After the Rain

A week on from the Solstice and I have just about caught up on sleep. It was a cross-country mission and yet to get photos back from processing, I don't know whether the end justified the means. There were over thirty thousand people there, a strange mixture of druids, pagans, international tourists, families and the, as predicted, local teenagers taking drugs for the first time. One guy sat quietly for hours drawing a pen and ink sketch of the scene. At three in the morning the centre circle was packed with drummers and crusties dancing on the stones, and around the henge a sea of umbrellas and beer cans. Groups of people huddled together under bin liners in a soft almost imperceptible English drizzle . The whole scene was incongruously lit by floodlights, which were turned off as the dawn approached. The dawn like, the rain, was difficult to perceive and the day's light became a white haze of dampness. The drumming intensified with the dawn and pagans gathered around the heel stone to perform a ceremony whilst in the circle some lifted a sun on a pole towards the east, and the A road lined with departing cars. As the solstice itself, at about six am approached, the crowds had thinned out, driven off by the rain to the makeshift parties in the car park. The remaining hardcore danced on to occasional blasts of a horn, people getting kind of naked, whilst others had built up a relationship with a particular stone, and perhaps under the influence of drugs, had a chat with it or hugged it or slept against it. I don't know whether I felt any spiritual response, already a memory for me my mind has kind of transformed it to a Bacchic mist, in which the stones seemed over real, like they had been built by a props department. The photographs for me will hopefully capture my experience of the time passing there. I took such an experimental approach to exposure in such grey light and I was shooting for so long without the prior benefit of sleep, I can only hope ... But like the start of a relationship the anticipation is exciting- viva film! (You can see the BBC day in pictures of it here.)

Adi Lavy's 'Camp Sundown'

Adi Lavy's Camp Sundown series records the reversed life of a summer camp for children who suffer from Xeroderma Pigmentosum, an extremely rare disorder that causes the skin to blister or develop cancer from even the briefest exposure to UV light.

80 attoseconds of light

Don't want to make a point of regurgitating stuff from other blogs but, via Conscientious, the shortest flash of light ever captured

Stonehenge Solstice

Off to Stonehenge tomorrow to photograph the solstice. Weather forecast- rain, surprisingly enough. According to recent news stories the circle was perhaps primarily a burial site, as opposed to some kind of giant sundial. Yet its ambiguity and the lack of written evidence informs our fascination, it is a place that we may now occupy according to our spiritual need. Trying to plan I attempt to research/imagine the scene. Lots of New Agers as far as I can glean- I'll be expecting many dreadlocks and also some messy local teenagers who've sampled mdma for the first time. But also that the light will do something surprising during this period of time, or at least there is the chance which is the nature of natural light. I am researching for existing ceremonies that reflect our ancient worship of the sun, but in England there are not really many which are not new constructs. This might be a result of general climate conditions here- shit, drizzle, summer over- we are hardly likely to have developed a solar culture as in ancient Egypt, but perhaps our assumptions of history may be wrong. Or else I need to do more research. Can make my mind up about this during the 24 hours without sleep I've got coming.

Paul Graham 'American Night'

Where do I begin? Paul Graham's poetry of ethnic segregation in America turns ascribed values of light and dark on their head. Too much light blinds, conceals not reveals, at the outskirts of the perfectly exposed American Dream. Our diurnal relationship with light became perverted through religious and cultural conventions : light, white, good vs dark, black, evil. A better set of explanations here.

Photo book blog

Eventually there will be a blog about everything.... and 5B4 is particularly great, especially if you are researching to create a photo book for your masters course.

They Shoot Horses Don't They?

At the Appleby Horse Fair to try out shooting colour film as its been a while, for reasons of cost, concept and control I've been sticking to black and white for personal work. Not delighted with the colour so I might need to keep to black and white for the solstice as the varying light is going to be a bit of a challenge. As somebody said (Meyerowitz?) you have to think in colour too, and I don't understand how the film will react. I have time to get a handle on one film if I was to shoot constantly over the next few days but the range of light means that I will have to change film speed and then I reckon it would make more visual sense to use a range of films rather than having two and pushing.... but I want to shoot colour... its a quandary. I think I need to seek advice from somebody old school who really knows film....

