Tokyo, New Years Eve, 2005

“Estragon: I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”

-  Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts)

One thing I have to admit I do miss in my recent dabbling with the devil is that old inner glow I felt, in the good old days, when I opened the fridge and saw my exposed but unprocessed beauties lying inert like a cryogenic experiment awaiting a better time (usually financial). Recently, I had a conversation with a teaching colleague who spoke about liking film because even by looking at recently processed negatives, irrespective of the date of their exposure, he could begin to remember being here or there, or having seen this or that and  somehow that re-remembering was missing when one worked with the ‘darkside’ (digital photography). Perhaps it’s simply a different process of  both laying down memory and engaging with memory within the process of digital photography rather than the specifics of film itself. Its possible that the relatively proximate viewing of the ‘positive’ image in relation to it’s capture, combined with the interruption of memory through the process of deletion that can occur with darkside photography (which usually doesn’t happen with the film strip ) radically alters this re-remembering and so connections are lost and the memory is not so labile or latent. There is perhaps an interruption in the flow of memory as those failures which one either forgets (or tries to forget) are not still present and so there is a fracture in our retrieval system. Perhaps this might explain why at times I find it quite painful to look back on contact sheets and it is somehow easier for me emotionally to retrieve images from a hard-disk rather than a hard-box. Being a little older than my colleague perhaps I have more doors to rooms full of film-strips that I prefer not to re-project on the inside on my head.

I have been churning this discussion backwards and forwards since that short divertisement from the mundane realities of grades, schedules and errant students. Photography and photographs are both umbilical chords to the past and arrows into the future. So on one level they are apparently fixed in time but in reality are always in flux. The latent image, that keeper of secrets for a future telling, is usually associated with film and the magic of analogue photography, but it could also possibly be argued that digital images are the ultimate in latent images in that they only really exist when printed, for if the software disappeared tomorrow they would no longer be visible and would remain unseen, pregnant with a phantom  possibility. So were his concerns a romantic notion? A conceptual conceit? An appropriate philosophical stance in relation to filmstrip memory and the analogue latent image? Or simply a stubborn resistance to the winds of change?

In a brave attempt to, at least for now, hold  Analogue Days 2004-2009 to that timeline I recently set out to drop into the lab two rolls of film exposed in the last days of December 09. It struck me that I could also test my colleagues musings so I also dipped into my remaining small archive of unprocessed and hibernating 35mm film from this work and selected an additional five rolls. It was a real, almost joyous, surprise to find that the archive had yielded wandering photographs from Tokyo that I had made while participating in the European Eyes on Japan Project back in 2004/5. Except for two specific ‘events’ recorded from the daily ebb and flow of the Tokyo streets I did not remember explicitly making any of the images from the five processed rolls. Of the two events – one had, over the years, recurred in the odd dream and daytime reverie in terms of – ‘I wonder what happened to that roll of film?’ – The other event, in spite of its ideal subject matter for either day or night time reveries, had been completely forgotten.

It is New Years Eve in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, it is close to midnight and I am wandering aimlessly but notionally heading towards a bookshop when suddenly in a flurry of colour, tradition and technology, a swarm of young Japenese women dressd in classical Kimonos sudenly emerge from the TV Asahi building, presumably having participated in some annual television ritual concerning the departing year. And it’s a flurry of cameras and mobile phones as they photograph each other against the backdrop of this particularly upmarket commercial zone before disappearing into taxis and the forthcoming year. Its one of those Tokyo moments of tradition crashing up against today.

I do remember cursing the film speed as they emerged from the TV station and attempting to fix something from the low-light chaos, and I do remember seeing a small group move over to the large glass panels that reflected some of the cityscape that surrounded us, and hosted (if I remember correctly) the randomly generated digital numbers, and I do remember at last something coming together, and click, and click, and click – but I dont actually remember making this photograph or at least I don’t think I remember – it’s strange – I can remember making certain photographs from my early attempts at the medium but I don’t remember making this photograph which is a wee cracker – maybe sensory overload in another country, maybe already back then my memory box for making photographs was full and so only the fixed image can be for me a certain certainty and yet now, when I look at this photograph, it’s like I have never forgotten it.

The other event, on another roll, well how could I forget this, and yet I had. In a place of perceived uniformity there is heightened uniformity of anonymous beauty – the sequence is below with some selected images extracted.

