Vintage And Obsolescence

Our iMac is terminally ill. As is so often the case with computers, there was no warning - one day it was working fine and then the next the screen starts up with what is a cartoon-like portrayal of illness - a uniformly grey face hatched from corner to corner with little pink scars, except over the familiar Apple logo in the middle where they are green - and thus it is stuck. Three conversations later with various levels of Apple support and I learn there is nothing we can do about it. This is a top of the range machine; it looks as fresh as the latest models but, you see, this computer was bought in 2009. It’s seven years old. In Apple parlance it is “Vintage”. Far from that word’s association in my mind with nostalgia, something faded and elegant to be preserved or enjoyed over time, in Apple’s dictionary it means it is no longer supported for repairs and spare parts. Redundant. It is time to move on. 

When I took the photograph above, I wanted to convey the idea of stumbling on a typically disorganised family archive and to emphasise that the item you will most immediately fall upon and instantly enjoy and share, will be printed - a photograph, or letter perhaps. There may be other valuable material stored within the various media there but the effort and equipment required to extract it will in all likelihood make the exercise cumbersome, even impossible. It may in short become a joyless task, which would be such a shame. In the case of our own computer we have been lucky; behind its dead face we could hear signs of life, the processors and drives seemed to be okay, as though the computer were trapped in some electronic coma. With a little ingenuity we found a work-around that allowed us to extract the remaining files that hadn’t already been backed up.

Later, I sat next to a mother and keen photographer at a party - my dinner companion was passionate about her family photographs. “I keep all my SD [camera] cards in the safe”, she volunteered. I asked her how confident she was that one day in the future she would still be able to read them - and on what? It’s not the media itself that’s necessarily going to fail in time (it may, it may not, we’re not sure) but the devices and connections that media relies on to read it are ever so vulnerable. We agreed that the best thing we were doing for our families’ future enjoyment of photographs was the dutiful creation of the annual holiday book and calendar.

Back at home, we have just discarded a broken mini-disc player. I am looking at my Firewire drives. I am looking at the comatose iMac. It’s time to switch the life support off. We’ll send it to be recycled and hopefully its beautifully machined aluminium casing will serve in some future incarnation. In the meantime, if your idea of a family photograph is one that your grandchild will one day enjoy, then bear in mind it may be best not to rely on the computer world’s notion of “Vintage”.

The Dolphin, The Gazelle, The Cheetah And The Lion

When I arrived at Mike and Clare’s house, Mike was wielding a pen-knife in boy scout fashion and excitedly removing an old sepia photograph from a crumbling frame. The image depicted a formal group at a wedding, a family gathering posed in a static arrangement to allow for the long exposure time to capture the moment for posterity. Mike had recovered it along with some others from an outhouse he was clearing out; it was in all likelihood just over a hundred years old. It was an emotive moment - I was now there to take photographs of his own family.

Mike is a leadership consultant at Aberkyn and author on the subject and Clare is a television and radio presenter - they are parents to four children. They are nothing if not passionate. Passionate about everything: family, faith, work, football, friends, life. I had known the family for a little while, in particular as neighbours in Winchester and I was always certain a photo shoot with them would be exceptional. When the opportunity did eventually arrive, I was taken aback by the generosity of access to the inner heart of family that they granted me. The experience is equally generously conveyed in Clare’s own words:

“Mike was the one who saw it first - ‘It’ being ‘The Golden Years’ of family life - when Lily (13) is her own person but yet so happy to be with us still, Maisie (10) is stepping into her true self, Hal (8) is so full of fun and without guile and Gabriel (6) is still young enough to be doted on by all the other siblings, and for him life is all about play… 

This is the story of the Dolphin (watch her dive);

The Gazelle (watch her dance);

The Cheetah (watch him run)

And the Lion cub (watch him roll and bask in the sun!)

All themselves

And all bound as one. 

“As a family we are consciously trying to ‘make memories’ - family adventures or times of one on one: Sunday tea by the fire or Dad’s Saturday brunch… but how do we ‘capture’ those memories? My hope was to have someone photograph ‘the vernacular’, the everyday, to create a virtual and visual scrap book that goes beyond the scrubbed faces and the smiles.  

