Today is Whitsun so what better way to celebrate than Philip Larkin’s beautiful poem, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.
In the poem Philip Larkin describes his stopping-train journey through East Yorkshire from Paragon Station, Kingston upon Hull to Kings Cross, London on a hot and humid Whitsun Saturday afternoon in 1955. Larkin through his simple, yet elegant style divulges the details of a commonplace journey into a wonderful poem.
You can hear an audio clip of him reading the poem here.
In 1981, more than a quarter of a century after writing ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Larkin recalls the genius of his poem-
“I caught a very slow train that stopped at every station and I hadn’t realised that, of course, this was the train that all the wedding couples would get on and go to London for their honeymoon: it was an eye-opener to me. Every part was different but the same somehow. They all looked different but they were all doing the same things and sort of feeling the same things. I suppose the train stopped at about four, five, six stations between Hull and London and there was a sense of gathering emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed aboard. And finally between Peterborough and London when you hurtle on, you felt the whole thing was being aimed like a bullet – at the heart of things, you know. All this fresh, open life. Incredible experience. I’ve never forgotten it.”
Posted in INSPIRATION | Comments Off on PHILIP LARKIN, THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS
I recently visited the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, which opened on April 4th after relocating to a wonderful new building designed by Rick Mather Architects, having outgrown their original building. It’s well worth a visit. In the main space they’re currently exhibiting work by Ivan Navarro – sinister anthropomorphic neon relief sculptures, based on the Olympic pictograms designed by Otl Aicher in 1972.
The gallery first opened in 1923 and curator Arthur Reeves Fowkes was appointed to oversee the expansion of the collection. Under his leadership, a ‘Pictures of Sussex’ policy was developed. The Corporation of Eastbourne funded the acquisition of paintings of the local landscape, ‘in order to provide the visitor with a complete review of this beautiful country.’ An unrivalled collection of paintings, drawings and watercolours was gradually accumulated. The first floor of the new gallery is devoted to pieces from this permanent collection. It includes work by the renowned English painter Eric Ravilious (father of James Ravilious, the photographer whose work I discussed on the blog here).
Ravilious studied at Eastbourne School of Art, and at the Royal College of Art, He began his working life as a muralist, first coming to notice as an artist in 1924. He went on to become one of the best-known artists of the 1930s including working as an Official War Artist during the Second World War. He was killed on active service.
A retrospective of his work called Imagined Realities at the Imperial War Museum in 2003, examined Ravilious’s contribution to British cultural life between the Wars and during the first years of the Second World War. As John Russell Taylor wrote in The Times, “Ravilious shines out for his distinctive vision, at once suspicious of and enthralled by the romantic spectacle associated with war. And curiously, this romantic duality proves to be right at the heart of a traditional, non-chauvinistic sort of Englishness. Englishness is, for once, the word….he was English to his deepest roots, and was turned on as an artist exclusively by the English scene, the sweep of English history, the little eccentric details of English life.”
Some of Ravilious’s most deeply imagined Spirit-of-England work is connected with the ancient chalk figures inscribed on southern hills, such as The Wilmington Giant and The Westbury Horse.
“In his watercolours, he observed and recorded the relationship between the modern world and the English landscape in a style that was both formal and yet deeply felt. His work as a designer helped to define traditions of English culture of the period.”
There is an extenstive discussion of Ravilious work on the Imperial War Museum website here.
Prints of Ravilious’ images can be obtained from The Kemp Town Bookshop, Brighton, Tel: 01273-682110.
Posted in MISCELLANEOUS | Comments Off on ERIC RAVILIOUS
As I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog, this is an exciting time for photographers documenting England (and long overdue). One photographer mid-way through a journey around the country is John Angerson, whose pictures I posted up on an earlier blog post here. I emailed Angerson a few questions about his project which he’s been kind enough to answer below.
Why have you chosen to follow in the footsteps of JB Priestley? What is it about his book that you associate with, instead for example, with H.V.Morton’s ‘In Search of England’ or George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier?
I first read ‘English Journey’ in 1990 and within the first couple of pages I was hooked. I greatly enjoy Priestley’s writing style and as I spent a large portion of my photographic career living and working in his hometown; Bradford, Yorkshire, I feel an affinity with his views and sentiment on England. Priestley was unique in combining a warm humanity with searing social insight. His writings on the people and places he encountered give us perhaps the most vivid and enduring impression of the country at this pivotal period; and the England Priestley discovered in 1933 is both alien and strangely familiar. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the book and it seemed to me to be the right time to undertake a project that references this signifcant literature.
Will you be re-visiting the places Priestley visited? Are you making a continuous journey around England? How are you traveling? (Priestley seemed to take all manner of transportation).