Tokyo, 2005 or 2006

Tokyo, 2005 or 2006

Tokyo, 2005 or 2006

Tokyo, 2005 or 2006

The above image was one of the early photographs in yet another series that I likewise began on that trip to Japan and which I recently titled Women with Blue Eyes, (2004-2009) through a meandering dialogue with the photographer, Luca Nostri on one of our brief road trips. And yet, I don’t remember making this photograph nor is it certain in spite of its recovery from limbo whether it may make it into the final selection so it it might be forgotten yet again.

And so I return to my colleagues musings and the photograph that the young woman made of her friend as one year closed and the possibilities of another approached. Where is that photograph now? It was a digital capture which could possibly have been sent and seen by thousands of people – Does it still exist? Did it it ever exist as something other than zeros and ones? – My photograph, on the other hand, has emerged nearly five years later from hibernation in deep time, I can see the images before and after, via contact sheet and filmstrip, I have made a print of it – so it exists – two plus five equals seven ……….  it must mean something …….. and yet perhaps all it signifies is that so much is chance and spin of the universe and that the wonderful landscape of memory with its rivers of neurones, synaptic borders, amygdala forests and hippocampal mountains is a landscape beyond our musings and understandings and that photography, that mirror with a memory or perhaps more recently that wafer of recollection, needs memory and memory needs photography to complete each other in an almost perfect symbiotic relationship of parasite and host – though which is which?, aye, now there’s a question.

Innocent Landscapes Revisited, Wilkinstown, February, 2010

Expecting stasis I reluctantly headed off to Wilkinstown last weekend under the grey light that enveloped us on Sunday. The protagonists have returned, the fourth act is under way, and with a renewed energy they have worked their way through a corner of this new section. The soil here at times is different with large sections having a thin covering of bog and possibly because this doesn’t match with information they may have they seem to have moved quickly through it. In another part the small clumps of trees that dotted this field have been leveled in preparation like two pages from a diary.The potential pyre is still present and in the soft light it now truly haunts the center of the recently returned field and justifies my rejection of the blue sky last week.

Innocent Landscapes Revisited, Wilkinstown, February, 2010

‘Utopias exist only in carpets’ -  John Berger

M2, October, 2009.

Trampolines in gardens, and trophy homes with garages bigger than most suburban houses, and other houses reduced to sell or available at two for the previous price of one, and some that are now advertised on trucks in fields, and ghost estates where empty houses haunt their inhabitants, and the work of an artist/joker/philosopher/republican posting tri-colours on bridges and road signs, and orange filtered blinds still protecting mannequins in the windows of fabric shops of small and medium sized towns, and the once brightly coloured and image-laden but now minimalist black and grey hoardings around stalled development sites, and the seldom crane, now an endangered species, and the return of pot-holes down which a small elephant could disappear, and a skeletal old man with a thin stick walking straight out of a Beckett novel with his open-fire dirt-stained face, who shuffles along the side of the road like the ghost of Christmas past, and the small irony of a dead petrol station being reborn as a petrol station perhaps selling Lazarus fuel, and this building below which, in the nineties, was a two-storey house on the corner of a Dublin street. These are a few of the things.

Dublin, February, 2010

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As a small aside, the top image poses a wee conundrum in relation to authorship, appropriation and photography – particularly photography that records/documents the consciously artistic actions of others.  I don’t know whether the person responsible for these tri-colours is documenting their endeavours in some way – I, the photographer, through empirical awareness, formal framing and subsequent editing can create a series that either mirrors or runs contrary to the intention of the ‘artist’ – am I also an artist through my observations and framing? – Or merely a craftsman? Or documentarian?. What can I do to exert my authorship?. Is it in this case by only making one image and refusing the obvious temptation to make a series of same and is it then my placement of the image in a larger body of work that somehow I can begin to claim this particular work as my own?.  It’s an interesting question. It is photography’s Achilles heal. Are we mirrors, windows or photocopiers, endlessly repeating what exists already – the midwife of a dying world conceived and lived by others. Perhaps our only salvation as artists is a deep appreciation of metaphor and allegory in order to photograph beyond what we are photographing.

Last weekend I had my first real chance, after all the ‘real’ weather we have been having, to visit the three sites currently being investigated. All three are in pause mode. Wilkinstown is like the set of a play that now awaits the fourth act or perhaps an epilogue. It was a blue-sky day, not exactly my favourite light, as the proximity of that slab of blue to postcard skies when working in the landscape is always troubling. A lone digger remained in the last area searched, close-by a large mound, about 20 feet tall, of the remaining uprooted trees and saplings that somehow didn’t manage to fit back into the excavated soil haunted and held the center of the field – a strong and eerie echo of a funeral pyre– I made a perfunctory image in spite of the blue sky in case it is gone when I next return. The adjacent mapped out field awaits its protagonists.

