Saturday 16 March 2024

The Wanderer's Wetware


I don't think anyone suffers from the illusion that this is, in anything other than a very vague sense, a "photography blog". It is a blog about whatever I happen to feel like writing about, and it just so happens that I often feel like writing about photography. But this post is definitely one for the camera buffs: the rest of you may be happy just to look at the pictures, or to sit this one out altogether. 

Some photographers value brand loyalty, as if it were a mark of integrity: "I married Nikon, and never fool around with other brands, however attractive they might be, or however badly Nikon keeps letting me down". Others go even further, with the "one camera, one lens" approach, under the curious belief that their "vision" – actual or metaphorical – is adequately matched by just one particular optical combo. "Yep, I'm a hammer guy: to me, everything looks like a nail!" In a world of overwhelming choices, I can see the attraction of choosing a single blinkered path, or buying into a single "system", but it's not for me. I may have remained loyal to one life-partner for half a century, but when it comes to cameras, I'm The Wanderer (that is, the 1961 hit from Dion, not the Old English poem).

In a previous post, I mentioned that back in 2014 I was transitioning away from cameras that used the "Micro Four Thirds" sensor to the larger Fujifilm "X-Trans" sensor. But before that I had been using Canon film SLRs and then DSLRs, as well as various Olympus cameras, film and digital. Mustn't forget my medium-format film cameras, either, Mamiya, Fujifilm, and the extraordinary, combat-ready Koni-Omega Rapid... I could go on. In fact, my photo-philandering has often run in parallel, as well as serially; luckily, cameras are easy-going devices, happy to share a bag. Once I had begun using them, however, I was sufficiently convinced by the outstanding qualities of the Fujifilm X-Trans "system" that the Micro 4/3rds cameras and lenses (mainly Panasonic, but also Olympus) would remain in a cupboard for most of the next decade.

Then, more recently, and much to my own surprise, I became convinced of the virtues and above all the sheer convenience of iPhone photography, and the Fujis started to join the Panasonics in the cupboard much of the time.

But there's a cyclical pattern at work here. Inevitably, after a while I realised how far the limitations of the iPhone had begun to define what I felt able to photograph. It was partly the camera's "noisiness" in low-light situations, but above all – for me – it was being stuck with a permanently wide-angle view of the world. I did try using one of the supplementary lenses made by Sandmarc that gives a narrower, 60mm-equivalent angle of view but, although the image quality did not suffer as much as I feared, it just felt a bit silly, having this weighty chunk of glass hanging off the back of my phone. The phone had suited the sort of photographs I had wanted to take for several years – in a way, it was my own "one camera, one lens" experiment – but it seemed my internal weather had changed. I still wanted convenience, yes, but image quality and flexibility of angle of view were equally important.

So I succumbed to "photography as window shopping" for a while – like biscuits, a temptation best kept well out of reach – and started to look for very small, high-quality cameras which could either take interchangeable lenses or had a built-in zoom; second-hand, of course, and knowing full well that this was likely to be one of those triads of choice: convenience, image quality, flexibility – pick any two. All of which seemed to lead inevitably back in the direction of Micro 4/3rds and Panasonic.

Now, whenever possible, I buy stuff from a reliable used-camera site like MPB or Ffordes, but if what you're after is scarce and you're willing to take a risk on eBay, as I am from time to time, then real bargains can be had. So last year I eventually found what I was looking for: a Panasonic GM1 on eBay at a reasonable price (in Italy, in fact), which is the smallest Micro 4/3rds interchangeable-lens camera ever made (and the body really is hilariously tiny, about the size of a pack of playing cards), together with its dinky little collapsible 12-32mm lens, and a supplementary grip.

Despite its diminutive size the GM1 is an excellent camera, yielding the same image quality as a full-size camera with the same sensor, and I'm not surprised they're hard to come by, although not as scarce as the elusive GM5; much the same camera, but with the desirable extra of an electronic viewfinder. You could almost hear the ironic cheers coming out of the camera cupboard as I dusted off the old Micro 4/3rds lenses. Add the equally tiny and collapsible Panasonic 35-100mm zoom (equivalent to a 70-200mm lens in 35mm terms) and you have a perfect "travel" kit, so light and economical of space you scarcely know it's in your bag. Convenience, image quality, flexibility: sometimes, it seems, you can pick all three.

But, as I say, these things are clearly somewhat cyclical and unpredictable, just like the weather: no doubt I'll be returning to the Fujis or moving on to something new in due course. They call me The Wanderer...


But the real bargain I picked up along the way, surprisingly cheap on eBay, was a Panasonic "superzoom", the TZ70 (ZS50 in the USA). I was looking for a more camera-like substitute for the mad Canon Zoom monocular that I was playing around with earlier in the year. The TZ70 has an even more insane 30x zoom, equivalent to 24-720mm in 35mm terms (that's "pretty wide" to "blimey!" in lay terms). It's small, flat [1], light, and easily as pocketable as the Zoom. It's image-stabilised, too, and even has a little viewfinder so you can steady it further by pressing it against your brow, in classic style (essential at the longer end of the zoom, even with stabilisation).

But the main thing is that it's great fun to use, which to my mind is an important (if subjective) attribute, often overlooked in detail-obsessed reviews. I really enjoy being able to stand on one side of a wet and muddy field or a busy road, and zoom in to compose a nice conjunction of elements on the far side. "Foot zoom" be damned: if you get up close you quite literally can't see the wood for the trees. Best of all, the combination of deep depth of focus (small sensor) with flattened perspective (telephoto lens) is a good match for what my eyes tend to spot and isolate within any scene in front of me, far better than a wide-angle view. Which, of course, is also available at the other extreme of this lens's range, should I feel the need, along with everything in between.

Sure, that triad of choices does come into play with the TZ70: it offers convenience and flexibility, but at the expense of technical image quality. Without doubt – in comparison with the GM1, say – this camera's IQ is somewhat less than stellar. Which you would expect from such a crazy lens stuck in front of a tiny sensor, even if it is badged "Leica" [2]. But the lesson it has reinforced for me is the importance of recognising the difference between photographic qualities and pictorial qualities. In the end, I'm looking for pictures, not opportunities to demonstrate or test the outstanding metrics of my camera.

