Anatomy of Photography
Introducing Anatomy of Photography 
In 1982, I shot my first roll of Kodachrome 25, and from that moment on became immersed in making colour photography. 
Kodachrome was a remarkable colour transparency film, made from 1936 to 2009. At the time that Kodak ceased to sell it, I wrote a brief elegy about its history, its qualities, and the particular skills and aesthetics that they fostered. 
Photography and memory are of course intimately bound together, for good and ill… 
… and since once out of childhood I never kept diaries, my regular – often daily – practise of photography is the physical prop of my recollections. 
So, for as long as I am able, I will pursue memory and photography at once, revisiting the photos that I took four decades on, bringing a remembered past and the present into juxtaposition. 
This project will engage with the analogue past of photography, the workings and frailties of memory, how photography deforms memory, and the past that camera and film recorded. 
The illusion of a coherent identity is assembled by the false mapping back of the ideas, attitudes, feelings, and temperament of the present personality onto past selves. 
I remember, though currently cannot quite feel, the mental disruptions that brought me to photography in the first place. 
It is with trepidation, then, that I reopen those old yellow boxes of slides.
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Illegal Art
Read more…: Illegal ArtJuly 1986 That July, I took three photographs of graffiti along the same stretch of black-painted wall in Finsbury Park. They may serve as a temporal triangulation onto today’s much-changed street art scene. Over my long London wanderings, paying close attention to how kids had decorated walls, it was then rare to come upon elaborate…
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Forced Errors—and a Knife
Read more…: Forced Errors—and a KnifeJune 1986 Some rare photographers have developed the skill to make well-crafted images in fast-moving situations of extreme chaos and peril. Don McCullin, for example (who I interviewed in the run-up to the Brighton Photo Biennial that I curated, Memory of Fire), had the uncanny ability to compose very fine photographs while under fire. Not…
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Imperfect Iterations
Read more…: Imperfect IterationsMay 1986 In pursuing this memory and photography project, strange iterations echo through the mind and across images, both within the past and in its distorted parallels with the present. A photograph that I took on the Blackstock Road in Hackney struck me as a success, and I sometimes showed it in exhibitions. A record…
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An End to Flight and Freedom
Read more…: An End to Flight and FreedomApril 1986 On the council estate where I was living, I came upon this perturbing vignette. Beads of rain perch on the brown plastic limbs, and fingers seem to reach for a fallen stick. I photographed it partly because Surrealism was much in my head, especially the strange power of disparate objects thrown together in…
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Revenant
Read more…: RevenantMarch 1986 Jihyoung Han, I Brought You My Bullets, 2024 In my new book on art and populism, I write about the uncanny reappearance of spectres long thought to have been permanently laid to rest. For example, the artist Jihyoung Han paints gloomy scenes of a near-future in what seems to be the aftermath of…
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Council Housing—and the Allure of Dynamite
Read more…: Council Housing—and the Allure of DynamiteFebruary 1986 Barkway Court, King’s Crescent Estate, December 1985 Needing a cheap place to stay, I had rented a council-flat bedroom in a Hackney tower block. Nineteen storeys high, it was built on modernist principles in 1971, as part of the King’s Crescent Estate. December 1985 An immediate revelation was living with a view onto…
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Flowers for my Mother
Read more…: Flowers for my MotherDecember 1985 A photograph of my mother, Audrey, taking the opportunity of a scaffold outside our flat in St Ives to give the window a proper clean. I knew that the flash would reflect from the glass but also that, given the latitude of the films of the day, it was the only way to…
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Julian Stallabrass 