Onwards then to Carrickrobin, managing to remember that small gap that reveals the lane down to the site. It’s always disquieting when you enter a site that is being searched to find the earth removers have departed – you whisper to yourself ‘it’s only a pause, they will be back’ though the small area searched before Christmas is flat again and yet the water continues to drain from this sodden place through makeshift pipes and the small bamboo sticks remain, skinny talismans of hope.

I had left it rather late to leave last Sunday as I was aware that the roads in these obscure areas would be covered in black ice so even a slight thaw would help. As the light which silently now stretches well beyond 5pm began to dwindle I decided to be thorough and have a quick look at the nearby site at Colgagh in case the digger has migrated there to scour a new landscape and at fist sight this does not appear to be the case but a sharp eye spots it across the road, deep in the original site at Colgagh that yielded the remains of Bryan McKinney and John McClory – the only people recovered by the digs of 1999 and 2000. It’s puzzling – surely they haven’t returned here – and in a way they have – they are widening and deepening for the best part of five to six hundred meters the natural ditch that extends from this place – so yet again it is more patient landscaping of the new site across the road in preparation for Spring

I believe that the existence of the classical “path” can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The “path” comes into existence only when we observe it.

–Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927

At present I don’t have commercial representation – its something I need to resolve practically and philosophically – I think i have an underlying fear, rational or not, of any possible commercial success influencing what/how I photograph – it’s a small, petty anxiety concerning being cornered or defined and settling for a way of working rather than continuing to search. Unfortunately it is an important part of one’s game so I need to get my act together. As a result of not having a box or perhaps a cube to fill, works can drift along for too long when one is essentially working alone in all spheres of ones practice and so there is a need to create deadlines both real and imaginary either by seeking out exhibitions in public spaces or setting an internal target such as to produce a book dummy in order to test a body of work. One of the main reasons I have undertaken this blog is as a means of kicking myself in the ass rather than polishing my ego – that said it’s nice to be asked and so far it has been an interesting challenge.

Upon mature reflection, amongst other things,  this blog could use some key features such as:

1) A good welcoming catchphrase.

2) A good sign-off catchphrase.

3) The odd joke/anecdote about photography.

The latter is probably the most difficult as I only know one half decent joke about photography which is….

‘Two street photographers are walking down the road when they pass a beggar squatting with cup in hand – they walk on a little and suddenly one of them says to the other ‘Hold on a second’ and he returns to the beggar – when he comes back his friend says ‘wow, that was very nice, what did you give him?’ – and  the other replies ‘a thirtieth at f11……..’

Ok not a masterpiece – maybe SOURCE should run a small competition for the best/worst photography joke. Actually a small bit of internet research turned up very few jokes in this area and those were even worse than the above. I wonder is the dearth of jokes linked to photography being a ’serious’ medium. As it happens this aspect of photography was explored in 2008 by the BACKLIGHT festival in Finland (http://www.backlight.fi/) with some interesting work as their intention was funny peculiar rather than  funny ha ha.

Project wise, as ever, I currently have a number of ongoing threads – I like to work in this way – it’s a way of exploring the medium and myself through different genres – this can often make my life difficult with ‘the gatekeepers’ as I can be difficult to pin down and categorize but believe me they all come from the same well of love, loss and unfortunately little redemption! – some projects work, some don’t and I am nearly sure there is a grand scheme but perhaps I just don’t understand it yet. So some bodies of work are ticking along nicely, some are stalled, some are possibly finished and I don’t know it yet and some ….  I shouldn’t even have started. Recently I had another look at large body of work that I made in Ireland the 90’s and began to see and shape it as a possible triptych of books Before, During, After – this I brought to an initial level of three unbound laser photocopy styled books which will now sit and distill themselves for a period in the sea of tranquility or perhaps more accurately, the ocean of limbo.

One of the many counterpoints to spending a lot of time making inscpapes within the landscape is my wandering with a 35mm camera in the native studio of photography – the street. I think later this year will see me move further to the dark side – as mentioned previously, I have already moved my suitcases there in terms of medium format and so the next logical step is with 35mm. That said I think we should all hold on to film for B/W work – Having last September yet again given my introductory printing demonstration to year one and experienced the pleasure of watching that image shimmer to life in the shifting liquid it is a moment that the dim room will never surpass.

Paris, 2001

(As an aside I do have a personal campaign going to keep the poetic term the latent image alive and in circulation. This year in an intake of 27 students with some coming from portfolio courses there wasn’t a single soul who had heard of the term, dear oh dear. My main weapon in this small war is the poignant  last scene in the Jan Troell film ‘Everlasting Moments’ which hauntingly visualises that ghost in the liquid phenomenon.)

