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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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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From Marble to Iron
Read more…: From Marble to IronI remember photographing the Albert Memorial on a clear spring day, fascinated and horrified by that assemblage of confidently imperial Victorian kitsch with the gilded presence of the universal ‘Renaissance Prince’ seated at its centre. If the monument is an ode to expense and excess, it reflected the fawning deference with which Albert was viewed.
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Hidden Talent
Read more…: Hidden TalentIn the last blog post, I mentioned that one of the kids at the home would go on to make remarkable photographs. What follows is Steve Phillip’s account of that time and the difference it made to his life, and some of his photographs.
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Money, Class, Photography—and the Lubitel
Read more…: Money, Class, Photography—and the LubitelLooking back on some of the colour slides I was taking at this time, now they seem to me to be inching towards an awareness of a simultaneous aging and binding, the slow solidification of social fetters, in a play of growth and entropy.
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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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