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Some Photos

A word of explanation...

My first exhibition was of 'multiple photographs', taken on a Nikon and glued to board; some recent ones, taken with a less than basic digital camera and slid about the page on a computer, appear below in the only manner in which they ever have, on screen.  

One or two single shots I like come first. 

But what is the homage to a writer, the late W.G.Sebald, doing here? 

Recently, you see, I have been urged to read his 'Austerlitz'. It weaves into its relentless, unbroken and enticing narrative a number of sudden, rather poor photographs.

I came to realise that the poor quality of the photographs is part of the point of them. We all take rather poor photographs; but what we see in them has a life entirely independent of the quality of the photo. So that the poorest photo is the richest, perhaps, for having no pretention. (Where, some would say, none can be had...)  And the fatuity of taking them at all points a light at life's mysteries, too.

At any rate, it has illuminated for me the 'drole' element in one's motivation for taking certain pictures in which the impassive sheen of photography adds to the dead-pan effect.  And those who urged me to read Sebald now receive e-mails with Sebaldlich little pictures too pierce the narrative... It is, by virtue of his words, a particular way of looking, or of taking photographs; and is not that easy.  My homage is inadequate but it is a start.  There needs to be a railway station or two...

Oh, not to mention the Austerlitz-lich high likelihood that he was for a term or two perhaps a colleague of the father-in-law who died before I knew his daughter...

Well, anyway...

• photographs

• collage/multiple photographs

• homage to W.G.Sebald

People taking photographs are so funny... they don't actually look?

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Multiple photographs

Taking the Staten Island Ferry to the Battery; October 1984.

This picture is 16'x3' [=5x1m] and is to be read from right to left. 

Is this my earliest RoadMovie?

When David Hockney first produced his multiples over twenty years ago, in polaroid grids, then quilts of snaps, he showed us that a trick many had done before, in a faffy sort of way, had behind it a deep logic expressing how we see, feel and move in the space before us.  The sweep of our experience of space entered the pokey world-view of photography.

The pity is that such is the thorough and alluring way in which he established this new vision, it has been difficult for anyone to take it further without seeming to copy or imitate him.  Yet it is a technique for all, not a style of his; and a tubby person such as I will figure the scene out quite differently from someone else, for example. 

My recent multiples have been done on a very poor digital camera.  It was almost a toy and friends told me how poor the results were compared to my chemical Nikon.  Yet then I thought, it does at least solve the cost factor of multiple photography; and by the same token, multiple photography gives my crummy photographs much greater life, because the finished image can have dozens of them in it and eventually be bigger in pixels than an ordinary high-resolution single still...

I often find that with this wonderfully stupid camera [it was £45 in 2002 and has yet survived falling in a river] I rattle off lots of snapettes while people don't notice and then I make up something afterwards that keeps me happy... That's all it is.

The lay-out of the images below is done entirely on computer.  The photos are never printed.  And so, while cheap-&-cheerful prevails, one crucial sensual, visual element is lost - the minute three-dimensionality of the snaps stuck down on top of each other, overlapping and unflat.  Believe me, it is very significant how important that loss is...

Villa Parasol: A Walk under the wisteria in the spring of 2003...

Villa Parasol: the view from upstairs:

left] in the sun; right] as the snow falls...

as it does:

La Fouguière, Correns; here in the shade of planes and with a spread of vines, I painted the Capri-Caprices in May/June, 2004...

Samm asleep...

'Oh for heaven's sake stop faffing with that silly camera...':

The birthday-girl Sarah texts and pastises at the Ritz, avenue Jean Médecin, Nice.

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Inadequate Homage to W.G.S.

NB: JB on W.G.Sebald in The Spectator: 20th October, 2007

All taken on the cheapest digital camera - but, unlike his, in colour.  Perhaps I should use black-&-white for my wgs pictures.  But one doesn't always take a wgs deliberately, that would be to spoil the thing.  This is a new obsession and I shall in time put the black-&-white versions beside the colour ones in certain instances...

Then I found in the basement a box of photographs that had been damaged by damp or even a small flood; the pictures were stuck together in wads, some by large areas leaving little to be salvaged, some only by an osmotic fringe along one edge.  One such photograph was of seaside chairs near Genoa, photographed in 1993, where now the peeling paint from the salt-battered chairs was accompanied by a water-savaged incursion along the lower edge of the photographic paper... for this extra-photographic richness, I am sure, Sebald would have prized the sheet.  It comes last on the page.

A path named after Nietzsche in Eze-Village, Alpes-Maritimes

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