BLOG # 5

I was once asked to write about . . . .Why I Take Photographs . . . and I guess the first response is

I take photographs because I always have!

I have been taking photographs now for maybe 65 years, so in many ways it’s simply a habit.

It’s also much of what I am, at least the way I see, and look at the world.

Garry Winogrand, photographer, said something like this when asked the same question.

to see what the photograph looks like

This is not for me, I kind of know what the photograph is going to look like. I have been taking them for so long that I have a good idea what the angle, the light, the colour, the exposure and the composition will indeed create. I am lucky in having a confidence in this. I generally know when I activate the shutter whether it will be a good photograph or at least something that I imagined.

No, I think I will have to take you back a little to help answer the question.

As a pre-teenager I had a little box camera, a Box Brownie, I’m not sure where it came from. With this camera I chose to create little farm scenes with models of animals and farm workers. I would set them up as if in the farmyard and shine a light on them to make them stand out and click away. Well one click anyway, surprisingly the Box Brownie used 120 film which was big and expensive, requiring a cautious shutter finger.

Snap. . .. . Me, the camera and the farm. . . .. Make-believe, wonderful.

12 snaps. . . the film now fully used, needing developing and then printing. My dad was knowledgeable, he had helped create a substantial darkroom at the local gas works social club. He showed me.

In darkness now, solid darkness. Carefully, holding only by the edges, the film is loaded into the spiral, delicately. Lid on, chemicals in. Agitate – twist – tap – agitate – twist– tap. The film is developing, the image arising.

Again in darkness a bright, crisp image, so alive and so immediate in the enlarger. A negative image but with many positives. It’s all there, the stuff of a photograph, back to front and only black and white but amazing to see the little farm.

Back to the chemicals. My eyes soon adjusted to the semi darkness and the brooding red light.. Intense and expectant. Counting one…..two….three. . . as the image appears in the gently rocking tray.

It’s born. The chemicals, the brew, an amniotic fluid.

Magic. Yes Magic.

The prints pegged out as if on Mum’s washing line. . . drip. . . dry. . . . drip. . . . dry.

Like the prints, I was hooked.

This is how I remember the picture. Of course it’s lost somewhere in all these years, so this is my contemporary reimagining

Later. . . years maybe. . . A Voitlander Single Lens Reflex Camera. German engineering, a magnificent, self-contained machine. Hard sharp and precise, my Dad’s?

An understanding of aperture, shutter speed, ASA, focal length; assimilated, an unconscious transfer of skill and knowledge, a father’s gift

Segway some years. . . . . .

A bunch of lads with views and dreams of a far-off other town. Expectations beyond the parochial. For now clothes and attitude would lift us and photographs of course. They will fill the void between here and there, for now at least.

Dedicated followers of fashion, but fashionable also in a photographic style, clearly influenced by record covers and rock bands posturing.

The camera a constant companion from now on.

What next, ? Jumping ahead, into the moving image. Initially primitive community video,
cumbersome and far from ergonomic but the images both exciting and important. Eventually the real stuff, actual celluloid running through exquisite film cameras. Film cameras, more complex and more romantic machines, capable of capturing action, movement and energy.

And what next is Film School. I was armed with the technical stuff but I had so much more to learn. Learn about lighting, editing, crew management, teamwork, budgets and schedules..But most of all, storytelling, joining shot to shot, a whole new world.

And so . .

A Cinematographer for 30 years. 30 years of looking through a viewfinder.The world in a frame, the world in an image, captured, reproduced and watched.

And now, after that . . . a return to photography, pure and simple

The technical knowledge and concerns of the Cinematographer and the Stills Photographer drift in the same atmosphere. A concern about film stock, exposure, the nature of light, composition, the worry about the print, are all common ground. But more important, is the strange and wonderful quality to tell stories. The narrative, the plot, the tale, what is going on, gets most of my attention. A film is nothing without a good story, and that thought informs me every time I now press the still camera shutter and take the photograph, a story told or suggested, hinted at.

This is why I take photographs.

This is why I make photographs . . . .