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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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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Landscape Rushing By
Read more…: Landscape Rushing ByDecember 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
Read more…: Double ReflectionNovember 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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A Few Steps Towards Depicting Strangers
Read more…: A Few Steps Towards Depicting StrangersSeptember 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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Julian Stallabrass 