Wednesday 25 December 2013

 

Thursday 19 December 2013

Thursday 12 December 2013

Dark sunlight


 
The early fog never quite lifted today. When I went out later something of it lingered - not really a mist, not even a blurring, but a softening of light and colour that I'd never seen before. Everything soft and thick like velvet. The low, low sun strong but diffused. A faint but distinct sheen on walls and pavements. And the sky such a dark blue. Not dark like a storm or dark like dusk, but a new shade. Some things can't be predicted or described or encompassed. Some things, some days are just astonishing and lovely.

Friday 6 December 2013

Planet stirring


 
Wild storms and flooding from the sea. The news of all this interrupted for the announcement that the bright light of Nelson Mandela has gone out. And around our little lake the rampant vegetation shrinks and cracks and flares as it shades into winter.


 

Thursday 28 November 2013

Thick

 
 
Thick might seem an odd word for these, for the big, pale, blurry, fragile images taken with a pinhole camera, for the standing figure, outside one picture, inside another, both solid and transparent. It was an exhibition of works by Karen Stuke, depicting places described in Sebald's masterwork Austerlitz about a man brought to Britain from Prague on a Kindertransport, his adult discovery of his past and voyage into it, the huge effect upon his personality and life, his recounting of his story to the narrator. It's a long, pale, swirling story, hauntingly glimpsed in these photos (see them all here), which were deeply atmospheric in themselves, all the more so in the harsh beauty of the Wapping Project, a cavernous, largely windowless former hydraulic power station, and all the more so to the captivated reader, like myself, of Sebald's work.


 
 

 


 
I was thinking of the way that social scientists, ethnographers, speak of 'thick description', a build-up of multiple layers and perspectives through which we may arrive at new insights. It starts with the book, a meandering, but intense and gripping narrative. No, it starts with the real places, historical narratives and found pictures that the book evokes and the visceral, unbearable, memories attached to these. And it spreads, alludes, moves and inspires, as writers and artists continue to make works in response to Sebald's; as readers and viewers are drawn in, tossed around, left floating, yearning, glimpsing pictures of our own, like this one through the window of the old power station on my way out.
 
 










Wednesday 20 November 2013

To frame or not to frame













A big thing in 'street photography', I suppose, is the lack of a frame, the freedom from it, the capturing of a random, unboundaried flash of space and time that is in some way affecting. But the point here, of course, is precisely the frame of door and window shapes behind the figure. She's walking past the front entrance of Tate Modern and the framed figure fortuitously evokes the pictures inside - perhaps was only noticed because, approaching the entrance, I was already 'seeing' the paintings I'd come to look at.

Monday 18 November 2013

Tipping



 
Why this impulse to tilt the camera - experienced before, but only in autumn? I suppose it's the sensation of trees meeting the ground as the leaves keep falling, of being tipped inexorably into winter.


Thursday 14 November 2013

Sea-pink


 

  Beached on the wet footpath - as pink, damp and fleshy as a creature from the sea.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

Vermeeresque again


 
Oh dear. Since I saw the film about Vermeer, they're everywhere: quiet, luminous women, reading or writing by a window, looking like a painting. What a cliché. But a sweet one, and all the sweeter when so many sit or stand or walk absorbed in their phones or tablets: that absent, abstracted indifference to surroundings and compulsive inability to put the damned thing down. Seeing someone read a book or write in a notebook never feels as alienating. Yes, of course they may be equally abstracted, and of course good stuff, as well as mindless or super-stressful, proceeds through all those 'devices'. Still, a proliferation of dwellers in the global city who evoke an old Dutch painting seems no bad thing.

Sunday 10 November 2013

Friday 8 November 2013

South London Botanical Institute



 
And before they become too drastically unseasonal here are some photos from a recent visit to the South London Botanical Institute. This big, boxy red-brick Victorian villa was purchased in 1909 by Allan Octavian Hume, a curious, energetic man, returned from a career serving the British Empire in India. He was one of the "least worst" colonialists, it seems, instinctively fostering welfare over repression; and when not at work he embraced and explored the sub-continent, making social and political contacts and collecting, collecting, as they did then, descriptions and specimens from the natural world - especially birds.


 
Back in London and with no exotic birds to shoot and stuff, his voracious attention refocused on
botany. This house and garden became the home of a fast-growing collection, assiduously cultivated, preserved, recorded - an exceptional work of its kind. Amazingly, it has survived intact as a modest, independent charity. The house has not changed much. It's spare and atmospheric, with rooms full of filing cabinets housing an extensive herbarium centred on a great number of fine, hundred-year-old specimens. The latest of many volunteers work endlessly and painstakingly to conserve the collection and most recently to check and digitally scan each sheet for inclusion in a national, publicly accessible computer database, herbaria@home. Other volunteers tend the garden, teach botanical drawing and the histories of medical herbalism and Victorian naturalism to children and adults alike. This is a precious place.



 

Thursday 7 November 2013

In sunshine and in rain

 
 
The exhibition we saw at Kew Gardens in September of botanical paintings by Rory McEwen was
memorable, especially the paintings from the last year of his life - precise and intense depictions of dying, decaying leaves, titled not by species, but by where they fell. These were images that lingered, cooking slowly. They bubbled to the surface as I trudged and skidded in the following weeks on fallen leaves, often stopping, in the street, in the rush, in the rain, to take photos. They're still bubbling.


Monday 4 November 2013

Sunday 3 November 2013

Colours of the wind

 







 
an early sunset
flickers between fire and ice -
colours of the wind

Friday 1 November 2013

Mindfulness of leaves


 
The rain was heavy. Fallen leaves, plastered into pavement picture-frames, curl and glisten as they start to dry - settling into new, more muted, more translucent colours.

Thursday 31 October 2013

Friday 25 October 2013

Bridge



I find it hard to pass the Millenium Footbridge without taking photos. While it used to be the architecture of the bridge, its long, lazy leap across the Thames and the shadowy heft of its underside,  now it's more often the people: above me, in movement, outlined, sometimes  poignantly, against the sky.


on the bridge
time stops and distance shrinks
their hands touch

Wednesday 23 October 2013

White water



 
to be imagined:
the floating fading colours
of lemon lime mint

Saturday 19 October 2013

Dutch light in London




In the odd little riverside microclimate of the South Bank and its irredeemably ugly concrete arts complex, the light can be surprising and extraordinary.




Thursday 10 October 2013

Around the lake

 





















  
Around the lake, an Autumn forest of tousled gold and green and purple.

more photos
 
 
 
 
while the tall reeds
and flowers sway softly
the heron stands still
 
 

Monday 7 October 2013

Cat's eyes