“When Lily was born we had a fire in the house and it was pretty devastating. It certainly made us realise what was important in our lives - and the only thing we wanted to rescue was… the photographs… The memories, the stories, our history and that of the generations before us. Fortunately, we had never put them in albums - instead they were left in boxes stacked at the back of cupboards and so escaped the seeping tentacles of smoke damage and were mainly ok!  Ever since then, photographs have been a critical part of our lives; when Mike’s Dad died we bought a good camera (for the first time) - so that we could record precious memories of our growing family.  

“Though now we are awash with photographs - the children snap away at everything on our phones: a funny face made out of baked beans at the tea table, a hundred shots of conkers, handstands, beetles, goofy grins and the obligatory surfeit of selfies! Devaluing the currency - and yet documenting living history and making their own memories…

“So it was time to embrace the Golden Age and capture it by raising the photography bar - with James quietly watching and documenting our family chronicles… catching the laugh and the light, looking through a window into our world… family heritage recorded with split second accuracy that will make each moment last many lifetimes. Perhaps kept on a screen, perhaps in a frame, perhaps carried in the heart.”

When we got back from the second part of the shoot, we sat around the kitchen table with a cup of tea and contemplated the hundred year old print. What were we going to produce with the material that we had just captured? I am working on some ideas - there will be something beautiful that celebrates the now of childhood, for sure - but what I’d really like - what we'd really like - is if, in a hundred years’ time, like us around this table, someone would still be able to hold a photograph from this shoot and say, “That’s The Dolphin, The Gazelle, The Cheetah and The Lion. That’s our family”.

The Constancy of Venice

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work in Venice for several days. Whilst out there I met the architect and historian Francesco da Mosto, a charismatic Venetian aristocrat who, while just happening to be married to the sister of a friend of mine, is perhaps best known in the UK for his passionately delivered travel documentaries about Venice and Italy for the BBC. By a happy coincidence, he was giving a presentation at our event and my friend had kindly texted his wife to say I'd be there so we were able to have a chat afterwards.

Our conversation revolved around life in London and Venice; as an architect, what did he think of London’s changing skyline? I asked. How did he compare the pace of life in these two historic trading cities? Would he live elsewhere? The response to my questions, delivered in his generous Italian accent, summed up his affection for the city: “I love Venice”, he said. “I love that it doesn’t change. The Venice of today is largely the Venice of hundreds of years ago. The geography and geology don’t allow change and I love this constancy in Venice.”

The following evening I had a chance to slip away for an hour, to explore the back streets and seek out one of my favourite vistas, looking east past the Baroque masterpiece of Santa Maria della Salute, toward the entrance to the Grand Canal and the campanile of St. Mark’s Square. I had taken some photographs here just the year before and by another happy coincidence had then stumbled upon a painting of the very same view whilst working at an event in Scotland. It was by Francesco Guardi, a contemporary of Canaletto. What is striking in this 250 year old work of art is not just the similarity of the view to that of the present day but the similarity of the details right down to the paving stones; only the people that occupy the scene have changed. Here was Francesco da Mosto’s “constancy” that he so savoured about his home city.

There is a reassurance about things that don’t change. Venice is a rare example where development is constrained by its lagoon setting and extraordinary history; cities are organic, diverse and constantly evolving, so we often turn to the countryside landscape for a more solid sense of place, even if it’s for a week or two each year. How many of us make an annual family trek to somewhere familiar?

In our case it is the north Cornish coast; the view across the beach at Polzeath to Pentire Head and opposite, over the Camel Estuary and beyond to Gulland Rock is ingrained in our collective family memory - fifty years and more of the same scene, as over time we have huddled over rock pools in the wind, built sandcastles or charged the Atlantic surf. We may be on holiday, but it feels like home.

The stories in our holiday photographs unfold similarly; there in the background is the familiar topography of beach, rock and cliff, standing steadfast over time, while in the foreground friends come and go and children grow. As with the pictures of Venice, the view remains the same, it’s the people who eventually change.