With all this in mind over the summer I started to print an edit of the photographs made with an M6 that I was very fortunate to win as part of the publishers’ award. This is my quotidian camera and the work has the ongoing title  ‘Analogue Days 2004-2009′ with the possible subtitle ‘Impulses of the Heart’. I suppose it’s a way of saying goodbye to working with film in this format and I intend including some  photographs that contain accidental mistakes that are a property and ‘danger’ of using film.

Charleroi,2006

There is something fundamentally honest about this way of working – it’s small secret is the www method referred to in posting no. 1. It really is a matter of just getting out there with an open heart, a curious mind and a good pair of shoes. It’s big secret, as with most creative endeavours, but particularly so here, is the edit. An accumulation of photographs scanning many places, countries,  states of mind etc hopefully will in time reveal a certain open text. I was about to call this somewhat like free improvisational jazz* but perhaps this is not such a good idea as by labeling it, even in a loose way, may corner  the work and these photographs are very much a free association work.  And yet, the challenge within organising such work into a body of work is that underneath the free flowing form there must be a structure of sorts. I often think of this invisible lattice as being akin to those steel frames that you see first with certain buildings under construction which are later invisible. Such bodies of subjective photographic work  as opposed to objective ’series’ need a greater appreciation of metre and timbre.

Lewis Baltz has astutely described photography as occupying a narrow trough between fiction and cinema though I often feel its a trough between poetry and fiction with a base of music as the rhythms, harmonies, inner harmonies and counter melodies particularly in work like Analogue Days are inherent to the experience offered to the reader/viewer especially within the real home of photography – the book. This trough which winds it’s way through our landscape of memory and experience and from which we peep out out every now and then to view the real world from a shifted perspective, is a strange insulated and yet vulnerable space somewhat like a trench in the first world war. There are days when the noise is all around you and you cant see anything, there are days when it is deathly quiet and you daren’t event look and there are days when you sit and wait for another day.

Ostia,2005

Lodz, 2009

Paris, 2008

Paris, 2008

Dublin, 2009                                                        Dublin,2009

Lodz, 2009

Iwate, 2004

Editing this work is quite a nightmare not just because of volume but due to multiple themes some of which may need to held over for another day or pushed really firmly under the bed beyond the finished but hidden and stillborn projects and slightly out of reach of a grasping hand. I do however have an idea to run by the nice people at SOURCE in relation to this work in terms of editing and the so called democratic nature of photographs like this. What I have in mind is to post 300-400 images and invite both of my readers to vote for their 80 or so which we might turn into a pdf book – at the same time I would also pick my 80 and make my pdf book -

hmmmm, this is an insane idea forget I ever mentioned it (3,2,1 ….you’re back in the room) – but it might be fun.  This will/would involve some technical stuff, so a maybe at some point. In the next blog or two I will look at one or two other ongoing works for consideration before returning to the renewed searches which will probably begin again, now that the snow and ice have departed. I will also examine the other sites at which events are concluded or to be resumed.

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* A little surfing though came up with this website http://www.jazclass.aust.com/im1.htm which gave an introduction to improvisation with some basic advice which I feel could be very sound counsel to anyone making photographs;

‘The beginning improviser must learn to master three skills :

1. What notes to play
2. How to play the notes selected, and
3. How to improvise without losing his/her place in the song.’

Dublin, 10-01-10

We have been basking in silent snow for a short while – the first time in a time and there is a quiet rush in me to catch it while it is still here and then puff it is gone, quickly too quickly and this small event some four days into the white blanket begins and ends in a few hours. The ephemeral lost to the ephemeral and the brief confusion of the foraging deer, their first hunger for invisible food, and a lesson learned and a memory etched, and a stain and a wound, and a moment held.

Dublin, January, 2010

As I have no doubt mentioned before, one aspect concerning photography and photographs is the issue of latency. As I get older, which as you know happens day by day, minute by minute, if not second by itching nanosecond, I have become more aware of what might be termed ‘my archive’ – the boxes of negatives and prints, and there are many, that populate and infiltrate my ‘shoebox’ with a background humming sound. Roughly speaking there is a divine trinity of photographed experiences beginning with the set that, so far in any case, have been experienced and questioned only by myself. Then there is another set that may have been experienced in an incomplete way by perhaps only a handful of people, and finally there is yet another set such as Innocent Landscapes that has been experienced in a small way by a larger audience even on different continents. Of these the first set intrigues me – do these photographs, this work, exist or not? Are they like film in the fridge awaiting development and, what ultimately is the fate of this lived but hidden photographed experience – condemned in time to skip or archive – it’s a sobering thought – all that trapped energy lying inert or buried in a landfill (which in some work might be appropriate).

