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.)