Camera reviewers obsess over "sharpness", for example, as if this were an absolute, as if a soft or grainy picture is inherently inferior, pictorially, to a sharp picture. I suppose to many the ideal model of photography is a perfect pack-shot or a studio shoot for a glossy magazine: the more flawless, the more like a perfectly clear window onto reality, the better. But our own inbuilt optical system of "wetware" doesn't actually care about any of this (see the post Cambrian Specs). Otherwise, how could anyone ever have celebrated generations of iconic photographs made with fast, grainy, "soot and whitewash" 35mm film? Or admired Impressionist paintings, come to that, or the likeness of a lion, scratched onto a cave wall with a burnt stick? In fact, the brain actually seems to get more pleasure from joining the dots, as it were, than from gazing passively through some simulated window. [3]

Quality-wise, I should say, we're by no means in Krappy Kamera territory with the TZ70. However, I won't pretend that I haven't had to do a fair amount of work on the raw files (What? JPGs, you say? They're not bad, I suppose, but I never use JPGs, given the choice...). Besides, this work "in post" is, for me, a large part of the pleasure of photography. I discovered some very neat new tricks when wrestling those truly awful Canon Zoom files into submission, for example: nothing stimulates creativity like the challenge of making a useable sow's ear purse. [4]

So, I hope that the pictures on this page (all TZ70 images) demonstrate that you can have all three elements of that aforementioned triad – convenience, quality, and flexibility – for very little money, provided most of the "quality" is supplied by you and your own optical wetware (with a little help from some decent software), and doesn't depend on the camera's mechanical contribution alone. If you're not convinced, well, I'm still having a lot of fun wandering about at the wetware / software / hardware interface we call "photography", looking for pictures.





1. Unless you accidentally turn it on, that is, at which point it's a case of "Is that a camera in your pocket, or are you just (very) glad to see me?"

2. The ongoing relationship between photo-legend Leica and electronics giant Panasonic is a curious one, but really only of interest to students of business economics and the psychology of "branding". From a photographic p-o-v, suffice it to say that a miniature 30x zoom is unlikely ever to appear on any actual Leica camera.

3. My (not very thought-through) theory of visual art is that it is humanity's attempt to reverse-engineer pareidolia, our brain's tendency to see faces and other meaningful images in random patterns.

4. For non-native speakers: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is a venerable English proverb, presumably dating from the times when a sow's ear might be something to be found just lying around looking useful, in an ugly kind of way, and which typifies the paradoxical self-evidence of folk-wisdom (a.k.a. "the idiocy of rural life"). See: "a watched pot never boils", "all things come to those who wait", etc. If you say so, Gran!

Sunday 10 March 2024

Publishing for Pennies

Forgive me if I've mentioned this once too often, now, but back in summer 2014, alongside my second solo exhibition at the FotoForum gallery in Innsbruck, Austria, I was pleased to be offered a 10-day residency. I was accommodated in a hotel in a village called Mutters, situated a few miles up an alpine valley from the city with a convenient and regular rail service, and had been invited to photograph whatever I felt like photographing. As I was also taking (slightly) early retirement that summer, aged 60, it felt like a suitable capping-off of my life as a wage-slave, and with any luck would mark the start of a late flourishing as some sort of artist.

I had a great time wandering about in the city-centre and surrounding area in the guise of "a tourist from Mars", and as a solid outcome I was able to put together two Blurb books: one which compiled the blog posts and photographs I had published during the residency, and a further, later volume which assembled the actual eighty or so photographs from my exhibition.

Compiling that second volume was actually only made possible some years later, as most of the files for the exhibited images were lost when a backup drive failed, and it seemed the DVD backup copy I had sent to Innsbruck in case of postal mishap to my prints in transit had been discarded. However, to my enormous relief and gratitude, FotoForum director Rupert Larl found them again in 2020, when clearing out his own computer files when he retired, and sent them to me.

Here are both books rendered as Issuu PDF flipbooks (as usual, click the central circular device to see the book in full-screen mode):


At the time I was transitioning from a series of cameras – mainly Panasonic, but also Olympus – that used the "Four Thirds" sensor (in the so-called "micro 4/3rds" configuration) to the larger Fujifilm "X-Trans" sensor. In fact, it was just before leaving for Austria that summer that I had bought my first Fuji camera, the X-E1 with its surprisingly superb "kit zoom" lens. But I was still getting used to handling it and, as it seemed rather too bulky and heavy for my trip, I decided to stick with the totally familiar, smaller, and lighter Panasonic G3 with its own excellent kit zoom. So, for those who care about such things, all of the residency photographs and a high proportion of the exhibition photographs are micro 4/3rds images. In fact, a surprising number of the latter were actually taken with that pocket rocket, the tiny Panasonic LX3; not a micro 4/3rds camera at all, but an all-in-one zoom compact with a bright Leica-branded zoom lens and a comparatively tiny 1/1.63" sensor. I think you'd  be hard put to tell which is which, though, even looking at the A3-size prints I made for the exhibition. Make of that what you will, you pixel peepers and "full frame" fanciers! [1]

To return to the books, however. As I've said before, I decided to start putting my books on this blog as PDF flipbooks because, in common with the vast majority of self-publishers who use an "on demand" service like Blurb, I rarely sell any physical copies, but I'd like my efforts to be seen, at least, and this seems a suitable way to achieve that. I usually buy a few more than the mandatory single hard copy myself for my own use and to give away (as I did, for example, with the two Innsbruck-related books), but invariably precisely zero copies get bought via my Blurb "bookstore". But that is simply how it is: in time you come to accept the reality that, in an online world, people expect "content" to be free. But pity the poor authors, artists, and musicians who thought they might make a living by providing us with entertainment, information, and the occasional revelation. Dream on, guys.

It bears repeating that the great advantage of "on demand" publication is that you don't end up with boxes and boxes of unsold and unsellable books (see this post). I have so far produced 30+ titles using Blurb, all of which are for sale, but virtually none of which has ever sold a single copy. Alarmingly, if I had produced them as even very low-run editions of, say, 500 copies of each via a conventional self-publishing "vanity" deal, I would by now be sharing a house with 15,000 surplus books [2]. Although the truth is that without the option of on-demand publication I would simply have given up on the idea of making books altogether after the first few ventures proved to be a pointless waste of time, effort, and money. As it is, however, for a relatively modest outlay I have been able to compile a convenient and nicely-produced collection of my own best, carefully-sequenced work at home in book form, as well as donating a similar shelf or two to my old college library and elsewhere. I can live with the fact that nobody else seems to share my enthusiasm for my books; fortunately for me, as a retired professional with a decent pension, I can afford it, too. So ████ ███ ███ ██ ███ [Redacted. Language, sir, language! Ed.].