About Being Brave And Hiring A Professional Photographer

If I asked, “Would you hire a professional to photograph your wedding?” I think for most people the answer would still be a given. But would you hire a professional to photograph your family? As someone with a vested interest, I hope the answer would be “Yes”, although I detect an increasingly confident self-sufficiency creeping into this area now. And why not? It’s not only cameras that are more sophisticated, there is a wealth of inexpensive printing and publishing options that have grown too, not to mention the various new trends in taking and sharing photographs. So how does bringing in a photographer stack up in the face of this change? I am not talking here about a cheap fix, one of those “session and all the photos supplied on disc for £90” deals where, like an all-you-can-eat buffet, the only memory at the end will likely be indigestion. No, a proper portrait commission requires an emotional and financial commitment and, unlike wedding photography, is a much more discretionary investment. Is it worthwhile and what should you be looking for?

Taking the leap

Taking the second part of that question, look beyond the camera for a start; the number one thing to consider is the finished work. It’s important to look to someone who understands the aesthetics and the production values required to turn the captured image into a physical product, be that a print, an album or a gallery-style wall mounting. Unless the chosen images are produced in some printed form I think it’s a fair bet your grandchildren won’t get to enjoy them, at least not in that spontaneous, tactile way that comes from handling an object. So a knowledge of production and an insistence on printing should very much be part of the package. Also editing, in the sense of choosing only the best and cutting the rest, is an unseen skill that is increasingly overlooked or even ignored. It is absolutely part of the photographic process. Dumping 500 unfiltered pictures on a disc is not a service to the client - it betrays a lack of rigour, at worst it may disguise a lack of skill. It’s vital to establish the quality of the outcome as well as making your choice on the basis of just style or price.

Lasting qualities

Having decided this is something you want to do, a major consideration is whether to go for a studio or location based session. I think this is a matter of personal preference - some people like the formality and neutral space of a studio setting, which often also brings a sense of structure to group shots. I am a location photographer as I believe that home is part of what makes family and so for me it is the natural backdrop where everyone can feel at ease.

One advantage of working on location

And the benefits? Perhaps, as a parent, you always seem to have the responsibility for all the photography and you yourself never appear in any of the pictures (I am all too familiar with this). Perhaps you’re aware that you are not taking enough photos and theres’a real gap in your record of family life. Sometimes, it’s a great excuse to get the whole family together, particularly larger families with teenage children who never seem to be around at the same time or where parents do a lot of travelling. A photo shoot addresses all of these.

But here is the main point, it’s a brave thing to do to put yourselves under the scrutiny of an outsider. It’s this objective view that is one of the factors which makes the exercise so worthwhile. Children in particular respond well to the non-judgemental attention and often, their personalities really shine during a shoot. A good photographer will set out to portray you in the best possible light for sure, and seek to play to your strengths but he or she can present a refreshingly honest view as well; there are no preconceived ideas of family dynamics to get in the way. A good photo shoot creates a buzz at the time and you’ll have some amazing, eye-opening photos to enjoy. But when you put together an album or frame a beautiful portrait, those items become part of the glue that sticks family together in the years to come - that’s an investment that can only grow in value and makes the argument for doing it compelling. At whatever stage in your lives and even if only once, at least consider handing over photography to a professional.

Lost and Found

As the opening week of the 45th Rencontres de la Photographie gets under way in Arles, I am sitting here slightly frustrated at not being able to go and instead reflecting on my visit last year, with a consolatory glass of vin rosé. This southern French city which lies at the edge of the Camargue, a rugged region known for its cowboys, or guardiens, wild horses and bulls plays host each summer to one of Europe’s most vibrant photography festivals. 

Arles has a gutsy feel - in the high summer heat the air is frequently heavy with the scent of paella or the spice market and every so often the strains of a native Gypsy Kings song carry down the backstreets, where equally you could find yourself caught up in a bull chase. The tough side of Arles is accentuated by the uncompromising dominance of the Roman amphitheatre at its centre but a few minutes’ walk away the sublime Romanesque facade of the church of Sainte Trophime and its cloisters act as an architectural foil and a sense of calm and culture is restored. It’s against this historical backdrop that the city, briefly home to the painter Van Gogh, accommodates a wide-ranging collection of the world’s best photography each year. Churches and railway sheds alike get turned over to exhibition spaces and the bars of the Place du Forum buzz with gossip and debate about the arts.

