February 2010

Thursday 4th

The early starts in the darkroom have been going well. I'm getting quite a bit of printing done and am keeping up with printing my contact sheets: if one gets too far behind it's very easy to get into the delusion that every photo one takes will be a masterpiece and waste a lot of time, energy and film.

But, even though I'm still printing small (I work on 6 x 9.5 inch paper for 35mm negs and  18 X  24 cm paper for medium format work) I still find that myself spending several sessions getting it right. I take what I think is a finished print home, look at it and find I'm dissatisfied with it.

Thoughts about music and art in general

I've been listening to a lot of challenging modern and contemporary classical music recently. I like to go on long walks with the one of Elliot Carter's string quartets playing on my mp3 player. I sent a piece for microtone guitar composed by Brian Ferneyhough to a friend of  - a lot of scrapes, squeaks and knocks, a lot of which sound out of tune - he replied asking whether the reward of such a piece justified the effort. This left me thinking about difficulty in art, and especially music and I found myself setting down some thoughts on the matter. Here they are, somewhat condensed and edited:

"Does the reward justify the effort?"

It should do so, but the reward should never quite be quite what one expected. And of course each person comes from a different position when he encounters a work of art for the first time.

I listened to the set of micro tonal pieces again and found them rewarding enough - though I think I've still got some effort to put in before I really 'get' them. Maybe one never entirely 'gets' any piece of music. Even with music as clear as Haydn's one never really gets to the bottom of it - every time I revisit one of his pieces I feel something's changed and developed in my absence.

But my thoughts led me to ask two question: why, all or a sudden, have the difficulties of contemporary and modern classical music become so much more interesting to me? and: what does this difficulty mean?

Well my answer to second question leads to my answer to the first via some considerations of what it is that Art, especially Music, does.

It seems to me that Music re-interprets the world, or existence, and our relationship to it, and re-presents it to us in an abstract form - much as if an architect were to take the physical properties of the materials he was going to build a house with, and their interactions, and reduce these to formulae. It teaches us to understand existence through presenting us with an entirely abstract model.

In the visual arts the model is never wholly abstract - various degrees of representation have always been mixed in both adding complexity and palatability. Music, however, is essentially abstract - 'representation' is added on as a surface layer (as in program music, or tone poems), rather than mixed into its structure.

The historical evolution of music has followed, or preceded, the evolution of men's ideas, philosophy and relationship with the physical world. We still find it hard to believe that an audience, used to the classical forms and harmonies of Mozart, could really have heard Beethoven's 3rd as noise. But they did.. This is because Beethoven's music was built around and exploring something in man's relationship to existence that had not yet really been properly thought about, felt or formulated by the mass of people at the time - that 'something' we now call 'Romanticism'.

Those people who had a positive reaction to his music probably had the impression that they were hearing something with beauty and truth in it, but could only half-recognise it. But they were probably also puzzled, frustrated and frightened by it too.

And this is how I feel about the music of Ferneyhough, Elliot Carter, Birtwistle, Schoenberg et al (though it's chastening to think that Schoenberg wrote his second string quartet, the piece which heralded atonality, over a hundred years ago!). I feel that it is exploring and proposing a way of existing that we are still coming to terms with. It obliges me to extend my cultural, emotional and existential antennae - the squeaks, scrapes and out of tune-ness of the Ferneyhough at first sounded like a random mess (then again how often does one hear a piece of tonal music and it sort of drifts over one leaving one wondering where it went?). But something is emerging from that mess now - the mess is taking on structure, starting to make sense, starting to extend my range of understanding.

And this is where the first question above - "why, all or a sudden, has the difficulties of contemporary and modern classical music become so much more interesting to me?" starts to become clearer. I think it is this aspect of existential exploration that it fascinates me - it helps me make sense of my existence and extends my understanding of how it is possible to exist in this reality - and I suspect that this is something that I need at the moment.

This contemporary music acknowledges that we have to start from a sort of chaos, that there is no benevolent deity (think how so many of the modern theist composers are drawn to forms of tonality - Messiaen, Tavener, Part, Macmillan...) that we have to find beauty and meaning in this chaos, and that that is the composer's task.

Think about how music teaches us to come to terms with Death. Compare the 'Moro' songs of Gesualdo, Mozart's Requiem, Schubert's "Death and the maiden", Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Schoenberg's "A survivor from Warsaw" - they all reflect different attitudes towards Death. Gesualdo's pure and clean-toned madrigal, where the twisted tonality gives the impression of sorrow and regret, but not of doubt; the Schoenberg which is relentless, comfortless and arbitrarily violent. These are attitudes that were a result of their times and its zeitgeist.