When it comes to the finances of real-world independent publishing, however, I was appalled to read this in the latest CB Editions Newsletter (March 2024):

Say the cover price is £10. Bookshops which have set up their own account with the distributor (in CBe’s case, Central Books) buy in books at a negotiated discount off the cover price. Most independent bookshops buy not direct from Central but from the wholesaler Gardners, which has a monopoly on this, and Gardners (quote from their website) ‘normally ask for 60% discount off the RRP’. Sometimes more. So in most bookshops a CBe book with a cover price of £10 will have been bought by Gardners from Central for £4 in order to reach the bookshop. Before passing on that £4 to CBe, Central will deduct their own fee (15% + VAT) and the sales agent’s fee (10% + VAT), which brings the amount payable to CBe down to £2.80. That’s my net income per copy, and I pay 10% royalties on that (I’ve already paid the author an advance on royalties when taking on the book, often £500). So CBe’s take is now down to £2.52. The printing cost is, say, £2.50 per copy. Which leaves CBe with 2 pence.

CB Editions is a one-man operation (the one man is Charles Boyle) producing a handful of books each year that feature well-reviewed, sometimes prize-winning poetry and short fiction. For a profit of 2p a copy sold, you'd think he'd be well-advised to pack it in; remarkably, he hasn't (or at least hasn't yet). If you buy your books directly from CB, of course, he makes rather more (in his words, "the difference between 2 pence and the cost of a flat white"). So I have two pieces of advice, or encouragement, really:
1. If you like unusual and beautiful books, books which were not produced according to some optimised sales formula or ghost-written for some celebrity, and think that the independent publishers who produce them ought to survive in competition with the giant conglomerates, then buy their books. It's that simple. Actually buy them! As in, give them some of your money... It's a win-win, after all. It sounds silly, but too few of us who could easily afford it actually do this.

2. Whenever possible, buy books direct from the publisher's own website. Sure, small independent bookshops are (were) a fine thing, but they rarely if ever stocked the Really Good Stuff, and TBH their days are numbered in the unfair, asymmetrical warfare with the likes of Amazon. Game over. But we need to keep good books alive at source.

For photography, check out Kozu Books, for example, or Atelier EXB, or TIS Books, or Peperoni, or any of the dozens of small, independent publishers struggling to survive out there. You'll be amazed at the quality and range of what is being produced, mainly for love, not money. Although (full disclosure) I should warn you that this can turn out to be an addictive pursuit. Did I mention that we've got a lot of books in this house?

1. For the uninitiated, "full frame" is the confusing name given to a sensor that is more or less the same size as a 35mm film frame. Now is not the time to discuss this, but you do have to wonder how long it will continue to make sense to treat 35mm as the measure of all things photographic. It has already begun to remind me of the more abstruse imperial measures we had to grapple with in primary school: acres, bushels, furlongs, and all the rest of it. The fact that there are 1,760 yards in a mile is permanently burned into my memory banks, along with the number of gills in a pint. A very long time ago I "went out" with a girl named Sandie Gill, and her father had named their house "Pint Size" because they were a family of four (4 gills in a pint? I know...).

2. OK, it's true that we might well already be sharing our house with a similar number of books – I've never actually counted them – but at least these are thousands of *different* books...

Monday 4 March 2024

Language!


The subject of "alternative cuss words" came up in a recent Language Hat post, and I was reminded of an ancient post of my own from 2009 which I thought I'd revive. Here it is, slightly expanded and edited to 2024 specs, as usual. You lucky people!

Gadzooks!

Our swearing is a good barometer of the sensibilities of our culture. A casual racial epithet becomes an unsayable, unforgivable insult. Yesterday's blood-curdling blasphemy fizzles out into a meaningless comic noise in a children's cartoon. I doubt anyone today would be much offended if I exclaimed "God's blood!" when I hit my thumb with a hammer, although they might be startled. It would have been a different matter in the seventeenth century, when I could easily have found myself having my ears nailed to a post (I have no idea how they did that... Maybe ears were bigger then? Or perhaps they used two posts?). I suppose in the USA, where the alignment of Christianity and respectability still seems (to European eyes) anachronistically close, taking the Lord's name in vain – not to mention other attributes or body parts – may still be quite offensive to some people. Although they've probably got over the ear-mutilating thing by now. 'Snails, I should hope so!

Fondness for one's unpierced ears may have been what led to the evolution of so-called "minced oaths", that is, allusive expletives used in place of actual offensive swearing. The pioneering classics are those musketeerish ejaculations like "Gadzooks!" and "Zounds!", but to an extent we're still at it, albeit unknowingly. For obvious reasons, a minced oath usually starts with the same sound as the "real" oath it masks. For example, all those strange exclamations like "Cripes," "Crikey," and "Crivvens" are clearly substitutes for "Christ!". Not so long ago in Britain the ubiquitous "bloody" was a genuinely taboo adjective, although no-one seems sure why: I have seen various explanations, including the suggestion that "bloody" is itself a minced-oath version of "by Our Lady". Hence the abundant use of adjectives like "blinking", "blooming", or "blasted" in the everyday speech of people averse to full-on vulgarity; "ruddy" is an unusual rhyming variation that was common in my childhood years, but seems to have fallen completely out of use. Interestingly, I suspect the relative paucity of exclamations beginning "sh..." betrays the relatively recent adoption of "Shit!" as an all-purpose expression of dismay, at least in Britain. "Sugar!" is the only one that comes to mind (although "Sh... urely not!" was my personal recourse when our kids were small).

Of course, any true puritan will find even a minced oath offensive, because it points pretty directly and transparently at the thing it purports to hide, like tight clothing or swimwear. But then the ability to find offence where none is intended is the hallmark of the puritan down the ages, from Cromwell to the Taliban and the extremists of self-righteous "wokeness". By contrast, a true innocent will happily use some of the merrier minced oaths, completely unaware of the big sign pointing at the taboo word they have, apparently, narrowly avoiding saying (and which, once upon a more genteel time, they actually might never have come across). Oh, fudge and fiddlesticks! I also doubt whether many who exclaim "Gosh!" or "Golly!" in an Enid Blighton-ish way, ironically or not, are either aware or care that they are thereby avoiding the Mosaic commandment (number three, in fact) against "taking God's name in vain". Really? My goodness!

