Summertime in Suburbia .....................the dog gets a wash

With my new found freedom from sticking and glueing that was the PG Cert in Photography, I am finding tradtional ways to fill my day. Today dog and I ventured out to do a little photography; summer is here, and the London Villages Project waits for no man.

We ventured into some different streets and found all sorts of delights; red roses, dead conifers in concrete tubs on lawns, and some wonderfully green summer trees. Suburbia is so "suburban". The more I look  the more I see the different styles of gardens and window dressings that make up the whole. Double glazed windows with net curtains, window boxes and garden gates all seek to define the occupants and make their dwellings unique. Stopping to take photos I am always wary of figures behind the curtains wondering what I am up to; I don't know that they would believe me if I tried to explain that I am taking pictures of their bushes and trees.

Our 20 minute morning stroll extended into an hour long exploration; checking where the sun lies, and when to go back to catch the light in the best position is part of the initial research. Summer sun is harsher, and requires a certain devotion to duty on my part to get up while the light is still kind enough to the flowers on a sunny day.





Dog had a wash today; her first for many months; I have time at last to do a little spring cleaning. Tied by her lead to a garden chair she endured first a cold hose and then some "strong" shampoo from my bathroom. she hates this, much preferring her own, doggy smell. She has been known to run up the garden after a wash to roll in some fox poo  to restore the balance that her senses prefer.

I was getting my own back on her for the worming tablet escapade that she led me on last week. Every few months I have to get three large brown tablets into her; a feat which gets harder every time and the one time when she well and truly lets me know that she is not as stupid as she pretends to be most of the time. I have learnt through experience that there is no point trying to hide these tablets in her food; she simply goes on hunger strike until normal service is resumed. So I wrapped the tablets in a delicious piece of  pork loin.

 Foolishly I let her see this process, and she happily took the whole parcel into her mouth, only to refuse to swallow it. I tried holding her muzzle closed to encourage her to swallow. She salivated wildly all over the floor and refused to play ball. I put her outside, where upon she swallowed the meat, and out popped  the tablets onto the lawn. We repeated the proess, this time concealing the tablets in a slice of bread; she ate two, and the third was again discarded with disdain. At this point I gave up, and left the tablet in her food bowl, hoping she would forget and eat it with her tea ( which , of course, she expected as usual despite the extra snacks).

Tea came and went; the tablet remained in the bowl. Dog wins................

 Later that evening I put some boiled cabbage water into the bowl ......................water and tablet happily consumed..................I win........................

3am the next morning.......................dog needs to go out to the loo becuse of the extra drinks she had; I have to get up and take her............................DOG WINS!!!

So today we have clean, healthy dog...................................WIN WIN

Hawkwood Press is born ..................... making your own barcode from ISBN

my barcode made using an on-line barcode maker

It is early in the morning and I feel under tremendous pressure; there is much to be done before the 6th June when all our project work has to be submitted. Between now and then I have to make a hand made book, a Blurb book, a portfolio of work, and complete my workbooks and analysis of the project.

It was with great relief, then, that my ISBN numbers came through from Nielsen yesterday, which means that I can get on with my books. I have 10 numbers, the first of which is shown above. This is allocated to "Hawkwood" , my personal project of a poem and images in a limited edition hand made book. The second will be allocated to a Blurb version of the same book for a wider audience.

On Monday I had a chance to show the two strands of my work to a tutor. She feel that I should show the suburban images rather than the Hawkwood images in the final show. This is not the work that I feel so emotionally attached to, but this probably means that I am not able to be objective about it. The images of Hawkwood were described as visually appealing and "suitable for an image library". That worries me as the images that I like best are more abstract and I would not wish them to end up in an image library. The suburban shots are not attractive in a  conventional way, and I wonder whether they fall into the category of conceptual art, not something my work has ever attempted to be before. They will not necessarily appeal to non photographers or even some other photographers; during the tutorial I could sense some students questioning the advice that was being given, and my other half, for one, was deeply disappointed with the change of tack.

Hawkwood by Caroline Fraser

This leads me to considering how much to follow my heart, and how much to follow the advice of very experienced tutors. There is one image from the suburban series that I feel does truly represent my feelings and has a beauty of its own. It is of cherry blossom and telegraph wires. I shall compromise by accepting the advice given, and making this the key work.

I am in the fortunate position of having a two week show in Chislehurst in September as part of the Chislehurst Festival at which I can show the Hawkwood work to local people who will have an affinity with it by nature of it being on their home territory.

Paul Graham ..............A shimmer of possibility..............haiku in photography

Paul Graham is currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In a retrospective of his work several large rooms are filled with photographs made between 1981 and 2006. Starting with the beautiful "television portraits" , moving through   Europe, Japan and America , he  immerses himself in the landscapes and unconscious rituals of societies.

 
 
 

 
 
 As the gallery describes "The everyday scenarios he reflects are also embedded with a complex iconography. The hand that an immaculately made up Japanese girl waves across her mouth evokes a society anxiously over-invested in surfaces."

