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.

  • Dream-Time Classicism

    October 1986 [I did not take any memorable photographs this month, so will look back to the slides marked September, among them the many images that I made in Greece.] Roman Agora, Athens From childhood, the allure of the classical world was for me a love of its stories, first through Roger Lancelyn Green, and…

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  • Time Personified

    September 1986 View of Thessaloniki from Kassianes Road On my first trip to Greece with a head full of legends, I encountered a reality which, especially in the big cities, corroded mythological fantasy. Mark Mazower’s brilliant history of Thessaloniki shows how that ancient and diverse city suffered, not just from successive bouts of ethnic cleansing…

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  • Artists?

    August 1986 The photograph shows a barber’s shop in Aberdare, an impoverished valley town dealing with the consequences of the closure of the coal mines. I had lived there for a year doing voluntary work, and was revisiting to meet old friends. A brilliantly double-edged joke, written by Barry Cryer, runs like this: A man…

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  • Illegal Art

    July 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

    June 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

    May 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

    April 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

    March 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…

    Read more…: Revenant

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