I have never really understood the contemporary fondness for swearing among the professional classes, especially the claim that it is hypocritical not to do so and prissy to find it offensive when deployed by others. But, having grown up in a respectable working-class / lower-middle-class milieu, I will concede that I am not best placed, instinctively, to understand. I literally never heard my parents or the parents of any of my friends swear. Not once. It would have been utterly unthinkable, in the 1950s and 60s, for any halfway-respectable adult knowingly to swear in front of children, even if they habitually used "effing and blinding" at work. Similarly, we kids (who rejoiced in using "language" between ourselves) would never have sworn in front of – never mind at – an adult. I did once tell my grandmother, at the prompting of a friend, to "buzz off" (a minced version of "bugger off ," as I now realise), with the terrifying result that she chased me down the street, incandescent with rage. I received a rare smack that evening for my impertinence.


In Britain, and I imagine elsewhere, the true traditional swearers are all-male communities and the upper classes [1]. Naturally, you would expect the occupants of a barrack-room, being troopers, to be swearing like troopers; it would be disappointing if they didn't. That the likes of Winston Churchill also did and still do when at their ease can come as something of a surprise. But, as Terry Eagleton once pointed out in a review of Isaiah Berlin's letters, members of elite establishments tend to "mistake a snobbish contempt for the shopkeeping classes for a daring kind of dissidence." What better way to underline your distance from and contempt for the genteel classes than a judicious sprinkling of witty vulgarity? On the positive side, I suppose, to hear the ambassador say, "Well, that was a fucking débâcle, wasn't it?" – enunciated impeccably after a difficult meeting – establishes that everyone still in the room is an honorary equal, and indubitably on the same side.

Having gradually slipped over the years into unnecessary swearing, I decided to wean myself off it once we had children. Other parents we knew had gone down the opposite route, which was to inoculate their kids against a wicked world by freely sprinkling the taboo words (or a politically-correct subset thereof) into the family conversation. Call me old-fashioned, but I wince when I hear an under-ten say, "But I don't want any fucking cornflakes, Mummy!" I suppose if you live in London such prophylactic precautions may be necessary. Not in my house, though.

In the initial phase of decontamination, I was substituting the most kid-friendly oaths I could think of, which was effective, but did have some odd results. A 40-year old man roaring, "Sh...urely not! I've hit my silly old finger with the silly old hammer!" does admittedly make for an amusing spectacle (for the spectators, at least). Then, having trained myself not to swear at home by substituting nursery equivalents – supplemented in extremis by gritted-teeth endearments like "sweetheart" and "darling" – I found this had started to bleed over into my work life, which could get acutely embarrassing when, squashing down annoyance, I began to sound like some theatrical type: "You've entered the wrong code again, my darling! That's why your silly old terminal has frozen!" What a relief it was when the kids started to swear like troopers / fishwives themselves, and I could finally uncork years of suppressed profanity. Fucking hell! What a relief... Although, it has to be said, this was less of a relief for my staff.

But I do try to remain largely oathless – well, much of the time – and I must admit it feels right, if only because I would never carry myself physically in that sort of swaggering, bullying way intended to intimidate others [2], and I can see no reason to behave any differently in my language. If there is one thing the world could do without, it is people who revel in their own strength and inviolability without concern for the impact of their boorish behaviour on others. A society which is careless of the needs and feelings of the vulnerable or the old is a malformed society, simply. When it comes to language, even the prissily genteel deserve consideration. Well, a little, anyway. Sometimes. They are not my favourite people, I confess. Hypocritical ████s, most of them.

However, one argument against swearing that I can't accept is the assertion that it reduces one's ability to express oneself, by constricting the habitual swearer's vocabulary. Which is bollocks. Take, for example, this splendid concatenation, which many people claim to have heard, typically booming from somewhere like the pit of a car maintenance garage, but which is probably either apocryphal or somewhat embroidered: "Fucking fuck it! This fucking fucker's fucking fucked!" Meaningless? Inexpressive? Real or not, this is an exemplary demonstration, surely, of a single word's protean power, when used with conviction in appropriate circumstances. Accept no flipping substitutes!


1. True, I have no idea what filthy banter goes on in all-female company: "fish-wives", after all, were as proverbial as troopers for the saltiness of their language.
2. Sources close to this blog have pointed out the unlikeliness of this scenario, despite my imposing height of  5' 6" (168cm).

Sunday 25 February 2024

Absent Friend


Ingelheim Exchange, Easter 1971
(Mike, Steve, Tony)

Sad to say, one of my original crew of home-town "besties", Tony Collman, has just died. Most of us, I imagine, get to hear of the death of the friends of our youth belatedly, if at all, and with little or no awareness of who they became or what they did in the years after we chose (or drifted onto) our divergent paths through adult life. The person we remember almost certainly bears little resemblance to the person who has died, most likely in some town you don't know, and mourned by family and friends you will never have met.

This was not like that. Although, curiously, if I had never started this blog I would probably never have heard from Tony again after the last time we met in (I think) 1981, and I might never even have discovered he had died, unless it was many years later, as happened with another good friend, and no doubt with others I have yet to hear about. There seems to have been something oddly prophetic about Jackson Browne's "Song for Adam", from an album that was something of a favourite in our little small-town circle of friends:

When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were saidAnd I never heard from him again as each our lives we ledExcept for once in someone else's letter that I read
Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead.
Except we were not laughing, that last time. Tony had changed, and by no means for the better, it seemed to me.

But before getting to that, I should probably describe who this old friend used to be.

We attended a boys' grammar school in the New Town of Stevenage, 1965-72, that became a "comprehensive" in 1968/9. Tony, when I first knew him, was a mild-mannered, un-sporty, bespectacled boy who usually ended up without much effort somewhere in the top 5 ranked by academic ability in our year. His small size (that is, before a dramatic late growth spurt), heavy-rimmed glasses, and habitual briefcase led him to be given the slightly cruel nickname "Joe", because of his resemblance to Joe 90, the puppet character in the British children's TV programme of the same name. His mother Lena was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Berlin who worked for the same patrician chain-store, John Lewis, as my mother, and his father Jim was a bricklayer from London, a Communist, and a very tough customer. Necessarily, as he was the local organiser for the building workers' trade union AUBTW (later UCATT), and played a very significant role during the construction of our New Town.

