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.
  • Wishful Thinking

    Wishful Thinking

    I took this photograph on the common land near my parent’s home, almost exactly forty years ago. Lifting the slide to the light, I believed that I remembered the place where it was taken, which was familiar to me since childhood, and which I had visited often in my early years.

    Read more…: Wishful Thinking
  • Formalism on the Rocks

    Formalism on the Rocks

    As a child, my parents took me to St Ives in Cornwall, where my grandmother lived in a flat overlooking the beach. I would count the thin copper bracelets which she wore on each wrinkled wrist, five on one, four on the other, the touch of her skin as cold against my fingers as the…

    Read more…: Formalism on the Rocks
  • In Praise of Shadows

    In Praise of Shadows

    In St Paul’s, under available light, I photographed two military memorials, both carved by Charles Rossi, a successful imperial propagandist who made other similar monuments in the Cathedral. These monuments summon old and venerable shades, which stand amongst the parade of British greatness that St Paul’s relays along its aisles.

    Read more…: In Praise of Shadows
  • Learning from Leica

    Learning from Leica

    This image was taken with a Leica III, a camera then about 50 years old, picked up quite cheaply in a second-hand shop. Even after nearly two years of regular picture-taking, I was too shy and unsure of my abilities to take street photographs of people. I used the Leica instead with static subjects.

    Read more…: Learning from Leica
  • Father(s)

    Father(s)

    This is a photograph of my father at the dining table, in a familiar pose. The composite image that you carry of a parent naturally changes through childhood, adolescence and into maturity, so the surprise of this image, seen forty years on, is a freezing of that mobile, organic vison into a particular moment and…

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  • The Ideology of Under-Exposure

    The Ideology of Under-Exposure

    Work often finished after three—the start of the shift was early—and, driven by the urge to photograph the city new to me, I would head out right away to grasp at the remaining daylight, as the winter solstice approached. Lyrics from the Talking Heads often played through my mind: Think of London, small city It’s…

    Read more…: The Ideology of Under-Exposure
  • The Battle of Winwick Quay

    The Battle of Winwick Quay

    A night in late November, one of violent struggle, has come to stand as a dark harbinger of the fate of the union movement under Thatcher’s regime. I had taken a job as a residential social worker in Hackney but, soon after I arrived, a strike over wages was called, and life became a round…

    Read more…: The Battle of Winwick Quay
  • A Gothic London

    A Gothic London

    I was asked to make prints from some old glass plates. They showed groups of Welsh folk, lined up formally but smiling for the camera, on outings and picnics, or in front of their workplaces. All but the youngest children in them were now dead, I supposed.

    Read more…: A Gothic London

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