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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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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Actually Existing Sculpture
Read more…: Actually Existing SculptureAugust 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
Read more…: The Ballad of Reading Bus StationJuly 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…
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Limping About Venice
Read more…: Limping About VeniceUnder 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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Wishful Thinking
Read more…: Wishful ThinkingI 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.
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Formalism on the Rocks
Read more…: Formalism on the RocksAs 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…
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In Praise of Shadows
Read more…: In Praise of ShadowsIn 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.
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