Print offer ending soon!

Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to look at, or enquire about, my Alleyway, Menorca print.

Not long to go now! Anyone who'd like to buy one has until 8pm on Tuesday (28th). From that point on, the print will be withdrawn from my shop.

Where is the work?

Is it on screen? On social media? In the print? In the print you made, or that someone else made for you?

Is it ‘the image’, or maybe, ‘image idea’: an abstraction that exists apart from all the physical versions? Or does the work have to be a ‘thing’ for you? A physical thing like a print that you can touch or hold?

For the former we might think negative or RAW file. We might not be too worried about where or how the different versions appear, because we are thinking of ourselves as ‘image makers’. The latter, however, leads to more traditional connotations of control and visualisation. Dare I even write ‘photography’, traditionally conceived.

Ansel Adams had an insightful way of seeing the problem. He famously called the negative the ‘score’ and the print the ‘performance’. This analogy with music is useful because it recognises the gap between image idea and realised, physical photograph. Insightful though it is, it doesn’t quite resolve the issues. Which is the definitive Moonrise, Hernandez by Adams? The early print, near to the time of exposure, or the later, darker versions with more contrast? 

Adams didn’t have to contend with social media either. What happens if you share a scan of your negative online, and then go on to make a darkroom print later? Where is the work in this case? The latter will subtly different; although potentially not so different that the ‘image idea’ is contradicted.

Must your work exist for a given period of time? This is written into traditional practice. One of the reasons for the high values for Adams’ prints is not only their highly individualised craft status, but their longevity, thanks to the silver gelatin medium and craftsman-like, archival processing. An iPhone or equivalent image is an obvious candidate for temporary status - made, maybe shared, enjoyed, laughed at … and then gone - but there are issues with images and files we might assume to be more permanent. Many photographers who made early migrations to digital have file storage and retrieval headaches. Discs become unreadable, software is not longer supported, old machines fail. Negatives made many decades earlier are still perfectly good today for scanning or darkroom printing.

For us as photography practitioners, these fascinating, near philosophical questions, resolve into practical ones. We face a series of choices about the work we want to make and where we personally stand on the issues. We can be an image maker or traditional photographer. It’s up to us to draw the necessary lines of engagement, to police definitive, perhaps physical versions if appropriate, or to concentrate our energies on other kinds of image construction and dissemination.

Like it or not, you do have to wonder where the work is.

Time limited print offer: Alleyway, Menorca

Today I’m happy and excited to announce a new print offer. I’m also trying something different, by offering it for sale in my shop for one week only (starting today). I may make more in the future, or I may not (so it is strictly speaking an ‘open edition’ print), but it will be certainly limited by this time constraint for now. Who knows, I may never offer this image for sale again, so there is plenty of scope for purchasers to land themselves a very low-number work of art.

The piece is Alleyway, Menorca, a black and white inkjet print with a full-bodied tonal scale. It was shot on a Leica M6 TTL earlier this year, using Ilford HP5+ film, before being scanned on a negative scanner and edited digitally. The paper is the venerable Canson Baryta Photographique, which holds the fulsome tonality well, and accommodates the subtle darkest greys. The print is on A4 paper, with a generous border for framing. Image size is approximately 15 x 22 cm. As is my custom, I will sign the print in pencil on the rear and will ship it with a certificate of authenticity. 

The print can be purchased in my shop now, but the sale will end on Tuesday 28th November at 8pm, London time. It will then be removed from the shop. If you are interested, my advice is naturally to place your order asap, something that is doubly important if you have the print in mind as a potential Christmas gift (and what better gift that a handcrafted print made by the photographer?). I'll do my best to make sure that any orders reach you in time for Christmas, but please be aware of shipping timescales and potential for disappointment if ordering from overseas.

The art historian under the dark cloth

The other day I came across my copy of T.J. Clark’s book Farewell to An Idea. It is a splendid work of art history, one that positively crackles with the most detailed and painstaking descriptions of Modernist artworks. As I flipped through the book, I remembered in particular the passages on Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Looking back, I had read and re-read these passages, almost as one might enjoy a novel.

Clark is an intellectual heavyweight in the old manner. He set up a masters degree in the 1970s called the Social History of Art, dedicated to a Marxist approach to art history. I studied on that programme in the late 1990s, under the tuition of Jasper Johns expert Fred Orton, amongst others. While Clark’s book is hardly light reading, it does repay the hard work it demands of the reader.