Tony was by inclination a scientist, but also a very competent linguist, and we first became good friends around the age of 16 on our school's Easter exchange visits with our German twin-town, Ingelheim am Rhein. We shared a taste for intoxication, in-jokes, and improvised goofy humour of the sort that probably only appeals to smarty-pants adolescent boys. We had a lot of fun together, some of it quite foolhardy in retrospect, most notably when we hitchhiked from Amsterdam down through Germany as far as Munich in the summer of 1971, bonding over the sort of memorably mad (and sometimes scary) adventures you could have in those days as footloose 17-year-olds at large in Europe.

At the end of our schooldays Tony went off to Bristol in 1972 to study Physics, and I (after a further term of study and two terms working as a teaching assistant) finally left Stevenage in 1973 to study English at Oxford. For the next couple of years we exchanged letters and visited each other and our friends who were also away at university, as well as those establishing various dens of iniquity back home, and probably spent rather more time entertaining ourselves than was compatible with serious study, certainly of lab-bound Physics, although less so of that slacker's degree, English.

Tony, Bristol 1975
(photographer unknown)

Then, somehow and quite quickly, it all fizzled out. Fast friends went their separate ways, and in those days of frequent changes of address (and no mobile phones or internet) communications would be intermittent for a while, at best, then cease. Around then Tony's hedonism and habitual mood seemed to have darkened in spirit; he went off to Egypt to teach English language for a few years and returned a different, more difficult and even dangerous man. Despite efforts to establish himself as a software developer and resorting, among other things, to taxi-driving, at some point he acquired a profound animus towards the police and other authority figures, resulting in a series of court appearances, fines and ultimately jail sentences, mainly for assaults (such as allegedly deliberately driving a car at two police officers). He also endured periods of homelessness, including a spell living in the woods back in Stevenage, where he was burned out of his encampment by young thugs. In his own words, he had "disappeared into the night" during the 1990s.

Eventually, however, the Stevenage local authorities found him accommodation in a small council flat, and he seems to have settled into a relatively contented life in the new century living on state benefits, helping to edit Our Stevenage, an online archive for reminiscences about the town's history, and pursuing his two enthusiasms, cryptic crosswords and the "abstract strategy board game" Go. As a fan of comedy, he would catch the train into London to join the audience for BBC show recordings: somewhere there's a video clip of his enormous beard getting noticed and riffed on by comedian Paul Merton and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the long-running TV show Have I Got News For You. It seems the idea of ever getting a job, never mind a "career", had dropped off his agenda altogether, along with any prospect of a family life: AFAIK he never settled into any steady relationships. That darkness seems never to have completely dissipated, either, but we won't go there: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

But that is all retrospective knowledge on my part. Whatever did or didn't happen to Tony in the 1980s that resulted in his effective self-immolation in the 1990s – I can only speculate – his personality had undoubtedly changed from the brilliant, mischievous and essentially benign jester I used to know into a glum, paranoid misfit with a gift for alienating people (including most of his old friends from home and those he had made at university) and, even more puzzling, someone capable of occasional fits of violence. The word went out that, in the Byronic formula, he had become "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". I didn't have any more contact with him for the three decades after 1981, as I did have a career and serious family responsibilities to consider, and the few rumours that reached me were sufficiently troubling to put up some solid precautionary barriers.

Then in 2011, quite aggressively at first, he began turning up as a transparently pseudonymous commenter on this blog. After a spell of light skirmishing in public we began a wary email relationship – he was clearly quite bitter about the friends he felt had abandoned him, and I was nervous about bringing this volatile stranger back into my life – but things steadily grew warmer over the years. I started posting him the TLS crossword every week – he was an active and expert participant in various cryptic crossword solving and setting circles – and he clearly enjoyed inducting me into the baffling conventions of cruciverbalism, sometimes asking for help with the more recalcitrantly literary ones. Despite some occasional spikiness – he would vehemently reject any offers of financial help, for example – it seemed that the old friend of my youth could still be detected somewhere in the voice and personality animating these email exchanges.

Knebworth Festival 1973
(photo: Martyn Cornell)

However, I only actually met Tony once in these latter years when our friendship was reviving, and that was entirely by accident. To celebrate my birthday in 2018 we travelled up to London to meet our children at the Hayward Gallery for the Andreas Gursky exhibition there. On that day, behind the galleries and theatres on the South Bank, there was an open-air market selling food, and as we walked through I heard someone calling my name. It appeared to be an elderly derelict with a long matted and plaited chest-length beard sitting on a wall, eating a curry from a cardboard tray. My partner and daughter hurried on, but I was curious. I walked over, and asked, "Sorry, do I know you? How do you know my name?" To my amazement, it was Tony, utterly unrecognisable to me, even standing face to face in broad daylight. Given we had been in regular email contact for a few years by then, it was a very unsettling experience [1].

Anyway, in September last year he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer, had declined any treatment (wisely, I think), and been given "weeks to a year" to live. He asked me to keep it a secret from our mutual friends – I really don't know why, unless he thought this would be a suitable posthumous reproach for their neglect – and (with one or two honourable breaches) I respected his request. Which was not difficult, as in all honesty it was hard to think of many mutual friends whose contact details I still had or would be able to find who, sad to say, would be particularly interested in his state of health. As I say, from somewhere, somehow, he had acquired a true gift for alienating people.

Then, at the end of January this year, he was hospitalised with shortness of breath, and was discovered to have Covid. They put him into intensive care with an oxygen supply and intravenous antibiotics. He still seemed chirpy enough via email, though, and quite his normal self – he asked me to send the latest TLS puzzles to the hospital – so I agreed to set up a Skype video call. Sadly, this turned out to be a bit of a wasted opportunity, at least from my point-of-view. It was clear that there was much he wanted to say, but his laboured, widely-spaced attempts to speak between breaths kept getting snagged on some idée fixe about a locally-sourced brand of sausages. Now, I'm a patient listener, and I like a sausage as much as the next guy, but this seemed rather beside the point under the circumstances. It was such a bizarre contrast to the lucidity of his emails, but then I suppose he may well have been under heavy sedation. So I listened to him ramble on for an hour or more until some nurses appeared, made my excuses, and closed the session, feeling that this was not an experience I was in any hurry to repeat.

