Old photographs often have an inherent yearning about them. There are photos in our lives that we invest with meaning. Those old snaps you find when clearing out a drawer after someone has died, or that faded photo found in a pile of old letters. There, pickled on the paper, a moment.
Photos that I recently found in a drawer:
That moment when Rod checks his watch in the doorway of his back garden as the century changes. The day we had a picnic in the fens - it was my 30th birthday.
The blink of an eye; the moment has gone.
But the latent image is left behind to emerge in the developer, to be collected with anticipation, to be stuck in a frame, shoved under the bed, or packed in an envelope and sent to a friend or relative.
Nottingham 1981; I’m in the Basford Flats, I’m a student. And I’m a mere 25 years old. I am watching a film; a prison drama in which the inevitability everyone’s death is apparent. (I can‘t remember the film, and the flats have been knocked down now in favour of low rise high density housing) As I lounged in student-bliss surrounded by friends, girlfriend at my side, I was suddenly acutely infected by an intense morbidity which did not go away. My friends at the time teased me about it and when I became morose. “He’s got the morbids” they would say.
In a way they never went away. Ever since I have been anxious about the inevitable death of each and everyone of us. Throughout early marriage and the arrival of children, and my first proper jobs this feeling was more of a background noise which could occasionally be heard in the dark lonely hours when I would wake and stare into the abyss.
Gloucester Hospital 4th March 2004 . My father James Richard Knott Fayle dies. At the time I’m standing in the shop of Leeds Armoury. I am looking at a book about the Battle of Bosworth when my mobile rings. It’s my brother with the bad news. The feeling comes flooding back. The cobwebs of death smother me again.
I mourned the death of my father quite privately, and got on with work and life. However inside I not only mourned the loss of my father; but I mourn(ed) my for my own inevitable death, and the inevitable death of everyone I love, and indeed every person who is alive.
As part of a kind of rebirth (mid-life crisis if you like) I singed up on an MA, and as result I wanted to do develop some new media art work.
We all understand that in order to live you have to die, and that in living one has a limited period of time and certain space. In a physical sense that is all we are.
There a many beliefs that would say that there is more to us than our physical being. Let me lay my cards on the table:- I do not know where I stand. I can’t see how we can be more than physical, but on the other hand I can’t see how we can be only physical.
What is a photograph?
What is a photograph for?
What is the purpose of all those photos stuck away in a drawers, and sandwiched away in wedding albums, and uploaded to the internet to be “shared” with strangers as well as friends?
Memory. A physical portrayal of a person, a place, an event.
The average modern photograph records a very short moment of time; 1/125th of a second perhaps. It takes this small sample of time and records the way the light was reflected deflected towards the camera for that short duration of time. Thus when we look at a photograph we see that scene or that person preserved in this short sample of time.
Pinhole cameras such as the ones I have been making require long exposures, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 40 minutes, even several hours. In these photographs the time frame is different. It’s no longer the blink of an eye. It’s a percievable period of time, long enough for us to think, act, fall in love, make a phone call, eat a meal, or die.
I think there are certain photos in everyone’s life that are important or memorable for some reason. In my life for example there's picture of me in a duffle coat, when my mother took me to London for first time (by steam train). It was trapped under glass on my Mum's dressing table. That picture I took of my Dad in nineteen sixty something as he came into the yard from the farm - it was my first camera - A Kodak 127 “brownie”. The picture of Clare and I outside a building in Hong Kong just after we got secretly married, we got a passer bye to take the pic.
It is not the photograph’s function to record an exact reference to time (e.g. 13:14 GMT), but when you look at photos we inevitably try and remember exactly when, and where. How do we start to get a grip on these moments that make up a life? Obviously we can record the time and the place.
Now: 21st February 2005, 16:14 GMT. But how precise can you be? I notice that for myself there is an average time, The clock in the kitchen is faster than the watch I wear, which is different from the time display on my phone. I work to some meantime of my own.
But if you were going to be precise about it what is the exact time now, and now, and now, and is it possible to record an exact moment in time and space?
It’s 1961 I think: I am 5 years old. I am wearing my best clothes, and I’m standing in a family group in front of our house. My grandfather looks down into his strange camera, the black bellows extending a black shiny eye towards us and Click!. I remember the actual moment. And somewhere in my Mother’s stuff there is now a fading photo of the gathering after my brother’s christening.
I can’t pin down the exact moment of time, not even the date, but I have tried to work out the exact place. I think I know where we standing. I think I can recall the position fairly exactly. I’ve looked it up and I think it was at grid reference SO 766 023. Not absolutely precise - but certainly picky.
