Before I even begin, this is more an appeal to myself than anyone. I just don’t realise it yet.
Everyone wonders at some stage where they all go? All the thousands of images that get taken by photographers on and off the clock. No exaggeration, I shoot loads. I don’t use a digital chip and a fast shutter by accident, I exploit every advantage it gives me in my work. But with photography, as many other things, when there is a give there is also a take. Technology always feels inverse. What we gain in facility and convenience, we compromise in love. I have been no different.
I am not about to go prosaic on shooting film. I’m not even really lamenting. I am saying that I take an awful lot of images. They wind their way into the cryptic bowels of a hard driveand the odds of ever encountering them again stretch the longer I take more photos. But when the planets align, and I’m down for a trawl, it does literally feel like a blue moon. I find some of the most wonderful things. Things I am certain have just manifested through digital stagnation, like pixel metamorphosis. Images I can hardly remember taking let alone claim authorship of. Images to and from shoots. Waiting on trains. Testing my equipment. Getting my bag in order. Literally from just sitting on my lap, accidentally or otherwise, the motive long forgotten. Images that stand alone, that just amaze me in their perennial obscurity.
The confrontation at the end of all this is the realisation that I have neglected my camera and compromised the love. Stills of The-Every-Day. Tracing the line back, I started as any other photographer, by using their instincts and raw materials by taking pictures of what was around them. Slowly what was once my full outlet of photography got overgrown with commercial schedules and briefs. No complaints there, but to my right hand side there sits a bag with a camera in it. A device that can make crisp sense of shapes and colours gestures that bypass our eyes. It is these images that keep me alive. I can gradually close the bag as I drift into more a commercial approach. But if I do, I miss all of this…
I was invited along to join in and photograph the fray of the GFF last week. If ever the balance of culture and fun was to be tipped, this was it. Heavily in favour of fun though!
It is easy to forget that at the core of arts and culture events, swathed in glamour and panache, cinema does everything its own way. Its recipe is artistic celebration at its most social. Less the stiffness of the gallery launch and less operatic than the stage. If there is one thing the blockbuster approach brings, it is a damn fine jolly. What more can you ask from a business of entertainment? Comically up-itself perhaps, but it is the the loosest, most inclusive form of enjoyment out there that you can share with 100 strangers at a time. And at the moment (in my jazz age reverie at least) I can happily forgive its mass production for the charm and messiness and swagger of the red carpet. Film can take itself very seriously but the cinema is still a party.
Which is exactly what was put before my eyes in Glasgow. An already incredibly broad and adventurous programme of screenings was supported by an ensemble of cinema events in creative spaces full of colourful people. A total mix. Isn’t that what festivals are all about? That and fun.
The full festival galleries are avilable to look at here. Also, major credit to Stuart and Ingrid for their amazing work on the other events.
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| Sheree Folkson and Sally Philips of The Decoy Bride |
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| Murray Grigor, producer of the documentary Big Banana Feet, which covers Billy Conolly’s 1976 Irish tour. |
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| Step into the Blytheswood! |
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| Tom , son of writer Sally Phillips gets his front row seat for The Decoy Bride |
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| Gala Champagne |
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| Festival Co-director Allson Gardner during a tech for a Q & A |
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| Murray Grigor introduces Big Banana Feet to a sold out Glasgow Festival Theatre |
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| Queues rock the block on the opening gala of the GFF |
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| The audience is listening – the premiere of My Sister’s Sister opens the first night of the GFF |
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| Director Lynn Shelton during her Q & A for My Sister’s Sister |
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| Wooden box woo the crowd at eh GFF gala |
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| Guests at the Gala |
Say hello to the band! Corinne on cowbell and The Barman, on the wine.
I had the great pleasure of shooting Greg Hemphill for the pre-production poster of the National Theatre of Scotland‘s new show that launched in Aberdeen on Tuesday. I am biding my time and praying to my diary for the chance to get my tickets for its visit to Glasgow.