A theme which struck me last year was the popularity of “found” or anonymous photographs, photographies trouvées, little family snapshots plucked from back in time, presumably from abandoned albums, attics, flea markets. You could rummage through boxes full of other people’s lost memories, little windows on to past lives available to purchase for a few euros. Often, it was children who were most captivated by the images - was it the tactile quality of the prints or the stories they held? One enterprising dealer had filled one of the fountains with photographs, which floated around waiting to be picked out by curious onlookers - a kind of metaphor for lives adrift on the currents of the world.

These photographs feel displaced outside of the context of family home - is the fact they were lost a result of the people in them being displaced themselves, either through migration or conflict? Or were they just abandoned by subsequent generations, unable or unwilling to carry on being custodians of these little archives? Earlier in the year I had had the privilege of a brief meeting with Tom Stoddart, whose black and white documentary photography is among the most compellingly powerful I know. His coverage of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999 contains images of found or abandoned photographs, the fate of whose owners one can only contemplate with a sense of dread. The images are gentle, domestic, mundane and so totally at odds with the calamitous circumstances in which they’re found and recorded by Stoddart.

We cast little glimpses of ourselves on to online media all the time now and no doubt these images will be carried around the currents and backwaters of the internet for years to come. Over time, how likely is it that they will become detached from identity, like the prints floating around the fountain in Arles?

Then and Now

Well, it’s turning into a year of flashbacks. We just celebrated my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday and were blessed not just with good weather for her outdoor party but also the presence of her entire family of children and grandchildren, a rare occasion. I had my camera to record some candid moments and when I saw my wife and her siblings standing in a doorway one particular shot sprang to mind immediately; sitting in a drawer back at home was a favourite print of the four of them as children. We produce it periodically to have a laugh at dinner parties. But actually what a record - a piece of micro-history documenting not only family hierarchy, but the fashion and photographic style of the time it was taken. I rather wish I had taken the print to the party as we would have been more likely to stage a copy of the poses, which might have been hilarious (Jim had had to stand on a box in the original) but that is beside the point. The fact is the original print is as accessible as an image now as it was forty years ago and my most important task to hand is to make a print of the new photo to file with it - the digital version may not survive as long.

Earlier this year I was asked to do a portrait session for a family who I had photographed ten years ago. I love this kind of work as you get a real feel for the value of photography, a sense of documenting the passage of time, a process here of growing up. I suppose, technically, all photography is documentary but the camera is never more powerful or evocative as when recording a sense of time, place, renewal or change and that is the essence of family photography. The photograph of Poppy aged 4 was taken on Fuji Neopan 400 and a selenium toned print was made for framing. The negatives show images of her bouncing around and laughing but I liked this shot of her contemplative look, a pose that she naturally adopted ten years later.

I am lucky to be able to forge relationships with families and help a few document their growth and evolving lifestyles over a period of years. Incremental changes add up and the record that emerges over time never fails to surprise me. I wonder if they’ll be able to look back in forty years on these photographs like we do with that print and maybe laugh or wonder at their family relationships, their clothes or the photographic style!

I had earmarked some images for this article a while back so it came as a complete surprise when just a week ago I was covering an event in France and bumped into a client whose family I had photographed in 2006. One of the two daughters I had originally photographed was present and I asked to do an up to date shot, below.  It's a reminder to keep that camera handy - family photography is documentary photography whose value really comes to light over time.

The Making of an Heirloom Album

A few years back, a number of factors coincided to bring about one of those creative projects that bloomed into something greater than the sum of its parts. I had been experimenting with my newly acquired Hasselblad X-Pan camera, a beautifully crafted and clever hybrid 35mm film camera that could expose two frames to make a true high quality panoramic negative. It was an ingenious piece of kit, if slightly tricky to use, and during its relatively brief production run built quite a following, in turn contributing to the growth in popularity of panoramic photography at around the turn of the millennium. 