Gypsies are of course photogenic, almost as much as war, although the atmosphere was rather more chav than Koudelka. There were a couple of camera clubs and a few pros taking the classic shot of the horse splashing out of the river. Most people who I know will wonder why I don't have a lovely picture of a horse coming out of the water if I were to show them these pictures, and would think me a better photographer if I did. This gives me vague anxiety and also pisses me off. But then am I just achieving a simulacrum of a more elite aesthetic- kids with toy guns, moments of contemplation amidst the bustle? Enough theorising- as it was certainly some strange and memorable experience, a bit like a Friday night in the city centre- too much beer and a feeling that it is about to kick off only with galloping horses thrown into the mix. And the girls were wearing outfits like a crop top and matching hot pants made out of orange lurex, and everyone was getting really bad sunburn and throwing beer cans in the river. My boyfriend said that somebody had just had a shit in the sink when he went to the pub toilet. I should really make it clear that this isn't aimed at gypsies as most people there had, like me, come to watch or shoot horses.

Chris McCaw's Sunburns

Chris McCaw's Sunburn project: The extended exposure causes the sun to burn the photographic paper in the camera. The intense light, as with the black suns, causes solarization. I like how, both in his work and Harlan Erskine's Black Sun Project, the discovery has come from involvement with process; playing around with things and the sheer love of photography. Conceptually strong but the concept follows not leads. I find a lot of contemporary art photography quite empty, too sleek and concerned with its own importance, as if it has been conceived in the cafe at an art gallery. Now I understand why photography became obsessed with its own representation but the loss of serendipity, or rather its smooth absorption into art world agendas is tragic. McCaw describes:

"This new project initially began completely by accident. In 2003 an all night exposure of the stars made during a camping trip was lost due to the effects of whiskey. Unable to wake up to close the shutter before sunrise, all the information of the night’s exposure was destroyed. The intense light of the rising sun was so focused and intense that it physically changed the film, creating a new way for me to think about photography."

But it took skill, experimentation and knowledge to convert this discovery into a successful series of photographs as you can read here. I can manage the whisky fuelled camping element, the other parts still require some work, although last time I drank whisky while camping I woke up on the fire, luckily having put it out through rolling across it.

Harlan Erskine's Black Sun Project

Harlan Erskine's Black Sun Project exploits a glitch in a mobile phone camera leading to the solarization of the sun. His post discusses his research, some interesting thoughts, and references Minor White's Black Sun, and also Chris McCaw's Sunburn project, literally burning the negative, who I'll post about next...

Ansel Adams- The Black Sun

"Drawing on his deep understanding of musical theory, he adapted the language of sound to explain subtle variations of light. From this discovery of the similarities between these physical phenomena he developed in the 1930s his famous Zone System in an attempt to devise a standard procedure for exposure and development that would give consistent negative quality. "The black and white picture known as The Black Sun is one o f your best-known ones. Tell me how you came to take it. I was working in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada a little after sunrise. I wanted to black and white photograph right into the sun, planning to use the brilliant flare as part of the composition. I made several exposures with a 5 x 7 camera and Isopan black and white film; I intended to develop one in Kodak D-23.I knew I might get a little reversal - a phenomenon of excessive exposure - in this negative, and as the sun disc appeared to have slightly less density in the centre of the general flare I decided to develop the next negative in Pyrocatechin, a highly compensating developer. In this negative the disc of the sun was almost fully reversed and has black and white printed very dark. Reversal can be a very exciting effect when it's properly used. I don't think that its physical chemistry is yet completely understood. Actually 'The Black Sun' is not a good description of this black and white picture any more, because it now means the equivalent of a neutron star, and that's an astronomical phenomenon which had not been discovered at the time I made the black and white picture. But I guess the title will stick!" (source- and I'm guessing it is generally from 'Examples- The Making of 40 Photographs')

Walter Herdeg

...And then some thirty seconds later (thanks AIGA) I learn that Walter Herdeg founded Graphis, the copy I have is of the one hundredth edition, in celebration devoted to the sun, and that Herdeg started his career designing this solar symbol for St. Moritz. The internet is humbling. His love of Garamond as body text strikes a real chord for me and his concept of a 'service layout' where form follows function utterly apposite for a photo book, and I have that delightful feeling where you have stumbled unexpectedly on something that will be inspirational. But best of all is his comments on selection: "I think in recent issues there might even be some examples of Post-modernism in which I feel there was talent. But then I show them not even realizing that they are Post-modern. I leave that to others who are much more articulate than I. I am so much an 'eye' man. For me, it's all visual."

