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 Inner Shadow
Read more…: The Inner ShadowNormally, I would do all I could to efface my presence from images, seeing it as an unwonted and egotistical distraction from the subject. Here, though, for reasons that are now obscure to me, I let my shadow fall, a negative projection across water and ground.
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ABCs
Read more…: ABCsOn my various wanderings around and about Aberdare that winter, I came across the town’s brick factory, which had recently closed down. Its tall and slender tower announced it: ABC. Unlike many other industrial remains, it was easy to get in and out off. Kids went there to play.
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The Lie of the Land
Read more…: The Lie of the LandSince, before moving there, I knew little about Wales, beyond certain clichés of which I was suspicious, I was taken aback to be woken from my first night’s sleep in the children’s home by the bleating of a flock of sheep being driven down the road under my window.
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Assorted Pollutions and Evasions
Read more…: Assorted Pollutions and EvasionsMy new environment, the town of Aberdare and the Cynon Valley, was very different to anything that I had previously known: the constant presence of the low mountains on either side, the black and greening slag heaps; the urban landscape of non-conformist chapels and working men’s clubs, and the terraced houses built by the mining…
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Nuclear Sublime
Read more…: Nuclear SublimeAfter university, I worked as a volunteer in a children’s home and special school in South Wales (of which, more later). One of the first things I was asked to do was to take some teenage boys to a military air show at RAF St Athan.
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Second-Hand Memories
Read more…: Second-Hand MemoriesAt a time when I was running a high fever for weeks, the heat of the blood had scrambled memories, dreams, thoughts and imaginings so that they became present all at once, like images etched on overlapping panes of glass. At any moment, it was hard to be sure what was memory, and what fabulation.
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Boxes, Mental and Pictorial
Read more…: Boxes, Mental and PictorialWhen I first read about the kinship between photography and melancholia, it struck a chord. I remember that as an adolescent I made a deliberate attempt, in the interests of self-preservation, to turn my destructive inward-looking mental forces outwards.
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The Graveyard of Industry
Read more…: The Graveyard of IndustryThis photograph was taken in St Sepulchre’s Cemetery in the Jericho area of Oxford during my last days of college. In this working-class area, the graveyard was partially hemmed in by the walls of an old iron works.
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Julian Stallabrass 