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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Absent Text
Read more…: Absent TextThe idea of ‘The Anatomy of Photography’ blog is that it follows the photographs that I took forty years ago to the month (the date was printed on Kodachrome slides), and that I should select images and write a text to accompany them within that same month, four decades on. Life events were bound to…
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Matters of Life and Death
Read more…: Matters of Life and DeathJuly 1985 Dead and inanimate things, when photographed, often appear to live a little. Sculptures twist their stone limbs; a gull crashed lifeless in the sand still shows the graceful curves of mobile flight. Since everything is frozen in photography, everything is also cast into implied movement. The psychologist Jean Piaget wrote poetically of how…
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The Sublime in Miniature
Read more…: The Sublime in MiniatureJune 1985 Hornsey Road, Islington, June 1985 [With exams looming, I made few photographs in June, and those, by the evidence of the slides, in a state of some distraction, so here I will look back a month to those I took near Dunstanburgh Castle.] The sea was wild that late spring month, and I…
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Dying Light
Read more…: Dying LightMay 1985 Returning to the Northumberland coast to photograph Dunstanburgh Castle for Katrina Porteous , we would be out from frosty early morning until after dusk in that wild May of sunshine, high winds and tempestuous seas. On the day I took these photographs, when evening came on, the wind dropped. As the sun lowered,…
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Street Monster
Read more…: Street MonsterApril 1985 Wandering in the Redland area of Bristol, I came across this piece, which was at the time one of the most skilful and elaborate works of street art that I had ever seen. It was early days in that art’s development, at the moment when Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book, Subway Art,…
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Clearing My Parents’ House
Read more…: Clearing My Parents’ HouseMarch 1985 [This entry and the next will be shorter than usual, as I complete the writing for my book, Art in the Age of Populism] At the top of the stairs in my parents’ house there is a strange little alcove, lit by stained-glass windows on three sides, and containing some bits of dark…
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A Surreal Meeting of Parallel Worlds
Read more…: A Surreal Meeting of Parallel WorldsFebruary 1985 [This entry and the next two will be shorter than usual, as I complete the writing for my book, Art in the Age of Populism] Studying modernism at the Courtauld, then situated in a Robert Adam house near Marble Arch, while living in a room not far from the Arsenal Stadium, and after…
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A Castle by the Sea
Read more…: A Castle by the SeaJanuary 1985 Katrina Porteous A yellow flag slants across the foreground, cracked by the wind yet silent and frozen mid-flight; behind it, a huge, cloudless sky, intensely blue; and silhouetted beneath that, the dark outline of a crag, surmounted by a tower; glimpses of windows, turrets, ruins. A sense is conveyed of great space and…
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Julian Stallabrass 