Let’s face it – writing proposals and applications isn’t interesting. And neither is writing about writing proposals and applications. And seeing as that’s primarily what I’ve been doing pretty much non-stop for the last months, you’ll be understanding the reasons for lack of blog updates.
Despite feeling as if I’m forever in front of a computer, I have started work with Lee Turner at Hole Editions on the litho edition. The pin-hole idea didn’t work at all – the plates are nowhere near as sensitive as photographic paper, and despite leaving a plate in a camera for a week in which there was plenty of bright sunshine, it seems that the sunlight has to fall directly onto the plate for it to affect the emulsion at all. So mark 2 involved taping a few plates up on the wall when there were lots of shadows being cast in the room and seeing what happened. I really wasn’t expecting much with this, so we were both pleasantly surprised when we got some quite interesting results. (See the images top images accompanying this post). I quite like the simplicity of these – there’s still a very much a Barthes-esq ‘having been there-ness’, along with a grainy feel to them – more photographic references perhaps.
The weather over the last few days has been accidently perfect, as I’d been waiting for it to snow. I was thinking of the snow in terms of erasure and absence, quite a weighty sadness to it. I went to a funeral at the end of last week – it snowed quite heavily on the journey to the crematorium behind the hearse, and with everyone dressed in black, the visuals felt quite Dickensian, appropriate for that type of occasion. The journey took us via the coast, but the sea wasn’t visible because of a slight rise in the land. From my perspective the snow was positioned directly next to the flat grey sky. Both were empty and blank – quite incredible. I went back a couple of days later to photograph this, I should get the transparencies back tomorrow.
I also realised that I’m being very precious about these photographs I’ve been taking, perhaps a bit too pristine. So I’ve been experimenting with my pinhole camera (a large biscuit tin + black spray paint, hurrah!), as the long exposures give a sort of echoey quality to the images. I’ve got a lot of transparencies from over the summer, which for one reason or other weren’t right for photographs or projections. I’ve put these on the floor back where the exposures were taken from, so that they get scuffed and scratched – physical marks from that space. A couple of images after a few days of this are attached to this post.