At the same time, as a family we were just beginning to explore the south coast with an eye to moving out of London. We also happened to receive a couple of invitations to Norfolk, near Burnham Market and the beautiful stretch of coastline around Holkham with its pines, rolling dunes, horizon-bending beaches and expansive skies. These were the kind of landscapes for which the X-Pan camera was made. The boys were at an age when the seaside offered all sorts of possibilities and adventure. I thought of my own family holidays in Cornwall when I was their age - there is something particularly nostalgic about children and the seaside and an idea was beginning to form about documenting this period in their lives with this camera. I started clicking away on these seaside ventures.

Meanwhile, I had been using Queensberry albums for three or four years in my burgeoning portrait and wedding photography business. In my mind Queensberry was, and arguably still is, one of the few companies that understood the essence of what a genuine, lasting family album - wedding or otherwise - should be and had made that production option available to photographers worldwide. In 2003, I visited their stand at a UK trade show and a huge 24 inch panoramic-format album caught my eye, clearly a statement piece. It stuck in my mind as being an ideal vehicle for my small, but growing series of family panoramas and which could double as a unique showcase for my work as well. In fact it gave me a disciplined objective: I would make one of these albums and just with panoramic photographs taken on the X-Pan.

After our third seaside trip to Norfolk I had collected just about enough material to start thinking about the design of the album and how the photographs were going to be printed. The negatives, being of unusual shape, had to be treated carefully at specialist labs. I turned to Genesis, a fantastic lab local to me in South West London and which I had used for a few years (they are still going strong). They had a full black and white darkroom then and were able to offer the high quality hand printing and toning that I was after. I wanted the design of the album to be austerely simple, just one image per page, but it still required sketching out by hand and faxing to Queensberry - yes, that’s how we did album design in those days. It was to be a page mount type album with black core pages and ivory mats - I would trim and mount the prints myself so that the underlying black page would show as a border. 

Ivory over black page mounts, "Iron" Contemporary Leather cover

Testing for tone

One of the things that struck me while researching this article was the amount of associated material that came to light in various boxes and files - the negatives, obviously, and the contact sheets and a load of test prints - it was like finding all the sketches for a painting.

A whole mini archive came alive and made me realise just what a hole is likely to be left in the absence of printing anything, now that we all use digital cameras and store the images on drives and servers.

The first photograph for this project was taken in February and the final print was mounted in the album in July. It was six months in the making and I can’t deny it was expensive to produce. Eleven years on, I consider it worth every penny and every hour of investment, value that will continue to grow as time goes on. It is a personal legacy that I imagine will one day be picked up and leafed through by my children's children. Will I be able to say that about my digital photographs, I wonder?

Eleven years on...

Challenges of Conservation on a Grand Scale

Two days ago, the brother of a friend of ours, Emmanuel De Merode was shot in an ambush while returning to his home within Africa’s oldest national park, the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mercifully his injuries, though serious, are not life threatening. He had just delivered a dossier to the local government office in Goma in response to Soco Oil’s Block V licence to explore for oil and gas within an area occupied by the park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

I had not anticipated on just my second post to be interrupting normal service to bring such a bulletin, but ever since meeting Emmanuel last summer I had been mulling over the possibility of writing about this remarkable area, famously home to a quarter of the world’s precariously small population of mountain gorillas. Several angles seemed to present themselves and photography was an obvious one; the grandeur and diversity of this 7,800 sq. km landscape with its lakes, mountains, dense forests and active volcanoes; the struggles of the local population, the rangers and animals who occupy it; the dramatic and terrifying photographs by Brent Stirton, who made a documentary of the park for National Geographic Television - all presented a case. As did of course the gorillas themselves, with their close family units and like us, their dependence on a safe and productive environment to prosper and raise their young. There was always going to be much material to choose from.

Baby Ndakasi  (Image courtesy of Virunga National Park)

However, the recent dramatic events prompted me to simply issue a plea to raise awareness of the park and of the remarkable efforts the staff and rangers go to in protecting it, often in the face of great danger. I would urge you to visit the Virunga National Park website to see the facts for yourself and get a feel for the challenges that need to be faced in this notoriously difficult region. There you will also find cause for some celebration, among them the support of the international community and conservation agencies, the dedication of the rangers, the environmental and economic initiatives of the Virunga Alliance, which promotes sustainable development over unsustainable mineral extraction.