 Under a hot grey Pittsburgh sky, an African American gardener mows the grass verge of a car park, traversing back and forth, going nowhere. This is from one of the series in "A shimmer of possibility", which I found the most beautiful of his works. In this quiet series , which Graham describes as "filmic Haiku" , he finds beauty in everyday events as they unfold before his eyes. Here is man who finds beauty in the ordinary, but who is also able to point out the contrasts of those who have and those who have not.



The way that this series was presented was of particular interest to me; seven or so different sized images conveying the same scene from different perspectives and in different sizes, are displayed as a whole that conveys not only time passing,  but also person and place, in a poetic way that befits the term Haiku.

Also of interest was the series of bespoke books made to contain the series;

A shimmer of possibility , published by SteidlMACK

These are bound in brightly coloured cloth, each one a different colour. The volumes range between relatively extended passages of more than twenty photographs over sixty pages, to a book that cradles just one picture, a story with no beginning and no end.

David Chandler says of "A Shimmer of Possibility" on the Paul Graham archive

"Graham has said that a shimmer of possibility was in part inspired by Chekhov’s short stories, which achieve the greatest atmosphere from ordinary situations, the most vivid sense of time, place and character, with the most minimal of means, and with plain words beautifully arranged often in long lilting sentences.

 Whilst too literal a comparison would be unhelpful, Graham’s photographic sequences do have a Chekhovian pace and phrasing, one that makes effective use of the pause – in Graham’s case blank pages between images – and that strikes a balance between formlessness and structure.

In the Shimmer books, formless photographs, or perhaps more accurately photographs where form is incidental, are variously sized and irregularly placed on the page but in carefully planned succession. The sudden shifts of subject and viewpoint and the use of repetition deliberately dislodge the narrative flow but also allow us to share in Graham’s watchful fascination. Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Tchehov’s Questions’, noted something similar in Chekhov’s ‘choice of incidents and endings’ that unsettle the reader, giving the impression ‘that the ground upon which we expected to make safe landing has been twitched from under us.’ But somehow, she argued, things imperceptibly ‘arrange themselves, and we come to feel that the horizon is much wider from this point of view; we have gained an astonishing sense of freedom."

He quotes from Chekov, relating it to another group in the series , of a gas station and events therein while the sun is setting...

‘And when he was crossing the river on the ferry, and then when he was walking up the hill, looking down at his own village and across to the west, where the cold crimson sunset was glowing in a narrow band, he realised that truth and beauty, which had guided human life in that garden and at the high priest’s, had continued to do so without a break until the present day, and had clearly always constituted the most important elements in human life, and on earth in general; and a feeling of youth, health, and strength – he was only twenty two years old – and an inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness, of unfathomable, mysterious happiness, gradually overcame him, and life seemed entrancing and miraculous to him, and full of sublime meaning.'

Anton Chekov, The Student


We are back in the realms of beauty, albeit of a different kind; beauty found in suburbia, as a reflection of  everyday routines and chance


The enormous scale of many of the images is striking; some are 2-3metres high/wide, reaching from floor to ceiling. My only criticism of the exhibition is the lack of printed information to accompany the works; admittedly the exhibition is free, but £35 for a catalogue is not within everyone's budget.

All of the works are framed in beautiful box frames, either white, occasionally plain wood and also black. I wonder how they are transported, as box frames are much more vulnerable to damage as the glass is not close to the solid back, but floats in front.

It is an exhibition to impress, and to provoke. I recommend it.

The joys of InDesign and outdoor photography in suburbia

I have a plan........



springtime in Bromley


finally I have an idea about what I am trying to produce. I have realised that I need to be outside to do my photography, and so there will be no more studio shots from around my home or anyone else's. As I mentioned before, I have written a poem called "Hawkwood", and I plan to make a book containing words and  images from the National Trust site of that name. It is tucked away behind Chislehurst station, and many locals are unaware that it exists. It will be a bespoke book, and for that reason I have now to achieve the following skills

firstly bookbinding; I have a two day course planned at Falkiner's bookbinders to learn the basic skills that will enable me to bind my own book. Having visited their shop I am very excited about the prospects of working with hand made papers and Japanese prints.

Falkiners bookbinders

Secondly I need to master InDesign. This is proving to be an immense challenge; after two days of watching U-tube videos and experimenting, I have finally managed to get a grip on creating Master pages and documents. This afternoon, while the sun is shining outside, I have been fighting with my printer, which will NOT print a booklet for me, no matter what I try. I have exported files to different formats, tried another printer, and all I have achieved is a microscopic version of the intended booklet that I hoped to print to show my achievements thus far.

Dog is getting lots of walks; around the streets of Bromley and down to the woods, but is having to be very patient when I stop to capture something suitable. As well as the book I am concentrating on the "bushes of suburbia" as opposed to "The Buddha of Suburbia" whose author also comes from around here.

one of the bushes of suburbia

I hope to show the contrast between the well groomed gardens of Bromley and the relative wilderness that lies down by the Kyd brook, otherwise known as the River Quaggy according to Wikipedia. There is a wealth of opportunity at the moment with the spring flowers.

Right now, I can't bear to be indoors any longer; I shall go back to the river and capture a few more rays of sunshine.

sun on Kyd brook