I am following the trail Priestley took in 1933 and have researched each geographical location he covered in his book. I have spread the project over the last year choosing to visit two to three locations in each trip. I have been using the same modes of transport as he did: a combination of train, motorcar and coach. How would you describe the photographic approach to your work? I notice from your initial photographs that you are bringing together landscapes, portraiture and interiors.
For this project my approach is to produce quiet, contemplative images of England in its urban and rural landscape and its inhabitants – images that will sit comfortably alongside Priestley’s text.
How important an element to the project is portraiture? (In Priestley’s view, rooted in nineteenth-century radicalism, it is ‘the people’ who are the real nation). And how do you decide who you will photograph- random people you come across or do you have a mental list of types of people you’re looking for?
I have been taking photographs in each location in response to what and who I encounter now and what Priestley wrote about in his book then. I am aiming to capture the essence of an English Journey rather than create a modern literal version. I’ve always tried to use an opportunistic approach when shooting my projects. I have spent a great deal of time trying to research and locate contemporary people and places that Priestley would have been interested in talking to and seeing if he were experiencing England in 2009. This has ranged from office workers, Big Brother contestants and mothers of fallen soldiers from the Iraq war. As with many of my other long term projects I am very interested and drawn towards inter-dependent groups within communities. I believe that Priestley’s English Journey overwhelmingly articulated the need for England to remove itself of illusions and that people must depend upon each other and work as individuals towards a common purpose.
There are interesting parallels with Preistley’s work which was produced during an economic slump, and his work was overtly political, appealing for democratic socialist change. You are also producing your series during quite a serious economic downturn, do you considered this important/relevant? Will their be a political stance to your series?
I started this project before the current economic slump, and I have noticed that as I have travelled, more of the images have had an element of the recession; be it subtle or the main image component. It has been said that Priestley’s writing helped shape Beveridge’s 1942 report and the great reforming Labour government of 1945. After the publication of English Journey in 1934 many leading figures in Mass Observation and the documentary movement were influenced by the book and ventured into the English industrial heartlands to record for themselves this included – Ellen Wilkinson, James Hanley and most notably George Orwell in The Road to Wigan pier two years after English Journey in 1937.
Why did you decide to make a transition to 5×4 (and colour) after your last book, ‘Love, Power and Sacrifice’?
Lover Power and Sacrifice was shot over 20 years on a 35mm. For English Journey I felt a change of approach would challenge me as a photographer. Due to it’s cumbersome size and single-shot nature the 5×4 camera forces the user to think harder about subject and composition; helping me to spend more time thinking and creating quiet contemplative photographs. As the images are a modern take on the English Journey book it seemed natural to shoot colour film.
As I’m sure you’re aware, there is a rich history of British photographers documenting their homeland. Whose work in this tradition do you most admire and why?
I greatly admire the work of British photographer Bill Brandt. There is a superb quote by Photographer, Bill Jay, which really sums up his work:
“Bill Brandt was a quiet, withdrawn, priest-like character with the taut skin and bony, elegant features of an aristocratic aesthete. He spoke sparsely and in little more than a whisper. He believed that the camera was a medium through which he received messages from another world. I am just beginning to understand what he meant. Brandt was other-worldly in another sense. Aloof from trends and movements in his own medium, he seemed to know nothing and no one in contemporary photography. He quietly continued his experiments, always thrusting ahead into new directions, confounding expectations and confusing his critics.”
Are you worried about your photographs being derivative of previous photographic studies of England?
Photographs are subjective – documentary photography can only ever be about the photographer’s perceptions of place, time and the people they encounter. As Priestley said, this will be “What one man saw and heard and felt on an English Journey.”
How are you funding the project?
I have been awarded a bursary from the Arts Council England for the project.
What do you see as the finished product?
A traveling exhibition with an accompanying book in 2010
Posted in OTHER STUDIES | Comments Off on JOHN ANGERSON INTERVIEW
I recently received the first proofs from the printers in Italy (we’ll be printing the book at EBS in Verona) and they’re looking great. It’s wonderful to get a glimpse of what the photographs are going to look like on the printed page, especially at this scale – the book’s going to be more of an ‘album’ than Motherland, sized at 36x29cm.
Checking reproduction quality of the book prints (left) with my colour match prints (right)-
The printing presses have now been booked for the end of June so deadlines are looming to finish the text and produce the CMYK scans and remaining match prints.
Accordingly, I spent the past week holed up in the darkroom of the colour printer, Rob Sara, tucked away in a Lakeland stone building near Burton-in-Kendal. Rob is a master printer, and I don’t say that lightly. He ran Rapid Eye’s printing service in Shoreditch for years, before making the jump and starting out on his own, opening the Studio One Darkroom in the beautiful surroundings of the southern Lake District. He’s produced prints for the likes of Hannah Starkey, Stephen Gill, Johnathon de Villiers and Cedric Buchet that have been exhibited in public and private collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern and Rencontre d`Arles
Having exclusively produced digital C-type prints for the past few years, I decided this time around, I wanted to get a set of traditional C-type hand prints made for the We English book production.
