Stem

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 Stem on the ground

 

 

 A witch's hand 

lay on the ground

 

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Branch

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Branch

This was taken over a month ago and is one of the photos that I'd describe as "modest photography". 

That's a term I've invented for a photography that draws attention to slight phenomena or humble objects, depicted in an undramatiising way. It's deliberately unimpressive.

Thus, I finds myself in a contradictory position: I have to decide which unimpressive photo is most impressive. 

That's a paradox I can live with because the possibilities of modest photography are endless. It opens one up to a totally different understanding of the art.  Liberated from the obligation to seek evermore transcendental or memorable imagery one is free to find value in the commonplace, the overlooked. 

I shall next explore this further with photos of little grey stones, small piles of sand, scraps of litter or small fallen leaves.

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Tongue

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Tongue

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Wooden wing

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Wing, side a

Wing, side b

 

A wooden wing.

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Ground, Campeche

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Ground, roots

Nail

Centipede cask

Wire

Twig

Shell, stalk, stones

Ground, Campeche

These are "gothic" in the sense that they are like clues- concentrated and significant and related to mortality. They relate to previous series of photos such as Witchy, which is an open-ended series concerned mainly with forests.

But if they are clues, then they are clues to what? Something that happened, not long ago. Perhaps somethings no-one though consequential, but which are dramas, nonethless.

They were taken with a cellphone and I'll admit that I was not entirely aware of their contents until I started uploading them onto the computer: a process of detection.

Working with the camera allows a concentration on detail. This is something I find tiresome in painting, where I am much more involved with gesture and movement. When painting, my own psychological responses intervene with much more force, too rapidly for much detail.

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Photos from a forest, part one

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Photographs taken in the forest at Rio Vermelho.

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The animals in our homes

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Pelican

Surely everyone knows about the ghosts that haunt ancient castles in Europe. Sometimes, in former lives, they were victims of  terrible cruelties, and now their fate is forever to wander stone corridors and stairwells in search of justice.

Fewer, however, know about how even ordinary houses have entities that represent things that happened in those buildings.

For example, a friend of mine lived in a house that was once the home of a doctor, in a pleasant but unexceptional East Dulwich street and every morning when he raised his head from his pillow his eyes encountered a pelican, great and white and walking from the bedroom to the kitchen. But when my friend got up and followed through to where the bird had walked, he saw nothing. He concluded, naturally, that he had merely become confused by a strong dream.

Things like this happen often, and usually we dismiss them as temporary hallucinations, waking dreams. I had an aunt and she lived in a huge house that a hundred years ago was home to a famous fish merchant.

He was a very kind man, and the parts of fish that he could not sell, or that were too small for custom. he gave to the neighbourhood cats, and the cats would accumulate, waiting for their dinners every night. This became quite an event: by the time a year had passed over a thousand of them from all over the region, would sit in the yards where the fish crates were unloaded waiting for their repast.

 He died, and the famous dinners ended with him: the cats no longer visited. But sometimes, at night, when my aunt is in the living room she looks from the window and sees cats, innumerable, sitting silhouetted  in the moonlight.

A final example is more extreme, and perhaps more difficult to believe. In this case the deceased was a carpenter. He had an aggressive character, and scared everyone with his foul moods, his moments of furious anger, often abusing  his assistants and apprentices.

He lived alone in an apartment in a lower middle class neighbourhood of Paris. He died, and the apartment was sold to a young couple. At first,  they were happy in their new place. 

But later they began to notice how often things were broken- each blaming the other. You broke the vase that my mother gave us, said one, you left coffee stains on the Chinese Carpet, replied the second. And so on until one, hearing a sharp cracking sound, woke up in the night and saw in the living room a baboon taking a porcelain cup from the dresser, inserting it between its teeth and biting it with full force.

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I am writing this in in my living room. White muslin curtains flutter in a gentle breeze, their soft shadows sweep across my ivory wall. Two small finches, one blue, one yellow, keep me company. They talk but about what I cannot say. Happy they seem.

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These are, in part, a homage to Victorian photography- the divine presence in nature revealed through the camera. This notion was taken to its limit with those "Spiritualist" photos- a genre I might revist sometime.

Witchery

IN relation to this series of photos two things come to mind- how Charles Manson urged his followers to create "witchy" objects using found items when they went on their killing spree. He is and was totally mad, of course, but it it hard to deny the aesthetic force of his imagery. This, much more than his ideas explains his enduring interest.

The second though that comes to mind is the memory of an afternoon spent twenty years ago at The Glen in Innerleithan, near Peebles, Scotland with Mark Haddon and others making sculptures out of bits and pieces of twig, the idea being that these sculptures should be so subtle that they are almost not discernible as sculptures at all- they lay at the interface between art and nature.

Regarding that memory, isn't it funny how time "telescopes" so some events or conversations are as fresh in the mind as if they happened yesterday, while others, ostensibly more serious fade (my first marriage, for instance, which I never give a moments thought to)?

Witchy, continued...

I'm going to start building a folio of photos which are suggestive of witchcraft.

The Island of Santa Catarina, where I live, has a history of witches and sorcery.

Witchy

I was put in mind of this story while taking these photos-

http://www.mysteriouspeople.com/Bella_in_the_wychelm.htm