon, the sky, the sun. 

Here you can see the water breaking over a rock (click for a bigger version): to the right, a smooth body of water gently reflects the light from its cohesive surface; to the left, it is impeded by the rough edge, and breaks into streams of droplets, each with its own internal reflections, all joining together to give that white-water-look. It's another form of fractals, those repeated patterns which lie at the root of so much natural beauty.

Whose is this?

The background image we all know. I obtained it from the National Archive website, which states that all images are in the public domain, unless it is specifically stated to be otherwise. The photographer (I believe it is Herbert Mason) is not credited on the site.

The Fourth Plinth website tells us the subject of the sculpture (Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, who co-ordinated the allied air forces in the Battle of Britain) but does not name the sculptor on the initial page. His name is Les Johnson.

The photograph of the sculpture on the plinth was taken by me.

As I understand it, I could use this resultant image in any way I choose, including the (unlikely) option of taking payment for it. Yet I would clearly be using the work of others for my own gain.

Furthermore, under current anti-terrorism law, I could have been arrested for taking the photograph, even though it is a public sculpture in a public place.

This seems like an almighty muddle.

McCullin, McUnited, and Manchester

Any namby-pamby consideration of pixels and involvement are blown away by Don McCullin's show, Shaped By War, at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. I grew up looking at his images in the Sunday Times; his books are on my shelves; and a print of "Shell Shocked Marine" hangs on my wall. Yet his show still blew me away, as if I'd never seen a McCullin image before. This is in part because it's a fluent and encompassing selection but even more because the new prints (made by him) seem to bring a another level of impact to sometimes familiar images, smacking the viewer right between the eyes.

Thankfully, he has also included his more contemporary work in landscape and still life. They are beautiful photographs, serving to remind us that his skill was not just about being in the right place at the right time (perhaps substitute wrong here, given the subject matter) but also about having an eye that could discern what matters in any given scene, and an understanding of tone which drips with life.

At the risk of his ire, this is from the IWMN site.

Still life with Cambodian souvenirs, Somerset, 1985
hangs within touching distance of images showing the horror of war, and a metre round the corner from a cycling slide show covering a whole wall.  The exhibition is punctuated throughout by screens on which we can see and hear him talking about the process of taking these photographs.

The whole thing is mounted in such a way as to bring the visitor back to the beginning, a circular trip which demands repeat viewing.

As a lazy Londoner, I don't make a habit of taking the train to Manchester in order to see an exhibition of photographs.

More fool me. The museum itself is a fascinating building, the sort that we have far too few of down here.  It rises imperiously out of the hodge-podge of redeveloped wharves and toy-town industrial estate lumps.

By curious coincidence, Libeskind's only London building is about the same distance from  Arsenal's Emirates Stadium as this one is from Manchester United's Old Trafford.  Even as an ardent Gooner, I was impressed by Fortress United, although the rather scrappy poster that they were daubing all over the front yesterday doesn't touch the roll-call of heroes currently wrapping Ashburton Grove.

But it's certainly time for a statue of Monsieur Wenger, perhaps in the style of the one depicting Sir Keith Park which now graces the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. (See next post)

Manchester had even more to offer. I wanted to visit the Manchester Art Gallery to see the Ron Mueck room and the Goyas.

Another heart-warming surprise. It's exactly what a city gallery should be, and the citizens of Manchester clearly think the same. It was teeming with visitors, but not the sort you see in London Galleries - no straggling crocodiles of weary tourists here, no babbling in tongues. It seemed that every visitor other than me was a Mancunian.

The shop had rows of postcards showing classic Turners, not one of which I'd seen. Had I missed a room? No, apparently not; they're just Not On Display. It takes some confidence from a museum director to keep the Turners in storage, and show the Kitsch Victorians. It works.

The Goya prints were the best examples I'd ever seen - and Jake & Dinos Chapman's perverted toy soldiers were in the same room.

The only problem with Manchester appears to be travel: you can only get there by Virgin Trains - or, as I heard one local saying to his phone: "On the Virgin." It's a small price to pay.

More pixels

There are two pictures on show at the Saatchi Gallery which illustrate the problem I've found with gallery photographs (see "after the gap").

The first is a large print of an imaginary rubbish tip, stitched together from many images, by Rashid Rana. It's an impressive piece, verging on the abstract, but gaining power from a close inspection revealing the subject. The second is a smaller, more intimate image, of a female figure sitting on a rock over water in what looks like a cave. It has some haunting quality. Approaching the picture, it looks as if the photographer (Ryan McGinley) has deliberately avoided sharpening or noise reduction.

While the first is a more immediately striking piece, with size, colour, and subject all contributing to impact, it does not allow the viewer to feel it as an object: however closely it is approached, it is still a reproduction of some thing that exists, not an object in itself. McGinley's piece, on the other hand, has a raw existence of its own. The visibility of the noise, of the pixel structure that makes the image, provides a doorway into the viewer's temporary ownership of the picture.

This is not to detract from Rana's piece - but I like to find some involvement in any visual art pieces that I look at, and this provides two examples in the same building that illustrate my observation.

The Saatchi is good visit right now, not least because  Richard Wilson's wonderful 20:50 oil installation is there. I went to see it several times at Boundary Road, and was delighted when Burkham surprised me with it the other day. The only disappointment is that the walkway which takes you inside the piece is roped off, denying first-timers the real icing on its cake. Odd.