The show is a heart-felt adaptation of the cult film starring Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward. If our portrait shoot is anything to go on, then the production looks set to be a total howl. I was asked to coax the Lord Summerisle from Greg so the designers could later dress and drop in front of a towering wicker inferno. Needless to say there was little coaxing needed.
It has been great to see the poster spread out across the local and national media. It has made the headlines a couple of times! I keep bumping into it inadvertently when I turn the pages of magazines and the papers. The company are broadcasting their production trials and tribulations from the NTS blog and in some top notch videos.
Book your appointment!
Lame pun. Sorry.
Hair by Lesley
Make-up by Ola
Assisting and tunes by Grace
Come back with me. Come back to the summer. To London.
An alien metropolis, heavy with feet. Sawdust, perfume, cooking, suncream, something citrus, the incense of youth is on the air. The breeze is humming with it. Like mitosis, a slow frenzy multiplies out from corners of unremarkable groves and lanes. Concrete trembles with the heat and deep sutures open into the grey belly of the city as its metamorphosis unfolds. Beneath flat steel and and geometric structure, colour is starting to show. For all its year long busy sins, a vibe is in the breeze, pulsating like a bass. The hot glow of the sun spreads a message as thick as treacle over towers and glass roofs: Summer.
London in full effect. The mouths of traders, slouchers, punters, tourists. A din of every sound you could never imagine mixed into a dizzying blend of colour. Mismatching socks, 2 day stubble, high-vis vests, sleeveless shirts, bronzing skin, hula-hoops, cracked skate decks, barefoot, old denim, a small dog, gossamer dresses, cups of cold juices. Limbs arranging and rearranging into infinite patterns of people. All the dull lines are warped in the heat, uniforms away. Top buttons are wide, neck ties forgotten. Cleaners stripped to the waist. Now a decorated push bike, now a grown man on a foot scooter, everyone making friends with everyone else’s dog. Great backdrops of mellow Embankment and a cacophonous Shoreditch. Infinite visual tricks, nothing sits still, not one ordinary thing is untouched by the glow.
And I can’t get enough. My eyes are trying to burn it all to memory on a sheet of colour negative film. And Behold! How foreign does it seem from our winter hive, like a land forgotten? A time machine from the photolab this week. How much I love my film, I cannot even begin. For the disorderly chaos of these images, they simply hold all the answers for me. Thinking of summer, with chin in and collar up I can only anticipate what lies in store in another 6 months.
Continuing our winter round-up, here is a selection of some live music i have been shooting between here and Glasgow for the Skinny the last few months.
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| Gruff Rhys @ The Bongo Club |
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| Muscles of Joy @ Orán Mór |
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| Gillian Welsh @ Clyde Auditorium |
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| The Dirty Dozen with Clean George IV and Riley from Aberfeldy |
In one long overdue sweep of the hand, here comes a round-up like never before. Over the next few weeks i have a deep reservoir of work to excavate from the last few months. Live music, theatre, pop-up events, some celebration and the man in the street. The countdown is on to plaster up the blog before the new year arrives and with it that elusive “blank slate.” And i don’t want to be the one sitting on mountains of unsung footage while everyone else is off playing in the lush glens of paradise this new year now, do i?
To kick off the deluge of imagery is some of the rehearsal coverage from the the recent NTS production Truant. That December is rolling in, full of glowing fanfare and frosty promise and, for many, it inevitably ends as the year began, at home with family. Truant shines a cold light on youth and adolescence as much as it does on the family unit. Depicting the broken home from every class across the full spectrum of hurt and negligence, it hits our idea of truancy and family from every angle. It is an emotional confrontation that beautifully balances terse and very human dialogue with daydream sequences of abstract movement.
I was very happy to be able to be part of Truant’s development. It is always exciting to see a performance slowly tighten up over rehearsals until it uncoils itself in the theatre. It has finished its tour in the theatres and community centres of Glasgow but hopefully this is not the end of the road.