For those of us with a nerdy side I should say that I did some research and found that there is indeed a national co-ordinate system. The responsible body is the Ordinance Survey. There are three possible systems to locate a place. ETRS89, OAGB36, and ODN - Ordinance Datum Newlyn. I could feed the nerd in me by buying a GPS system and going to the very place and logging the position. Ooh. I can feel the anorak enclosing me already.
I also started to look into the definition of death. If I was going to worry about death, perhaps I should try and find out exactly what death is. Surely we all know what death is. Everything has shut down, there’s nothing happening in the body, the brain has stopped functioning.
The definition of death has been the subject of considerable debate it turns out. In Kuwait in 1985 the Islamic Organisation for Medical Science met and discussed the issue. Every country has had to decide on the legal definition of death.
The most commonly used definition of death, as far as I can see, seems to be the cessation of all vital processes and in particular death of the entire brain, including the stem. I also found that there are many tests to check that death has occurred, including the bizarre test of putting cold water into the ears whilst looking at the eyes to see if there is any reaction.
So I had looked a little into positioning in space, and I had looked at the definition of death, and I had thought about time and how we can fix ourselves in a time and place.
I decided to trace the 0 Meridian around the globe. I was interested to see where it came into Britain. Where did it go after that? I got an atlas out and followed it:
THE NORTH POLE Withern Sea (Kingston Upon Hull)
Louth (east of Sheffield)
Near Royston (Cambridgeshire / Bedfordshire border)
GREENWICH
East Grinstead
Into France
San Pierre sur Dives
A mountain summit near Couroges
Near Le Mans
Lezat (near Poittiers)
Grignals
Gavarnie
French border - into Spain
Caspe
Castellea De La Plana Almeressa
Into Algeria
Mostaganem
Into Mali
Gao
Into Ghana
Wolehe
Tema
Then no more land until
Georg Forster island (Germany) THE SOUTH POLE
I also traced the same line up the other side of the world back to the North Pole. I wondered about having people arranged along this line (Exactly) on the line and arranging a long exposure photograph of each person to be exposed at for the same minute of time. This idea was clearly beyond my immediate means so I tried to think of something more achievable within my means.
I decided to get a video camera and a pinhole camera pointing at the same scene, and to record the exact same minute of time on both.
My first attempt took place one lunch hour, when I borrowed a video camera, packed a pinhole camera into my bag and nipped round the corner.
The scene I chose was of a place in Nottingham where many streets join. The traffic and pedestrians are controlled by traffic lights. My thought being that there would waves of movement. In my rush I found that I hadn’t packed the microphone. I set up the video camera, the pinhole resting on the ground directly below the lens of the video camera.
I set the video camera going and then pulled out the detachable shutter to expose the first of two pinhole photographs. As soon as had done this I flashed the shutter briefly in front of the video camera so that I would know when the minute had started, similarly at the end of the minute.
As a technical note I was interested to see that when I compared the two images, and put the video image on top of the pinhole to see that the video image had a much smaller field of view than the pinhole. I knew it was a wide angle but I had not appreciated how wide. I think the angle for the particular camera I used is around 110 degrees.
I repeated the process with a second minute of time and a second pinhole photo. Well you have to give yourself a choice.
I stuck the two images together, and put on a caption detailing the time and place. I slowed down the video so there three time frames running.
1) The 1 minute exposure of the pinhole
2) The original 1 minute of video footage
3) The new duration of about three minutes.
I enjoyed the result which showed people moving slow-motion across the cross roads (a kind of symbol of life), when they get to the edge of the video frame they disappear. But in your mind they carry on walking. It is as if they have moved into another dimension, or indeed died. It’s a minute from their lives.
This is a true account of certain events in Stratford on Avon -Summer 2004. I wrote it a while ago.
Names have been changed - except that of Gordon Vallins whom I urge you to find out about.
The weirdness that has haunted me this weekend has roots that can be traced back several weeks to a moment when I looked from the kitchen window and saw the cats toying with a little mouse. You may say that I should not have interfered with the natural order of things, but the I was compelled to shoo off the cats and rescue the mouse.
Close inspection revealed that the mouse had had its tail mutilated - skinned and broken and it was obviously in a state of abject terror. Not least because it was now in the hands of a giant. I put it in a Perspex animal cage that we had, and left it water, and a little food and shredded up paper to hide in. It did quite well and over the next few days started to recover it's vigour and could be seen scurrying and twitching quite happily.
There was a portentous moment, which I should have taken more notice of, when Tamsin found one of the cats (Venus) sleeping on top of the Perspex box apparently oblivious of the mouse and vice versa.