Nonetheless, the Covid cleared up and, after checking out his flat for fire hazards, a hospital-style bed was installed so that he could sleep upright with a supply of oxygen, and he was sent home on the 8th February. He had already asked me to post the next TLS crossword to the flat in anticipation of his imminent discharge, and on the 12th he acknowledged its receipt by email, as he always did.

There was then was an ominous silence, that stretched on and on for ten days. Nothing. Eventually I decided to ring the hospital to see whether he had been readmitted. But the doctor I spoke to informed me that, as I suspected, he had died. When? On the 12th February. I found this hard to believe: not so much that he had died, but that he had died ten days ago, on the very day that he had sent me that last email from home. But by checking his name, address, and approximate date of birth it was confirmed: yes, he was dead, or "had passed", as the doctor kept saying, as if he had been sitting some kind of exam.

So, there it is. To be honest, it's a relief no longer to feel conflicted about whether to make the trip up to Stevenage to say a final goodbye, even though I knew in my heart that was never going to happen. We always like to think we will "do the right thing", don't we? Despite knowing that we'll generally choose the comfortable thing instead. Less selfishly, it's also a relief to know he won't have to suffer the final painful stages of a terrible disease.

Tony sent me a selfie from hospital, an honest portrayal of himself in the gaunt days before his death, still with that matted and plaited chest-length beard, but it's not easy viewing, and so I choose to remember him as he was in summer 1971, a bright young man of 17 experiencing full liberty for the first time, with every prospect of an exceptional life of achievement and happiness ahead of him. That this was never to happen is, in the long view, perhaps just a simple twist of fate, an unexpected kink in the narrative, or even – as I suspect the later, belligerent version of Mr. Collman might have argued – just your opinion, mate. And who asked you, anyway?

Tony, Ingelheim, summer 1971

1. In a typical Collman move, when I emailed him to apologise about this the next day, he replied, "SO tempting to reply 'What the hell are you talking about? That wasn't me!'"...

Saturday 17 February 2024

A Second Lustrum of Calendars


Every year since 2010 I have produced a small number of copies of a simple spiral-bound A4 calendar featuring my own photographs or artwork, for distribution as a Christmas / New Year gift for close friends, family, and – before I retired in 2014 – my more esteemed co-workers. The numbers in those categories were never large, and are inevitably declining, so the costs involved in this largesse have always been manageable. The standard of art reproduction I choose is quite high (I use and recommend Vistaprint) so that each calendar constitutes a little portfolio of some of the better work I have produced in the preceding year. If nothing else, it's a nice way to be present in the domestic environment of some people I never get to see often enough.

It occurred to me – calendars being essentially ephemeral items – that it would be worth putting together a book to record some of them. So in 2019 I made a Blurb book with the title A Lustrum of Calendars (a "lustrum" is a fancy way of describing a five-year period, although it also had a more specific meaning in Ancient Rome), as I had decided to record the run from 2014 to 2018: the five-year sequence in which I seemed to have hit my calendrical stride most convincingly. To make the book more interesting, I also paired the calendar image for each month (on the right) with a photograph taken by me during that particular month of that calendar year (on the left).

Why? Well, a calendar picture is a very public kind of divination (a hostage to fortune-telling, you might say): in November you pick what seems like it might be a suitable image for, say, June in the following year, without any idea of what those few weeks in the future will be like, not least in the lives of those who will be living with that picture for the whole of that month. By pairing the two pictures I thought the book might suggest how each month in each of those five consecutive years had turned out for me, even if only as captured in a single photograph. I also thought it would be curious to see how often there might or might not be a connection of some sort to be made between the two images, the one as prophecy and the other as actuality.

This produced quite a big book of 134 pages, which in hard copy is inevitably also an expensive book. I had really only produced it for my own amusement, however, and didn't seriously expect anyone else to buy a copy (do I say that every time I make a book? I might as well...). So, now that another five years have passed, I have made yet another book for myself with an identical format and the unsurprising title A Second Lustrum of Calendars. But, in the spirit of my decision to use Issuu, I'm making it freely available as a PDF flip-book.

Here it is: you can either run it in miniature here within the the blog page, or – if you click the little circular device in the centre – you can go to a full screen view (recommended). From full screen press <ESC> to get back here on the blog.

Whether I'll still be sending out calendars every year until 2028 and then making a third five-year collection of them in 2029 when – with any luck – I'll be 75 and still "sound in body and mind" remains to be seen. It's remarkable how passing a milestone as predictable and inconsequential as a seventieth birthday can nonetheless compress, confuse, and complicate one's projections into the future. "Five years from now" – once the vast and storied distance between ages 8 and 13, or 13 and 18 – now seems both incredibly brief and alarmingly ephemeral as a span of time.

Kafka's very short short story The Next Village – which to a 17-year-old me seemed so hilariously surreal – now reveals itself as a glittering shard of cold-eyed, gritty realism:

Grandad always used to say: "Life is amazingly short. Looking back, even now, everything is all so closely crowded together that I can scarcely imagine, say, how a young person can make up their mind to visit the next village without the fear that – quite apart from any mishaps – even the length of a normally, happily unfolding life will be anywhere near enough time for such a trip."

OK, I exaggerate, but I recall writing in a post on that story in March 2009, not long after my 55th birthday, "is it not amusing ... that life, as lived, has an exponential quality which makes the banal, the eminently possible, as daunting as a trip to Mars?" Well, not so much amusing at 70, young 'un, as baffling. Why on earth would anyone want to go to Mars, anyway?


But if that vision of befuddled stasis seems a bit too comfily chair-bound, let me put before you another short, single sentence "story", one of Kafka's first published pieces, Wanting to Become an Indian, which embodies much the same idea, but filtered through Karl May in an exhilarating, ecstatic inversion:
If only you could be an Indian, ever-ready on a galloping horse, tilted against the wind, jolting again and again over the jolting ground, until you lost your spurs – there were no spurs – until you threw away the reins – there were no reins – and could barely see the land before you as smooth cropped heath, with the horse's neck and the horse's head already gone.
(my translation)
That's a vision of old age, too. Hoka hey!

Sunday 11 February 2024

Threescore Years and Ten


Would you give up your seat for this man?