This month’s frame holds a still from a a tech of 27. The show is a National Theatre of Scotland production that ran at the Lyceum Theatre this month. Starring Maureen Beattie as Sister Ursula, an old story of faith and virtue in a closed orthodoxy, is clashed against the contemporary threat of the bitter, sprawling pharmaceutical economy.
However, none of this is in my image. It tells of a dilemma. It as much depicts someone on the margins of dark thoughts as it does directly project a darkness of its own in its composition. A bleak black backdrop, all detail is swept away and the image we remain with is a very sparse and morbid scene of contemplation. Over all the other images of our shoot, with the spectacular set and subtle expression of the actors, this stands out almost as a single image summary of Ursula’s pervading doubt.
Since this was shot in a tech rehearsal (for the lights and stage) rather than a performance, I was lucky to see this in a moment where the actors were waiting for their cues. It wasn’t scripted or rehearsed, it was altogether unintended.
Perhaps the moral of this month is that the image that screams loudest does not always have the best story.
At the moment the posts aren’t exactly ten a penny. It has been all festival over here for the last two months (you may have noticed) and what a joy it has been to be able to lift up the carpet and show the insides and my own take on it. And the feedback….i won’t even begin. Just the experience of doing the EIF was life changing enough, i can barely take into account the great ripples in motion for my life in the aftermath. It makes me have to close my eyes.
I have not really stepped aside and laid down my thoughts since the festival ended. What actually happened was a a very abrupt stop. One minute i was taking pictures hell for leather, the next i was not. All was still in the air but my ears were ringing. And on cue the wind whips up and winter settles in again and Edinburgh tries to remember what it did before the commotion and puts the good times to the back of its mind. That brief, eerie silence before the pace is picked back up. What to do when you cannot keep pace with the machine. I’m still dwelling on the good times. Four years of them.
You can’t talk about memory without talking about time, and sitting on the edge on my bed i feel let down by both. To try and crystallise the last four years of us together in my head: an impossibility. You only draw attention to the great void of forgetting. And it is only when something has changed for good that you fear the obscuring of all the luscious moments that became it in memory. You would desperately discard all the facts and insight and sophistication, all those numbers and dates in perpetual oblivion, to feel the old weight and hear the familiar notes. All that bloated rumination for a seconds glimpse of a humdrum scene. To surrender all the world’s knowledge for just the vapour of a scent. Of her.
Our selective memory is not without mercy, even if it is without control. Tiny fragments connect. In the smell of rain, or burning toast, or a warm quilt, or seeing old handwriting, or the sun on your neck: orbs of the past that unlock the treasure chest. Like a snippet of conversation, a glimpse into the past. Without warning, you are elsewhere in a younger body. Back at the start, back to the anchor. Hand in hand in the sunshine, carelessness on the air, with nowhere to go.
Four years under the microscope. I can only shake my head at the scale of it. Like yesterday and forever at the same time. These are the things in the foreground when change is on the air. Beyond the lists and inventories. When your boxes are packed and groaning, you sweep your old floorboards and switch off the lights for the last time, before heading out into the dark. You panic about the nuts and bolts falling off on the move, the great material convoy to a new pasture. A situation as old as the world. The ensuing grapple with memory as it gradually withdraws the old scenes that buoy me on. Only to realise that it is doing a packing of its own. Saving the most precious and private things, encrypting them beyond retrieval, for when they are needed.
For now. For our old flat together. Where my ears are still ringing.
Huge apologies all. I haven’t forgotten about our corner of the web over here, it is long in need of a dusting though.
Like all troughs, there is a huge crest of activity coming this way. Stay tuned for info and some footage on the Edinburgh International Festival Photography exhibition, and the launch date this month. Not just that, there is a fully fledged, upholstered website on the way to soothe your eyes (and ruin my brain). An unearthing of neverbeforeseen personal as well as commercial work. It has been an exciting month and there are some very cool projects emerging but there is also a proportion of personal woe that, no doubt, shall all be shared in due course.
Anyone living down in Leith, all i will say is look out. Its time to batten down the hatches.