In the dark and lonely hours of that night I lay awake contemplating the confusing and terrifying images that I had just been dreaming when I thought I heard a burglar down stairs. So I tiptoed down stairs to find the cats intently focused on the sofa. When I shooed the cats away and lifted the sofa up there was the mouse which scurried away into the shadowy recesses of the room. The Perspex tray had been pushed of its shelf and the cats stared at me with searchlight eyes that pitied my lily-livered view of life and death.
Time passed and the weekend arrived when I was to meet up with a few people (I think of them as rather sexy girls but actually they are middle-aged women) that I went to college with in 1976 / 7 in Stratford on Avon. I donned my leathers, packed my bag and and strapped it to the back of bike. I headed south to the tourist ridden town.
The weekend started with a good dose of life and death as I went to the theatre with a woman called Tamsin to see Hamlet. As students all those years ago I had been rather surprised when The Tamsin that I now sat next to in middle age had flung herself and an offer of lust and love at me. Being at the time somewhat shy and confused I ran a mile. I had not realised that she had any interest in me until that moment. Now many years later she had recently apologised for this moment and I had assured that I was confused and flattered, at the time hence my rejection.
So here we sat all these years later contemplating Hamlet and his father's ghost.
The next morning I awoke in my chintzy and frankly tasteless little B&B and having showered opened my bag to get out clean clothes. But upon opening the bag I was horrified to find that all my clothes were crawling with maggots. Who had packed this bag? I had! I had certainly not packed maggots - so where had they come from for God's sake?
Having travelled by bike I had equipped myself with various bin-liners to deal with down pours etc. So Item by Item a shook the maggots off my clothes into a bin liner. My face distorted in disgust. Eventually I had decontaminated all the clothes. I reached into the bag for the last item which was a pair of martial arts gym shoes which I hardly ever wear and found inside one of them the body of the mouse that I had so lovingly rescued crawling with maggots.
I put the bag and the shoes in the bin-liner slipped from the B&B down the road; if you had been walking the Alcester road that Saturday morning you would have noticed a middle aged man with a black bag which he was furtively stuffing into a street litter bin. His face in a grimace of distaste.
Later that morning, I got on my bike and with determination I tracked down a certain Jenson Bleer (with whom thirty something years ago I had been at school) who lives in Stratford and whom I had not seen for probably 10 years or more. Having got some vague directions from a mutual acquaintance I found his house easily as outside was parked a Russian Motorbike and Sidecar. As I scanned the house I could see the familiar twitching and bobbing silhouette of my old school friend Jenson (My dad always called him Jenson Blur because of his constant movement).
"Roger old bean- do come in! how lovely to see you - My dear fellow!" he said as opened the door. "Come in! Come in! meet the wife."
I was ushered through into the front room where a plump woman of around 60 was sitting drinking strong beer. She had a very red face and no teeth.
"Will you be putting your teeth in today dear?" said Jenson twitching with attentive affection.
"Mnnoo - wen ah go down fhops" she said
Jenson explained that they didn't normally drink this early but that he had been working until two in the morning and woken at five and that Tilly - his wife- was also very busy and this was a narrow window of opportunity in which they could share each other's company.
I asked what his job was
"R&D engineering that kind of thing"
He answered quickly and explained an employment history that ran through aircraft engine manufacture and marine accident investigation. Then bizarrely took a turn into his present occupation which he informed me was currently as director of a double glazing company- he was making loads of money and was even as we spoke on priority-one stand-by in case of emergency.
He also informed me that his house could be powered by a generator which he had in a shed at the bottom of the garden, and that in power cuts his was the only house with working lights and TV. Tilly said she wanted some money to go down the shops and buy knickers with. Jenson did a lot of mental maths about money and gave her a £20 note.
Next I was invited to see an electric bicycle that he was testing for R&D purposes.
"No one" he told me "Has ridden one of these things in all weathers day in day out for years on end" I had a go on it and up and down the road watched by Jenson, Tilly, and the neighbours who thought it was the most interesting things they had ever seen.
After a series of complex explanations about the workings of the Russian motorbike (which had now become the focus of his torrential stream of words) we put it on the centre stand and started the engine - which did sound really throaty. But it was time for me to move on for my lunchtime date with the girls.
"The Dirty Duck" is a famous pub in Stratford near the theatre and it's always full of actors and students - and it was here that I sat with three rather sexy middle aged women - where we had sat so many years before. No longer torn apart by adolescent self doubt I relaxed into the company of these people who were living artefacts from a nearly forgotten past in which at the time I had felt so lonely and excluded. And yet here I was sharing beer and ploughman's and flirtatious conversation. Fantastic.