The challenging contemporary music seems to say 'well, things are not beautiful, they rarely are, and life is hard and cruel and ultimately meaningless, but still something can be made out of these un-promising raw materials without having to sugar-coat them and change them out of recognition."

Maybe it's music for a generation that no longer believes in the saving power of the gods and who is contemplating the collapse of mankind..:

Any thoughts and comments from my readers would be most welcome.

Friday 5th

3 new images in 'Recent Prints'

The one entitled 'flats on junction of Rue des Aires' is from one of the many monstrously under-exposed negatives I've recently been pumping out. I tried printing it with as much contrast as possible and like the resulting tonal qualities.

I've given all three photographs a black border rather than the usual mid-grey. I find I'm printing darker and darker. A black border compensates for this - makes the darkness more visible, to paraphrase Milton.

Thoughts about music and art in general continued ...

...and this is why sentimentality is incompatible with art. Sentimentality is 'packaged emotion' - there is no discovery, exploration or complexity there - only a re-iteration of what is already familiar. This is why film music is rarely good Art. If it's doing its job it will not distract the viewer from what's going on screen, but generates packaged emotion - fear, sympathy, awe etc:emotions that can be encapsulated with a word.

Some film music gets in the way. Bernard Hermann's music to 'Taxi Driver' and 'North by North-west'. The music is sufficiently intriguing that you start to listen to the music rather than just absorb it subconsciously. It gets in the way of the films.

Saturday 6th

Free print of 'North Bridge, Halifax, West Yorkshire, November 2002'

     

I've been going through some boxes of spare prints, and found a set of small prints I made for publicity purposes of the above Halifax photo.

In an access of generosity, and curiosity, I'd like to send one of these to anyone who is reading this wherever you are on the planet.

The prints are small 11 x 11 cm and are simple single-exposure prints on Warmtone Ilford RC paper. They were printed in July 2007.

They are surprisingly good - it just goes to show how much you can get away with when you print small! The full size print, which is 24 x 24 cm requires 13 separate exposures at two different grades. I suspect that bigger you print the more attention each square inch of print surface requires...

Anyway, back to you freebie:

I'm putting a time limit on this offer: it ends at the end of this month.

All you need to do is to email me (click on 'contact the artist' in the navigation) and give me your name and postal address.

It would be nice as well if you could tell me a bit about yourself, your photographic tastes and what you like and/or don't like about my web site and if there are any of my photos that particularly interest you.

(This offer is open to friends and family too

The retail value of one of the prints is £35)

Hope to read you soon.

Wednesday 10th

4 new photographs in the colour section - all of mushrooms

I always had this strange impression when looking at the photo of the Amanita phalloides that it was a kind and cosy photograph, despite these being the most deadly mushrooms of all mushrooms. Whilst I was preparing this image for the site my mum looked over my shoulder and remarked on the pleasant smile being displayed by the left hand mushroom. I'd never consciously noticed this - but it seems that my subconscious had and that it was influencing my response to this image. Interesting; very interesting...

Thursday 11th

3 new photographs in miscellaneous gallery

Saturday 20th

Over the past couple of weeks I've been conducting an experiment. To start with I decided to have a look round the nearby town of Gabian. I eventually found my way to the graveyard and found it particularly intriguing. It is set out on a slope above the town - the oldest section is quite scruff and disordered: exactly the sort of place I like. That first visit I photographed it with my 6x6 Bronica with the 50mm wide angle lens and got through a couple of rolls of film.

My next afternoon out I went back to the cemetery and had only my 35mm camera with my usual 35mm lens. My last visit I returned with the 35mm camera with the 50mm lens on. My next visit will be with the Bronica with the the 80mm lens.

I am curious as to what the results will be - the same place but photographed with two different negative formats and with two different focal lengths. Of the three combinations I've already covered I was surprised by how much I got out of the 35mm camera/50mm lens: the 'vanilla' combination.

I haven't photographed with this combination for years in any serious way. But the compositions I saw in the viewfinder seemed more inventive, organic and intuitive than those I saw when using the 35mm lens.

But I still haven't developed the films yet from the last visit. Maybe it's time for me to return to this format/lens combination. Maybe I've got a bit tired of the 35/35 combination.