A Zodiacal Being

After some very general trawling of the college library I pulled out an old Graphis book about the sun in art. It has the charming feature of six or seven inserts on different paper of various sun symbols- I should photograph it really so you can get the full effect. It is impractical, but lovely which is really the more important thing for a book to be. It also has a very charming introduction: "At all times, under all skies, the profound relationship of Man to Sun has persisted, and is still giving birth to new symbols, new images. I have gathered in this book a choice of the loveliest and most startling if them." (Walter Herdeg). I love that 'most startling'. It reminded me of the role of the sun in alchemical symbolism, where it might signify gold, and further- the philosopher's stone. Above, some plates from Bibliodyssey, the first from Splendor Solis, the sun in the context of the landscape represents different stages of the alchemical process; the second a: "Zodiacal being. Allegorical frontispiece with alchemical imagery, showing the Sun and Moon as givers of all terrestrial and subterrestrial life." (source)

blogorexia

Still feel a bit topsy-turvy with this as I had done quite a bit of research before and now with some of these ideas and references it feels like I've stumbled into the middle of myself having a conversation with myself. I've also developed a form of blogorexia where I keep reading and looking at other people's blogs (primarily Conscientious, primarily American art scene) and comparing myself unfavourably with the famous. Still no endeavour, no progress...

Olafur Eliasson

So has the study of natural light become less relevant in our neon age? Olafur Eliasson's Domadalur series explore the changing effect of light on landscape just as Monet explored this theme 100 years previously in his Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral series (good article here). As the light changes colour shifts become heightened, in both instances this is highlighted through repetition: a tactic more usually associated with contemporary art than impressionism. Eliasson's explorations through installation go further into our experience of light to transcendent effect, for instance in the Weather Project at the Tate Modern. This was truly a sublime experience, visitors prostrating themselves to the illusion of this hypnotic sun. It seems photography's obsession with light diminished as colour became an accepted medium but as Eliasson observes:-
"Even though one of the largest intercultural common constructions is the agreement about what color is what color (time being the all time largest !), there is still a very large portion of individual opinion about color (unlike time). Color has in its abstraction an enormous psychological and associative potential, and even though color has been cultivated to the extreme the amount of individuality in experiencing colors is equally extreme.This points to that color doesn’t exist in itself, but only when looked at. The unique fact that color so to speak only materializes when light bounces off it into our retinal circus shows us that analyzing colors is in fact about the ability to analyze ourselves."

Tim Davis

Furthering the idea that light may pervert perception Tim Davis' Permanent Collection and Illilluminations. This though, artificial light, understandably long considered shady...

Trent Parke

I have the names of thousands of great photographers that I want to link to rushing through my head like the Generation Game conveyor belt. I can't remember them all.....a toasted sandwich maker.....a his and hers towel set......a cuddly toy......a...oh shit, er.... But perhaps an apt place to start would be Trent Parke, the first Australian to be made a full member of Magnum:- "I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical." You can see his work (obviously then) at Magnum, and on in-public, which includes his recent shift to colour, medium format (market forces or love of experimentation ?). The latter also hosts his wife, Narelle Autio's work- stunning in its own right. Must be nice to be able to go halves on your equipment. Parke's work is spectacularly concerned with light, Australia becomes a dark land brightened by sudden apparitions of otherwordly light. The effects are created in camera with a bit of mild dodging and burning, and nicely Parke isn't prissy about sharing technique in interviews. It is sort of modern pictorialism, and I would imagine, much mimicked. Indeed I am guilty of this intent, but for the fact that I live in Manchester, and even on the single day of the year when it isn't raining the light is of a completely different quality to the intense low sun of a late Sydney afternoon. As Barbara Bolt would have it in her book 'Art beyond Representation', the glare of Australian light can be so bright that it whites out perception.

Rudolph Arnheim

‘If we had wished to begin with the first causes of visual perception, a discussion of light should have proceeded all others, for without light the eyes can observe no shape, no colour, no space or no movement. But light is more than just the physical cause of what we see. Even psychologically it remains one of the most fundamental and powerful of human experiences, an apparition understandably worshiped, celebrated, and importuned in religious ceremonies. To man as to all diurnal animals, it is the prerequisite for most activities. It is the visual counterpart of that other animating power, heat. It interprets to the eyes the life cycle of the hours and the seasons.’ (Rudolph Arnheim)

I have a blog.

I have a blog. How strange. The general purpose is to pull together a set of disparate research and ideas for my final Masters (photography, Bolton) project on the worship of light. All the people who contribute to the internet, and in particular photobloggers, have given me so much: it seems a little bit churlish of me to be balking at sharing something in return. But there you have it- I don't like being stared at even in cyber space and I'd far rather be watching from behind the lens. I'm sure this must become easier with time.