It was a wonderful experience working alongside Rob, who was able to get the most out of each negative-
And produce some luminous prints-
However, the week left me totally exhausted!
It’s now back to Brighton to do the CMYK conversions and finish the text. More of that later.
Posted in POST PRODUCTION | Comments Off on PRODUCTION UPDATE
“Once upon a time I lived in a double-decker bus, reg. JRR 404, better known as the Free Photographic Omnibus. She was my home, my travelling darkroom and gallery” writes Daniel Meadows on his Photobus website.
“People ask: “Where are you from?” and I have to tell them that really I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m English. And this story is about the England I come from.
We were an unlikely couple; she with her crash gear box and temperamental ways, me with my bushy hair and homemade flares. But we got along okay and, during 1973 and ’74, we travelled about making a national portrait of the English. We covered 10,000 miles shooting pictures and giving them away. The bus’s glory days, taking holiday-makers on seaside runs to Skegness and Mablethorpe, were in the 1950s but, by the time I got to know her, she was 25 years old and (it has to be said) past her best. By comparison I — fresh out of art school and all of four years her junior — was just a whipper-snapper.”
Photographer and university lecturer Daniel Meadows is recognised as one of the prime movers in the new documentary photography movement of 1970s Britain and is best known of his tour around England in the Free Photographic Omnibus (1973-74).
In 1973 – just out of Art School – Meadows bought a double-decker bus and spent 14 months travelling through English towns. When he pulled up, he took free portraits of people who came to his bus which was fitted out as a mini-studio. In the course of a 14-month journey, he offered free portrait sessions in 22 different towns, developing the black and white prints in a darkroom he had contrived inside the bus, in which he also lived. He photographed a total of 958 people, alone or in groups, the majority of whom remained anonymous and collected their free portraits the following day.
The result was a series of photographs he called ‘National Portraits’, a selection of which you can see here-
You can view a slideshow with more images from the series on Meadows’ website here.
In 1999Â Meadows decided to ‘go back’ and re-photograph some of his original ‘subjects’. He ‘found’ them by putting original photographs in local papers. The two series of portraits (from 1974 and 1999) were then published alongside each other in a book called The Bus: The Free Photographic Omnibus 1973-2001 (The Harvill Press, London, 2001).
With the help of the local press in Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool and Southampton, he went in search of them. Many could not be found, others had died, but a number of people turned up to be re-photographed. The juxtaposition of their past and present selves makes for a unique pictorial history of the changing face of England (particularly the vagaries of fashion, and the ravages of time). Meadows interviews the sitters, ordinary people from varied walks of life, who talk candidly about their lives, their friends, their loves, their families and what they feel.
You can take multi-media tour on Meadows’ bus here.
I’ve just come across details of an intriguing new book published by Dewis Lewis called In A Very English Town. John Comino-James has photographed the streets, shops and shopkeepers in the centre of Thame, an historic market town some 45 miles from London. Comino-James studied his local town after being asked by a Cuban friend to show her life in his area. His series of panoramic photographs were taken between July 2007 – June 2008 and are laid out in the book in a sequence representing a meandering walk through the town.
£19.99
Hardback, 168 pages
110 duotone photographs
160mm x 295mm
Here are the publishers notes on the book-
“High Street, Buttermarket, Cornmarket, Pump Lane, North Street, Park Street, have such a deceptive familiarity to the English ear that they might be found in any English town. They are names that suggest a sense of continuity and tradition – something very English. Yet the reality is often not quite what it appears.
Portraits, texts and candid photographs which document everything from the last cattle market operating in the area, travelling showmen at one of the two annual fairs, and the weekly street market. The accompanying interviews reveal pride in the continuation of family businesses, as well as small enterprises both challenged by and benefiting from the increasing impact of the internet.
While the presence of supermarkets and services such as banks, travel agents and estate agents is acknowledged, in choosing subjects for portraits Comino-James was drawn to those shopkeepers whose aim might be summed up in the words of one of them: ‘To keep the character of Thame as a Market Town and not a Supermarket town’.”
You can see a slideshow of photographs on the Guardian website here.
