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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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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Far from Home at Home House
Read more…: Far from Home at Home HouseNovember 1985 When I went to study at the Courtauld Institute, I was new to art history and extremely insecure about my abilities and the extent of my ignorance. Given the reputation of the place as a small, specialist academic centre, I naively expected an atmosphere of intense intellectual exchange—and did in fact find it…
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A Concrete Shore
Read more…: A Concrete ShoreSeptember 1985 Visiting Italy with a headful of legends, the mundane and disjointed character of its landscape sometimes seemed layered, translucently, over ancient stories. I did not come to know the photographs of Luigi Ghirri until many years later, but his work precisely portrayed a simultaneous crisis of the environment and the image world. In…
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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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Julian Stallabrass 