Now, I write that Clark’s descriptions stand out, but it isn’t just that these are careful and rigorous, which they are. There’s something more. They are object lessons in how to read a work of art. Clark makes every effort to convey the richness of the works he grapples with; it becomes a time consuming process of looking and looking again, a process that demands equal care with writing. The writing is not an afterthought, a means to an end in the descriptive enterprise, but a poetical analogue of the condition of paying close attention. This is perfectly in line with Clark and his ilk, who believe that canonical works of art repay that kind of close treatment. Unlike so many art historians though, Clark has learnt the figurative and rhetorical potential of his prose, and I can’t help feeling that his search for the ‘right’ phrase (a mirage of course) is a figure for our search for meaning in the painted and other material forms.

As is the tradition in so many of these blog posts, I make a recommendation to the photographer. Spend some time with Clark (or a Clark equivalent) and see how he describes the artwork. Think about how such a careful approach might be applied to a photograph - a canonical one, of course, but perhaps yours or a friends, too. Photography is so often a descriptive business. I’ve written on these pages before that there is much to learn from carefully looking at the work of others, and an analysis of composition, tone, mood, and so forth is the nuts and bolts work to be done.

This not only helps us to appreciate the finished image, but sharpens our skills of looking and in turn informs our visualisation. Indeed, as I continue to grapple with learning large format photography, I’m struck by how that format offers up a picture to be read right at the start. Under the dark cloth one has time to survey the flickering camera obscura image as if it were the final print. The Clark pacing to and fro in front of Pollock’s paintings in MOMA would be a wonderful mental guide to critical and rigorous decision making at the time of exposure. I can envisage him asking us to trace a line here, shift a little there, re-think depth of field, interpret a tonal shift. You would be right in thinking that this is not unlike the procedures recommended to us by experts like Ansel Adams, but the point here is that our resources stretch much further than the discipline of photography alone. And there are riches out there indeed. 
 

Physical Grain

“There are a plethora of websites designed to be little more than photographic “like farms”. Here at Physical Grain we’ve taken the opposite path: we feature only one image and the story behind it per week. We want to give you a chance to interact with the photographer and dig into the story of their image. Below, you will find the latest work from our featured film photographers over the past six months. Much more can be found in our archives. Images and words contributed by people with a story to tell; people just like you from every corner of the globe.”

— Ray Larose, Physical Grain

This week saw my image Sermon on the Sand featured on Ray Lorose’s website Physical Grain. I’m really happy that my image has been included; there’s the obvious personal pleasure in seeing one’s work valued and appreciated by others, but it’s worth highlighting Physical Grain as a website and concept too. 

I can surely recommend taking a look: you’ll find a carefully selected gallery of film-based images, each with an accompanying backstory or short technical insight. As Ray states above, he’s deliberately tried to avoid the simple ‘liking’ format of some social media platforms, and instead focusses on but one image a week. There is an elegance and simplicity to the work, and one can certainly see Ray’s guiding eye at work in the selections. It’s not always easy to find sources of images that are of consistently high quality, but Physical Grain is one of those places. The link below will take you directly to the site if you’d care to take a look.
 

How do you dry your films?*

I’ve been doing a lot of film processing with my students of late, and drying the film properly is inevitably a consideration. In my experience, this is one of those elements of analogue photography that is very much a matter of craft. No two photographers seem to have quite the same process; indeed, all possess little rituals and sequences as individual as they are.

A key question is what to dry the film with. Fingers? Microfibre cloth? Chamois leather? A few years ago, I came across Barry Thornton’s advice to use a film squeegee. He was absolutely convinced this was the best way, although he did attach some provisos.

A significant number of films later, I can concur with Thornton’s advice. However, some of my films have the dreaded long, even scratches down their length, so I have learned the hard way to take his provisos on board too.

First, the squeegee should be pre-soaked (with a dash of wetting agent in the water), so as to remove the particles that create the scratches. Depending on where you live, differing amounts of matter is contained in tap water, and you may well look (as I do) to distilled or de-ionised water as a more reliable alternative (I buy the kind of water used for car batteries, which is relatively cheap and available in five litre containers).

Second, the film should be soaked for a little time in the clean (de-ionised, etc.) water with a little wetting agent. The amount of wetting agent itself is subject to a little alchemy, although I follow Ilford’s recommendation for dilution that comes with Ilfotol.

This procedure is reliable and produces consistently clean negatives. It goes without saying that the film squeegee must be in good condition (I simply replace mine regularly to avoid degradation), and while I can’t say that scratches don’t creep in from time to time, it is the best method I personally have used. This is a craft you must learn first hand, so my advice might not be the perfect method for you, but it could be a great starting point.

* I write 'drying' here for simplicity, but it is more accurately the first part of drying I'm referring to, i.e. getting most of the water off the film before it is hung up to dry.