Posted in OTHER STUDIES | Comments Off on IN A VERY ENGLISH TOWN
Lowe quotes the outgoing chairman of the awards (and director of VII photo agency), Stephen Mayes-
“…ccommentating that 90% of the pictures submitted were about 10% of the world, he questioned why most photojournalism investigates a very limited series of tropes in a very limited series of visual approaches, becoming a self replicating machine that churns of copies of itself in perpetual motion, which he described as a ‘feeling that photojournalism, rather than trying to reinvent itself its trying to copy itself ‘, and that the industry is in essence reactionary and unrealistic in its understanding of the changes in global media and society.  Too many photographers are ‘reflecting the media not as it is but as we wish it was’ and assuming that it is the world that must come to them, not they that must go to the world. Bemoaning the surfeit of stories about the ‘Dispossessed and powerless, the exotic and anywhere but home’ he encouraged photographers to ‘photograph what really, really intrigues you’.”
Posted in MISCELLANEOUS | Comments Off on ANYWHERE BUT HOME
One of the first photography books I was given as a teenager was Don McCullin’s autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour (Jonathan Cape, 1990). It was powerful reading and certainly made a huge impression on me at a time when I was just beginning to explore the medium for myself. After a career spanning 50 years McCullin documented every major conflict in his adult lifetime up until the Falklands war. During this period, he also continued to document the dramas, injustices and eccentricities of his own country – England. Work which was published a couple of years ago, Don McCullin In England (Jonathan Cape, 2007).
“So much of my war reporting had involved watching national identities take shape that I began to ask myself who I was. What were the English and what did they represent? What for that matter did I represent? ” (McCullin, 1990).
Finally, a major exhibition of the work has just opened at the National Media Museum and runs until the 27th September 2009.
It’s described as “a dark, often uncomfortable vision of a divided nation where the gulf between rich and poor remains as defined as ever. However, McCullin balances his anger at social injustice with great humanity, compassion, lyricism and occasional humour.”
The NMM have set up a pretty extensive website around the exhibition with video interviews and links to McCullin’s work. It’s certainly worth having a look at. In the meantime, here are a few of the pictures from the exhibition, alongside some quotes from McCullin (taken from the NMM website):
“I was just an amateur, feeling my way with no real knowledge of what I was doing. At the same time I had found a direction… In the next four years I started learning what photography was all about and gaining a broader picture of the world than I’d ever had in Finsbury Park, where it all began.” (Don McCullin,1994)
“I stopped wandering when I reached Bradford, where I found a microcosm of the dark satanic legacy that we had inherited from Britain’s industrial heyday … I was met everywhere by warm and courteous people … In Bradford I experienced a new freedom, wandering through the quiet dilapidated streets where, for the first time in years, I encountered a great deal of hospitality and the welcome absence of violence. I discovered here a city, a living city, and in so doing I rediscovered myself – not always a comfortable process.” (Don McCullin,1994)
“For six weeks in the winter of 1969 I appeared at dawn on the streets of Whitechapel in London’s East End … Communication was difficult at the best of times, for I was dealing with alcoholics and schizophrenics who were sometimes violent and dangerous … Stealing pictures of these people with a long lens was not my style. I wanted to be close to them, to feel their plight and to convey the emotion of contact with them. I wanted their trust and to become their voice.” (Don McCullin,1994)
“We are not as class conscious as we used to be but there is still that barrier there… It’s a tricky place this country, even though it’s changed during the years from Thatcher to Blair. But if you’re a photographer, you can exploit some of those unpleasant and tricky sides to it… It’s tricky this country but I like that because it’s a challenge.” (Don McCullin, 2009)
“I can’t describe how I feel when I’ve had a good day photographing people, having met and talked to them and had their co-operation. It’s as if somebody’s given me an enormous present; I go home as if I’ve got a full belly.” (Don McCullin, 1979)
“I’m probably the only person in England who’s anxious for the winter. As soon as the leaves of autumn start falling from the trees, I become reactivated, the opposite of a hibernating animal. I know that I’ve got four long months of darkness, wind and cold to exercise my masochism. The English landscape’s known for its Constable summers but I’m obsessed with photographing it in the dead of winter, at its hardest … I love the winter – not the climate, but the struggle, its abrasiveness, the nakedness of the landscape.” (Don McCullin, 1979)
Don McCullin reviews his career with John Tusa on BBC Radio 3 here
(August 2002).
Observer interview covering his career, with great detail on his early years here
(August 2005).
Posted in OTHER STUDIES | Comments Off on DON McCULLIN – IN ENGLAND
It’s 8pm and I’m currently sat in my office writing the final text for We English, while outside I can hear the Chanctonbury Ring Morris Men performing on the street. You may remember from my previous blog post, it was nearly a year to the day when Sarah, Jemima and I left Brighton on our grand tour of England in the Talbot Swift motorhome to the sound of the Chanctonbury boys singing us off!
Watch them perform one of their numbers –
Posted in EVENTS & PASTIMES | Comments Off on CHANCTONBURY RING MORRIS MEN
