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.

  • A Castle by the Sea

    January 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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  • Landscape Rushing By

    December 1984 Ivan Kliun, Landscape Rushing By, 1914-15 As I started to study art history, I took photographs of pictures—in galleries when it was allowed, or from books. Since I had only one camera body, and as it was difficult to change film mid-way through a roll, these photographs became interspersed with my own. So,…

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  • Double Reflection

    November 1984 During one of my first walks along the Regent’s Canal, on a wall under a bridge, my shadow is doubled as it is projected by the sun and then again by light thrown off the water. The shadows are cast across a concrete surface, which is scrawled and incised with lettering. At this…

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  • Cages and Frames

    October 1984 Spider monkeys, London Zoo Looking back on the slides taken in this month, although they depict quite different places, there appear at regular intervals images of grids, cages and barriers. In each, I have tried to align the geometry of the subject with that of the photographic frame. Willem Claesz Heda, still life,…

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  • A Few Steps Towards Depicting Strangers

    September 1984 Rue St Louis en l’Île The renowned photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths was fond of jokes, and he once told me this one: two photographers are talking: ‘I saw a wretched-looking tramp in the street yesterday.’ ‘Oh really, what did you give him?’ ‘1/125th of a second at f8.’ It gets, of course, at…

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  • Actually Existing Sculpture

    August 1984 Opera Garnier, Paris: Harmony, Poetry, Music (left), Instrumental Music (right) This photo, taken at one entrance to the Opera Garnier, a building widely seen as the ultimate cultural manifestation of the regime of Napoleon III, shows two sculptural groups that make strenuous efforts at expressing the glory of the new empire—and its civilised…

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  • The Ballad of Reading Bus Station

    July 1984 March 1984 Among Martin Parr’s collection of boring postcards, there is a view of a shopping centre in Reading. It struck a deep chord in me when I first saw it, since I lived and went to school there, and viewed from bus windows on many a journey the unfolding panorama of stained…

    Read more…: The Ballad of Reading Bus Station
  • Limping About Venice

    Limping About Venice

    Under sunshine, the city forms a hallucinatory vision on the glittering water, a cavalcade of rich colour and variegated surface, of shadow, brilliance, and dancing reflection. It is equally an obdurate labyrinth, improbable in its creation and survival, and the marvellous screen onto which travellers have projected their imaginings of vice and virtue, glory and…

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