So, over the weekend I turned seventy, and should probably now reluctantly concede that I am old. Or, at least, getting there. Possibly. In a few years. I have to admit, though, that I was taken aback, standing on a very crowded train back to Southampton from London a few weeks ago, when an Asian woman made her daughter get up and offer me her seat. I refused, naturally, but it did make me wonder: maybe I look older than I think? Perhaps it's time to reboot the magic bathroom mirror...

Anyway, rather than ramble on about how young I still feel inside, despite appearances, I thought I'd offer you a small celebratory anthology of blog posts, one for each decade, and selected from the Top Twenty most-read posts according to Blogger's statistics: current No. 1: Bee Boy at 3.5K reads since it was published in April 2017.

These posts do seem to cluster around the years 2016-18, which may well have been peak blog, who knows? But I have published 1,992 posts since 2008 – so close to a neat 2,000 – and quite a few not listed here would figure in my own personal Top Ten, if I could only find the energy and motivation to dig them out (did I say I am seventy?). Maybe another time. But I'm happy to hang my idiotic hat on these few for now, as chosen by The Wisdom of the People. So here they are:

Bee Boy: In which I interrogate Gilbert White.

Snake Oil: In which I investigate the nature of art.

Mister Unsafe: In which I invent a new musical genre.

The Height of High Culture: In which I fail to read Emma. Again.

Hey Presto!: In which I contemplate politics and astrology (Aquarius with Scorpio rising, since you ask).

Culloden: In which I look askance at tartanity.

Moscow Rules: In which Gomer nods.

And one for luck:

Homeopathic Ancestry: In which I consider the making of my mark.

No need to read them all at once, obviously... Or indeed any of them at all, although I'd be pleased if you did dip into a few, and found them to your liking. I have no idea why these particular ones out of the 1,992 available posts should have attracted the largest number of hits, and I also have no way of knowing whether these were actual "reads" or hit-and-run glances resulting from searches for, say, "metheglin" (Bee Boy) – not to be confused with methedrine – or "Yevtushenko" (Moscow Rules).

As for the birthday, I'm not big on celebrations, but to mark the occasion we met up with our (now very adult) children at the Royal Academy for a pleasant chat and then a stroll around the exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now. This show is a very mixed bag, especially compared to something as solid as 2017's Revolution : Russian Art 1917-1932 discussed in the Moscow Rules post. It can seem that a lot of second- and even third-rate art gets a free pass when "message" is prioritised over quality in an exhibition, but this one does have enough outstanding moments not to deserve the panning it got in some reviews.

Should you be able to visit the RA while it's on, my recommendation would be to head straight for the three-screen video installation by John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea: take a seat, and settle down for an awe-inspiring 45 minutes. The experience is completely mesmerising, in the way a Tarkovsky film is mesmerising, and I could have happily watched it repeatedly for the entire afternoon. You might, of course, rate just as highly the other video installation, Lessons of the Hour, by Isaac Julien, which is clearly very popular, but which I didn't watch as it was too crowded; you had to step carefully over the legs of those seated on the floor in the darkened room to pass through. But Vertigo Sea is probably the best video installation I've ever seen, aided by a superb soundtrack, and worth a trip to London all by itself.

Justice for All, by Yinka Shonibare

Monday 5 February 2024

The Gloves Are Off


For many years now I've been noticing the personal items that get dropped onto pavements and roads, and which – if not found or picked up by someone – can spend a lengthy afterlife getting kicked around, trodden on, and slowly degraded into roadside rubbish. What these items are tends to change over time, along with fashions. For example, once upon a time easily the most frequently encountered escapees used to be black plastic combs, but these are no longer carried by men precariously in a trouser back pocket, and have become a rarity. Similarly, biros in varying degrees of distress and destruction used to be a much more common sight than they are now. The sheer variety of such kerbside casualties seems to have increased in recent times, although people have become such terrible litterbugs that it's hard to tell whether an object has been "lost" or simply tossed carelessly away, along with all the empty cans, snack wrappers, and plastic bottles.

I had often considered assembling a photographic series of such items but never did, partly because it seemed such an obvious idea that far too many others must already be doing the same thing. I enjoy the "taxonomic" work of Michael Wolf, for example, collating the rubber boots, coat hangers, stray bits of laundry, and plastic chairs to be found in the backstreets of Hong Kong, and no doubt he had his own precedents to follow and now has hundreds of Wolf-wannabes all over the world. But my resistance was also because I had developed a prejudice against such mechanically cumulative "projects" which, in lesser hands than Wolf's, have in the end nothing much to say about anything other than the desire to have something – anything! – to photograph. Which didn't stop me photographing them myself, of course.

During Covid and in its wake the quantity of lost and tossed facemasks and "disposable" protective gloves in the street became ridiculous, even allowing for the fact that we do live quite near a hospital, where you might expect the odd one to be discarded or dropped. The grimy things are everywhere, almost rivalling the crisp packets in number, and naturally nobody wants to pick them up and do something with them. By "do something" I mean put them in a bin, of course, not create a sculpture or collage, although no doubt someone somewhere has been doing exactly that. Again, I rejected the idea of a photographic "masks and gloves" project, as I expected that dozens of people will have been documenting these strange years in precisely that indirect but handily material way.

But I found that this did prompt me to notice other varieties of lost glove lying around all over the place, and in particular what struck me was that they usually seemed to have made their bid for freedom one at a time. Perhaps the other in the pair gives the escapee a boost on its way out of a pocket or bag, or off the back of a builder's truck? Whatever, single escapes seem to be the runaway's rule, and it occurred to me that I had actually already been photographing them casually whenever they turned up, not least because they seem to retain a level of personality that other lost objects lack (the two giving the finger here date from 2018). I suppose that is because, unlike most articles of clothing, even when discarded they closely resemble what is probably the most emphatically expressive part of our anatomy, and in many accidental configurations they would seem to be trying to communicate something ("Oh, shit... Help! This is not what I imagined...", in the main).

So I started looking and photographing less casually, primarily with my phone, and now I've almost gathered enough to put together a little PDF-only booklet, as proposed towards the end of last year (see Pentagonal Pool on Issuu). It's not ready yet, but will be as soon as I can fill a couple of gaps in the intended sequence. Which, given I'm relying entirely on chance finds, might take longer than I'd intended. But, no, I'm not going to start posing my own gloves in the street: that would be disrespectful – gloves are clearly quick to take offence – and I don't want to inculcate any fantasies of escape.


