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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The Ideology of Under-Exposure
Read more…: The Ideology of Under-ExposureWork 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…
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The Battle of Winwick Quay
Read more…: The Battle of Winwick QuayA 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…
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A Gothic London
Read more…: A Gothic LondonI 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.
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Quadruple Exposure
Read more…: Quadruple ExposureIf, as in the previous post, the rehearsal of memory is like a multiple exposure, this project is at least quadruple.
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Unphotographed and Unphotographable
Read more…: Unphotographed and UnphotographableIt comes near the time when I would leave South Wales, having spent a year there working as a volunteer in a children’s home and a special school. While I have been touching on various aspects of my experience and the circumstances of the place through photography, in preparing to leave—as it were, once again—I…
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An Allegory of Industry
Read more…: An Allegory of IndustryIn that Victorian amenity, Aberdare Park, with its boating lake and bizarre cast-iron fountain, there also stands on a head-high plinth this allegorical figure of Industry. The detailed listing that I kept of my photographs at the time records that the image was made with a polarising filter, which darkened the sky so that the…
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Ur-Graffiti
Read more…: Ur-GraffitiLooking back at these old slides, I am struck by the palpable presence of objects in a few of the images. I remember having that feeling when first getting the slides back from the processors, and raising them to the light.
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Rain and Recession
Read more…: Rain and RecessionIt had rained that autumn in Wales for sixty days following one upon the other, a consistent heavy rain. After a few weeks, everything, tree bark, the soil, the stones themselves it seemed, were swollen with liquid. Under the leaden light, colours darkened, losing themselves beneath the black sheen of water.
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Julian Stallabrass 