Yesterday I had the rare and great honour of photographing legendary Glaswegian photographer Harry Benson. He spoke to a group at Waverly Gate about his life with a camera and his work at large, covering stories for magazines and media. A picture adorned the front page of his presentation: a floor spread with a copy of all of the covers from his editorial commissions. A snapshot of a lifetime given over to one craft.
It is easy to overlook the inspiration and humility that someone at the far side of their career can offer to someone at the start. Harry spoke to photographers, lecturers and students alike. A message – to have ideas and stick with it. Simple to the point of profound. His is a story with all the chapters in place, a sheltering sentiment as we all begin to write our own.
The landscape inverted. Transformed from a crushing cold into brazen sunshine, as if under a passing eclipse. The rare aromas and opal light once more and the grey pavement itself breathes a hot electricity that crackles under the footfall of the city’s carefree denizens. The world becomes a golden inebriant, you could drink it. The drowning darkness of winter dissipates like a glacial figment. Yet the chasm of time inbetween remains as shrouded and bridgeless as ever. Where does the time go?
Like a series of small conspiracies. Smoke and misdirection fill the unwatched minutes, until all of a sudden, three months rush you at once. From Christmas to there, a wedding, here, a birthday. April or February? Like a serial amnesiac I plunder my Diary for clues of previous weeks’ activity. Reiterating hellos to people seen minutes before, and confusing the same for long unseen acquaintances, like some preoccupied impresario. Such a bumbling acceleration through time, I may as well be operated by remote control. Six months passed and the sum of my year feels like a shapeless dust blowing about in the new sun.
This enigma of time, not half unique to me, gives us the slip easier as years tick up. In my amnesiac haze though, I carry a golden thread that I can always follow back to the start, gently notched with unwasted moments. An artless chronicle that traces the months as they roll away, a script of concrete memories. This thread is my friends, and through them I am looped back on myself and fastened to the earth. Through them, time doesn’t really pass at all.
In all the privileged chaos of just being alive, I prize the brief, offhand encounters the highest. Through the forgotten hieroglyphics of The Diary, reminders of minute expeditions and crash rendezvous recall themselves. An early morning drop-in or a synchronised stroll the same way. A bump in the street and a coffee shelter from a soaking. A destinationless night stroll, a lemonade on some remote lamp-lit bench. That these revolve largely around beverages, I won’t even begin to account for the great syllabus of repartee that springs from the pub. At any hour, a companion is at hand. A late heartfelt jar, slowly emptying, or a great tide of glassware, washed back by the light of impending day. Small moments that defy remembering, imprint themselves deep.
Amid the unending litany of impulsions and half-plans, we get there in the end. For us, the young, with more appetite than stomach, too enthusiastic for our own busy hives, there is more satisfaction in the forgotten day-by-day than we allow ourselves. Gulping down opportunity and trajectory and new experiences in great draughts, we scarcely acknowledge the pleasant sips of what we already have. Today I am notching a mark on the right now, before I escape it again. Not behind or ahead for this blog post, I have too much to be thankful for today.
And that thanks is for my friends, that have kept pace for the last brilliant six months of 2013.
Here we go then. As of this week, there is enough Festival mayhem on the horizon to put anyone’s blood pressure through the roof and have an escape plan hatched for August. I’m not there quite just yet thankfully. Instead I still have some work to show off from festivals been.
The engaging Imaginate Festival, which ran last month, boasted a raft of theatre and performance aimed at children, but largely enjoyed by grown-ups as ever. I was asked by Curious Seed to work on Chalk About, an interactive dance performance that shed layers on issues of identity and growing up (and pizza). Me, Chris and Leandro worked on a poster together early in the year with only chalk and cloth at our disposal. Proper Arts & Crafts!
I joined them again months later after the show had taken shape and toured Europe to shoot the production in Edinburgh. It always amazes me how organic shows are. Like other art forms, they are never finished. Especially so when your raw materials are chalk and children, it is always nice to be part of something unrepeatable.
This weekend ushers in the end of The Arches Behavior Festival for 2013. A heady five weeks of completely new work for the stage from Scottish and international artists. Eclectic and contemporary as only the Arches can, even the term “stage” is only applied loosely. This year saw a new creative partnership come to fruition between the Arches and NTS, which I am very indebted to have been involved in from early on.
The project gave five rising Scottish devisers an opportunity to research, incubate and perform new work at the festival. Each with their own developing trademarks and disciplines, some of them out and out rogues, but all of them auteurs of their craft. Having had the chance to meet them together for the school portrait lineup for a feature in The List, I was brimming to shoot all of their performances individually over the course of the month.
First was Gary McNair’s brilliantly referential investigation into stand-up comedy: Donald Robertson is not a Comedian.