Sunday 28 January 2024

Brief Encounter



We spent most of last week in Bristol, as my partner had to take part in the viva voce interrogation of a PhD candidate there. Unfortunately for me, this coincided with not one but two "named storms", Isha and Jocelyn, so I spent much of the time admiring the view through the streaming rain being flung against our fourth-floor flat's window with surprising violence. So when the weather cleared up on Wednesday, I was keen to get out.

The extensive green area at the top of the Avon Gorge known as Clifton Downs is conveniently nearby, so that was where I headed. The atmosphere was still pretty waterlogged, so everything beyond a hundred yards or so was softened into a mist, which is not ideal for photographic purposes, mine anyway, but you work with what you're given. Unless, of course, it's an unwanted gift: Wednesday afternoons are traditionally devoted to "games" at British schools and universities, so the Downs get temporarily converted into a dozen or so football pitches where muddied oafs (oaves?) can chase balls and shout abuse at each other. It's very lively, but I lost interest in all that when I left school, and it's just not my thing; I don't even pretend to follow any football team, despite living among fervid Saints fans. But, running down through the western cliff of Clifton Downs, all the way down to the Portway 300 feet below, is a narrow rocky ravine once known as Walcombe Slade but now called Goat Gully, for the simple reason that it is inhabited by a small herd of goats, introduced in 2011. I decided to head there instead.

Goat Gully makes a remarkable contrast to the grassy plain of the Downs, which – even on non-Wednesdays – is always busy with runners, dog-walkers, and groups doing various outdoor exercise routines. You pass into a bit of woodland, through a narrow barrier gate, and suddenly you're in a different world: in summer, when the rock has been absorbing sunlight all morning, it can feel as if you were somewhere like the Dordogne: hot, scrubby, rocky, and precipitously steep. I love it, not least because it has that magic combination of elevation, voluminous void, and a spectacular view, plus surprisingly few people ever seem to go there, so it's always peaceful. For obvious, goat-related reasons, dogs are banned.

The misty, soft light meant it was clearly not going to be a great day for photography, so after clambering around for a bit I ended up standing on a rocky edge near the venerable rockslide, polished smooth by the backsides of many generations of Bristol's children, back when "children" were still a species often spotted in flocks playing out of doors, a rarity now. Like many people inclined towards visual art, I enjoy just gazing in a contemplative, switched-off mood which, paradoxically, seems to make one more, not less aware of what is going on around, especially at the periphery. I imagine our distant ancestors on the grassy plains of Africa entered a similar state of all-around unfocussed watchfulness as they foraged for roots and berries, or discussed the advantages of bipedalism. 


So it was no surprise that a movement off to my left interrupted my reverie. Now, there may no longer be large predators like wolves in these parts, but their human counterpart is not unknown, and there is a particular silhouette – narrow track-suit bottoms and dark hoodies – and a particular purposeful slouch that can trigger a mild alarm, particularly when three such silhouettes are heading towards you, when standing on the edge of a steep rocky drop.

But the closer they came, the more I relaxed. It was late afternoon, and these young lads were clearly coming off some labouring job – they were covered in what looked like plaster dust and shreds of paper – for a crafty spliff or a couple of beers and a laugh before heading home. It was also clear they realised they had nothing to fear from me: in the old formula, you can take the boy out of the tribe, but you can't take the tribe out of the boy. Fifty years may have passed since I was their age, but it seems you acquire some indelible markers in those youthful years. Perhaps it's the way I stand, perhaps it's the clothes I wear. Whatever, they sidled up in a friendly way – I was clearly standing in their favoured spot – and we began a companionable chat, gazing down towards the Suspension Bridge, only half visible in the mist.

After a while I decided I needed to head back, and leave them to their fun. But before I went, I said, "Listen, guys, do you want to know a secret?" And this is what I said, in spirit, but perhaps not entirely in these words:

You don't know it now, but these are the best years. You've got work, but no real responsibilities, and nothing to spend your money on beyond whatever fun and mischief you've got lined up for the coming weekend. You've got good friends – I bet you've known each other for years – and you're having adventures you'll remember for the rest of your life. Sure, if you're lucky sometime you'll meet a girl, settle down, have kids, maybe even start your own business and buy a house, and that will all be great, but when, like me, you're a few weeks away from turning seventy, it's these days that will start coming back to haunt you, and you'll wonder why you can't go back to the way it was at the beginning, when everything and anything was possible, and life was still your best friend. So, enjoy it now, and maybe in fifty years or so one of you will come up here again for old times' sake, sit on the edge and remember your old friends and the stuff you got up to, and perhaps even recall how, long ago, some white-haired geezer told you that this was how it was going to be.

And, to my enormous gratification, not one of them laughed as I walked away. Job done! And I didn't even tell them the thing about shooting the albatross...

Sunday 21 January 2024

What Just Happened?



I've been entertaining myself by compositing some recent photographs, mainly those taken with a telephoto lens on various cameras, including a Panasonic TZ70 (ZS50 in the USA) that I picked up surprisingly cheaply on eBay, looking for a more camera-like substitute for the Canon Zoom monocular (it has an insane 30x zoom, which is equivalent to 24-720mm in 35mm terms). Actually, this is not so surprising, really, as the camera's image quality is somewhat less than stellar (well, what do you expect from such a ridiculous lens on a tiny 1/2.3" sensor, even if it is badged "Leica"?), the image files are just 12MP in size, and the thing was launched in 2015, which is the digital equivalent of the Pleistocene; put those together, and I imagine that's why nobody else felt like bidding. Their loss: used with care, it's almost a decent camera...




Something interesting happened with the trees in this last picture below, but I'm still not entirely sure how. It has a certain Samuel Palmer vibe, I think.  When I "get in the zone" with digital imaging I keep trying things out quite rapidly until I've got something promising to work with. Sometimes I will have gone a number of steps beyond before I realise what just happened, and – as in this case – have no real idea how it came about. Photoshop Elements can step back through many stages in the image editing process, but frustratingly does not name or describe them: unless you yourself can remember or it's self-evident, there's often no way to know which filter, layer, blend mode, tool, etc., was used in any particular step. But that element of serendipity is a large part of what makes it so enjoyable to do, and can often lead to new "secret sauces" to add to your digital recipe book. Although only if you can remember how you got there, obviously...