Back at home at the micro level, you could say that leafing through an old family album and dwelling a little on the past is just misty-eyed nostalgia but I argue we look back to remind ourselves of the things that we value and that need to be conserved for the future. Family photographs allow us to hold a moment, perhaps remember a relative or relive a childhood holiday or family tradition and enable us to carry that moment, pay that love even, forward - if it’s missing, we lose a tiny bit of heritage. At a global scale, the last great wildernesses are a vital part of our collective heritage. We can’t just record them and leave them in the past, we have to care for them and take them forward intact - to lose any would be nothing short of a catastrophe for our future generations.

We wish Emmanuel a speedy recovery.

As a postscript, I was excited to hear a couple of days after publishing this post that the feature documentary film, "Virunga" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, where it received a standing ovation. You can see the trailer here.

Where it all started (I)

Spring, Mother’s Day, Easter, a season of renewal, creation, birth. I suppose I couldn’t hope for a more appropriate time to launch a new blog although, as my family will testify, it has certainly spent a good while in gestation. 

By whatever means you have found your way here, welcome, as you’ll be among the first and no doubt wondering “What’s this all about? What is The Candid Eye? And what’s with the books?” Well, you can find a bit of background in the About section so I am going to cut straight to the books as these are the inspiration behind this blog and at the heart of what I do, so a good place to start this ball rolling.

The picture shows a selection of our family photograph albums at my mother’s home. They contain an unbroken photographic documentary that starts with my parents’ engagement in the South of France in 1958. I emerge as a fat and happy baby a couple of volumes in and my brother shortly after. Friends, cousins, uncles and aunts, grandparents, the Greek taverna owner and his family, the Padstow harbour master, assorted au pairs and other characters all come and go through the pages, many reappearing with the regularity of a summer holiday or other seasonal get-together. The same is true of places: Cornwall, the South of France, Corfu, favourite spots revisited and each time, like us, a little bit changed year on year. My father’s meticulous and humourous captioning continues to bring it all to life: “These are the ------s, their daughter felt sick on the bus and we gave them a plastic bag but nobody saw it had a big hole in it.” Inevitably some people, my father included, dropped out of this storyboard forever, their places gradually taken by new faces, those of our own children.

How did this archive take form? I don’t remember my father being hugely into photography, not in the sense that I later became. There was a seldom used 8mm cine camera knocking about and I do very much recall his twin lens reflex camera, not a Rolleiflex but similar and, later, a Pentax with just a standard lens. I got a Kodak Instamatic 126 when I was around nine and my mother had a smart 110-format pocket camera, which I coveted despite it being one of the worst film formats ever to come to market. You could always tell which photos she had taken because the camera strap appeared in them. I think possibly the albums came about as a token of thankfulness for surviving the war but mainly as a record of the happy times that were a legacy of his work. It seemed a natural middle class thing to do.

My own interest in photography came not through a camera but from these photographs. The photographs were there first, a living story. For me the printing, editing, cropping, sticking, captioning were as integral to the process and art of photography as the capturing itself. It turned out to be a great way to learn about picture taking as we always placed so much more value on the caught moment and the context of story - which remains the pretext behind my photography to this day.

And so, what future for the albums? Even as a photographer, I am conscious that I am failing to maintain the same level of fastidiousness as my parents in documenting my family. The conversations I have on the subject suggest there is a looming crisis for the kind of family archive many of us have either inherited or started with good intentions years back, only to stall. Digital technology has resulted in a proliferation of photographs, but how many of them will our children be able to pick up? Are our little social documentaries being overwhelmed when it's now so much easier to deal with images in bulk rather than through selection? And what of the ramifications of keeping it all online rather than in a book or frame? Are we even getting pictures worth keeping in the first place?

I'm not entirely sure where this journey will lead but my ambition over the coming months is to take a look at some of these issues and hopefully to share ideas so that we can get the best out of our personal and family photography, both for present and, just as importantly, future enjoyment. And it doesn't have to involve scissors and glue anymore.