Kieran Hurley explored notions of community and ideals of Scottishness in, effectively, a living room jamboree. Intimate and foot tapping: Rantin
Claire Cunningham’s ongoing curiosity in the body brought her to and back from Cambodia to begin a work meditating on the effects of landmines. A framework of disability through which the indiscriminate excess of war can be viewed from a humble perspective: Pink Mist
Finally, Rob Drummond’s centenary revisiting of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, through a screen of contemporary dance and music as well as recent societal dysfunctions. Leaving the outcome in the hands of the audience: The Riots of Spring
There have been heaps of great writing documenting the Festival, but for a succinct in house perspective check out Rosie’s blog.
Sunday is classically the day for putting your feet up and doing nothing. It’s not often you find an offer good enough to have you on your feet doing everything. Sunday at Edinburgh’s Electric Circus saw a raft of great music dominate the entire day from the early afternoon playing live into the early morning.
Having some great work up our sleeves from an earlier shoot with Discopolis, this was my first chance to see the guys play. With Dems and Dutch Uncles also on the roster, it was really a no brainer where my Sunday was going. Easy knowing it was a bank holiday…
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The Royal Lyceum announced their productions for the year to come this Tuesday. With new writing from Ian Rankin. David Haig and Tim Barrow, collaborating with Artistic Director Mark Thomson, a varied and exciting season lies ahead
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| Author Ian Rankin discusses Dark Road |
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| Writer and Director Tim Barrow on his writing of Union |
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| Artistic Director Mark Thomson introduces the season |
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| Writer David Haig discusses his upcoming premiere of Pressure |
The house lights have come up on the Traverse Theatre’s first full production of 2013, which finished a sensational run last weekend. But I couldn’t be happier its over.
Quiz Show is a rare double-edge sword for a photographer. At one end, it is decidedly visually brilliant. It abounds in colour, fun and dynamism that kept me curious and on my toes. A sumptuously gaudy set with screens, monitors and teleprompters of a dated TV studio that provided additional layers of perspective to play with. The show has a careful veneer that conceals a heavy hitting commentary which, as it gradually lifts away, made me readjust my approach. The action is frantic and the images pay it full justice.
But therein is the double edge. The play undergoes such a transformation and such unexpected action emerges, that to even hint at the violence and the darkness contained would ruin the reveal for the audiences over the run. Having seen the very first performance of the show, I wouldn’t trade any knowledge of the plot for the shocks in store. So I have sat on these beautiful photos for the last 3 weeks! When you produce something you love, its hard not to shout about it.
From the chaos of March and the illness of April (changing seasons after all), I haven’t been able to man the blog and have had to let it rust by the way side. Well no longer, I have much to talk about.
What better to start with than the most recent and most interesting. Last week, before succumbing totally to a bout of tonsillitis, I attended an event organised by ASCUS, as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. They hosted an open workshop where members of the public were presented with a collated version of a published scientific paper and had to in turn interpret the academic rhetoric into a poem.
Teamwork! And interestingly, the room was split accidentally into scientists and artists who banded together. The results were curiously different. Myself, Mark and Graham concocted our own method to blindly extract individual words from the prose. Through the legendary power of the post-it, we curated our words into a work that obeyed rules of poetry but also lovingly summarised the paper at hand, and the nature of academic articles in general.
High Five! It was a very fun way to apply our disciplines to something unfamiliar. Our team’s word choice was so random and so repetitive that we would have been delighted to contrive anything at all, let alone our interesting two stanzas that are posted below.
Tara is a writer, and as I have learned, many other things. The learning is at the very beginning though, and it is a two way exchange. Tara has been selected by the Traverse Theatre, off the strength of her script Tourists, to be one of their 50 writers for their 50th Year.
This is a great programme, both in scale and in promise. And like all great things, it needs to be properly documented. Enter the foresight of the staff at Writer Pictures, who have cleverly elected 50 photographers with which to partner each writer. A personal chronicler for a time that is pivotal in their career. Tara is my writer and last weekend, we met for the first time.
A difficult balance to strike, when two people first meet. Thankfully for us, we both recognise a blank canvas and the opportunity to create something. And thankfully for us, we met for a meal in The Shore, where no wrong can be done! Talking without a script, about flats, about painting, about forgetting, big changes,sisters and brothers, style, about Ireland, a very rounded image of Tara emerged as a writer, worker, person. Someone unique for a unique project. Creating can be a solitary process, and I am very much looking forward to sharing it with someone not only with a different perspective, but a separate medium to express it.
I will produce a portrait of Tara over the course of this partnership for exhibition in the Traverse during August.
All too aware that this March is turning into this April all too quickly, I had better step up my pace and keep the world up to date with my whereabouts. 2013, slow down will ya?
To coincide with the release of Steve Mason’s Monkey Minds in the Devils Time, The Skinny asked me to shoot him for this month’s cover. I heard the words “protest” and “somewhere like kind of a wasteland”, and my head skipped a few chapters and went straight to “smokebombs!” We took a walk to a lesser-known spot overlooking Leith Walk and stirred up a storm of smoke and flashes. In hindsight, only in hardy Leith could this go unacknowledged.