I noticed two women looking through the window apparently at me and consulting each other. I presumed they were not looking at me but at the architecture. But I was wrong they really were looking at me, because now they had entered the pub and somewhat shyly approached us. Not just us but me.
"It's my Hen Weekend" the pretty one explained and I have to photographed with a Shakespeare look alike - would you mind . . .?"
As you can imagine I was delighted. So I went outside where there was a large gathering of women who photographed me with my arm around the bride to be. The "girls" took photographs of the photographs being taken.
I walked the girls back to their B&B and said I was going to buy jeans which rather excited them and they said they would like to help me. But the thought of being advised and inspected, even by three middle-aged beauties, was too much for me so I slid out of the offer and went solo into town to buy jeans and have sauna and swim.
Later that evening we all arrived at the Ripple restaurant and Night-club where we met Gordon (Gordon Vallins - inventor of drama A level) He was our vigorous and enthusiastic teacher and course leader all those years ago and now he stood before at the age of 70. I could not help doing a sum which confirmed my suspicion that we were now older than he was when he was teaching us. He was still bright eyed and vigorous and his mind was very sharp and quick.
I also found another sum running in my head, a sum that is a constant background since my Dad died in which I subtract various numbers from 78. In subtracting my own age the answer is 31. In the case of Gordon - to whom we gave birthday card and present the answer is 8.
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." A voice in my head recited
We were also joined by a very handsome and distinguished looking man with receding hairline and rather well placed wrinkles.
"I ACT" he said "I act; and I direct"
This man (Rudolf Indigo) was a mere boy the last time I saw him. At the time he was gay and a "luvvy" of the first water. He was now just as camp but he had learned to turn it on and off as required. Now he was in full "Luvvy" mode. He had a part in a film in Budapest, he was directing his own work, he had played the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. His hands flew around like birds looking for escape as he spoke and his voice became so mellifluous that he was nearly singing rather than speaking.
Suitably fed and slightly inebriated with love and wine we all went upstairs to dance. In the dance area there was a woman dressed in harlot red and wearing a wedding veil.
"Oh my God" she screamed at me over the din as I passed. "Would you mind if my friends took a picture of you kissing me"
This was not my previous bride, but I was very happy to oblige. Flash! Bang! Wallop!
I started to dance with Samantha who has recently rediscovered the fun of freedom and sex because she has separated from her husband. She squirmed and swivelled in my arms as we danced and I remembered how much fun it was to be alive and ruddy.
Samantha is an amazing woman who does not know how witty and funny (and now sexy) she is. She really could be on the radio and just talk. She would have an instant fan base of middle-aged women in search of someone to speak to them, and for them. She is brilliant.
I was interrupted by the woman with a veil again. This time she had with her an older woman
"My mum" she shouted at me. "I know it's cheeky but she wants you to kiss her as well" So I did. Flash! Bang! Wallop!
I walked the girls back to their B&B. Samantha (chattering about sex), Phillipa (Who had ensnared my heart 1976 by wearing a rather sheer red leotard) and Paris(Cackling like a swan) zigzagged ahead.
Tamsin (whom I had rejected in ignorance and fear all those years ago) became a little sad, and I hugged her and told her again that I was privileged that she had offered me so much affection, and that she should not worry, because despite the passage of time and all the junk it drags with it we were still friends and if anything I liked her more now than then.
The next day I got up - no maggot surprises and suited myself up, got on my bike and made my way back home. That evening my son Josh said we should watch a film called "Big Fish" which I had never heard of.
At first I kept falling asleep because I was tired and I had drunk some beer.
But the film started to get to me. It was about a man - a father who made up incredible stories for his kids, but as they grew up he kept on making up stories and his son felt that his Dad should stop "lying" and start saying what was really inside him. H wanted know his father before he died. The father lay there in his hospital bed, life draining from him and he told his son that all the stories and all the incredible people he had invented were not lies. They were actually him.
And he looked like My dad, and he sounded like me. And he died. And his son took his body and waded out into a lake and lowered him into the water, and his father became this huge fish and swam away into the deep water never to be seen again.
I was weeping like an open wound and went to bed wishing for my Dad, and for my Tamsin and Josh and Gabriel, and for myself, and for the other Tamsin, and Samantha, and Paris and Phillipa, and Gordon. and Rudolf Indigo, and for Jenson and his wife Tilly, and for the ladies who were getting married and for their Mums. In fact I wept into my pillow for the imminent and inevitable death of every person on this planet.