As I get older, which as you know happens day by day, minute by minute, if not second by itching nanosecond I am also interested more and more in the dialogue between images that may initially emanate from very different projects but when placed together create a new more intriguing narrative than the primary intention and yet each image is sufficiently strong enough to work within their original narrative framework – it is this latency, this malleability that’s makes photography a never ending journey into the self. This may or may not be a good thing and is probably a motorway to a kind of latent lunacy.

The two images above were made three days ago within hours of each other. One I had been waiting/dawdling to make for no particular reason save for activation energy or the simple decision to remember and return with camera to something observed three months ago. The other was made unhesitatingly as the ice will, without doubt, melt relatively quickly. Both are in essence temporary scenarios vulnerable to external actions, even those of a humble photographer. Their combination and loose latency of meaning has sparked yet another more open set of narrative possibilities and already I am trying to structure this work in terms of possible expansion and yet hold on to its loose association. I will return to some boxes to retrieve older images for a new interrogation and will go forward making new images with this initial pairing in mind.  All the time working on another invisible book that only I may ever see and possibly never getting further than these twins. Maybe I should even stop now, while I am ahead. A two-picture book might be the solution. But what about a series of two-picture books, that might be better. Or perhaps an expanding series of  2ⁿ - picture books could push it further.  Working black against white, then white against black followed possibly by white against white and then black against black before finally returning or interspersing black against white, and all in colour. Now that would be something.

So as I get older, which as you know happens day by day, minute by minute, if not second by itching nanosecond I realize ah yes a latent mind the secret elixir of youth and longevity.

Innocent Landscapes, Resumed Search, Wilkinstown, December, 2009

It is the end of December. All three areas, each the size of a small soccer pitch, that have been searched since the summer have been returned without return. It is nearly there, nearly over, all to begin again.  This area above will be explored in the New Year and the soil here will be sifted and searched for hidden truths or concealed lies. On it goes, this remarkable quest for a homecoming.

Innocent Landscapes, New Search, Carrickrobin, December, 2009

“Walk up that lane, past the green field on the right and the stone mounds, and you’ll see the bogland. After 150 yards of bogland, stop. Walk 30 yards into the bog – that’s where the body is buried.”

A small area has been searched since early November. It is now almost Christmas and this small area has been returned without return. The slipperiness of memory even when excavated in faith remains a constant fallibility in our consciousness. On my most recent visit a small Robin flitted here and there as I worked away, even at one stage landing on a leg of my tripod. Legend has it that Robins acquired their red breast by landing on the cross of the dying Christ and they are considered in folklore to be harbingers of good fortune. In January 2010 the time team will return and begin again moving beyond the fragile bridge of the fallen tree.

Innocent Landscapes, New Search, Carrickrobin, December, 2009

Dublin, December, 2009

‘Well, I’d prefer if you would delete it’ to which I rudely laughed so hard that the woman must have been offended. All I was simply doing was making the photograph above when I heard the initial ’sorry, what are you doing’ to which I explained that I was just making a photograph of the box in the back window of the car and that I wasn’t the tax man, or from social welfare, and there was nothing sinister about it – ‘but why would you photograph a box?’ she asked  – Now, on a better day I might have tried to explain this in some cogent way but I was tired and probably a little cranky – it was a beautiful winters morning, the first day of my Christmas holiday and the last thing I could muster some energy for was to try to talk about what it is like to www (wander, wonder and work), and the slightly melancholic resonance I felt from the weeping car with the trapped beauty, and that red is the colour of love and passion, and that I was searching for this both outside and inside, and that it was a year or more since I kissed my beloved, and two years since she kissed me, and that December is a sad beautiful month with days so short and nights so long that the souls of the departed can travel inconspicuously, and that yesterday my tortoise died but my cat had kittens which somehow almost balanced things out, and that I dreamed last night of a far away place were all the women had flowers in their hair, and that boxes contain the mysteries of the universe, and that my pockets contain seeds of hope and despair, and that purple is a sign of penitence, and I photograph therefore I (may)be – but I didn’t – I shrugged my shoulders, shook my head and raised my hands in exasperated defence – I had no defence – here on a public street I was no longer the wistful flanneur I considered myself but a dodgy voyeur looking into the back windows of cars and stealing souls. Strangely, after I had finished laughing and explained it was an analogue not digital camera she seemed less threatened but still unamused. A Luddite anarchist she must have thought as I walked away.