Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Windows, Bicycles and Catastrophe

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Windows in images are, as I’ve discussed previously, evidence of people living their lives without a thought for the subject or subjects in the photograph. This entry examines a number of details taken from photographs of Oxford at the beginning of the 20th century.

This detail below, from a view of the High Street taken in 1907, shows the open windows of what was then the Mitre Hotel.

Perhaps these windows were opened by guests visiting the city over 100 years ago, or perhaps by maids in preparation for their visit. But what was taking place behind these windows when the photograph was taken? What conversations were being had? As I’ve said above, whatever they were and whatever was happening within, the open windows serve to give life back to a place from which the photograph was taken. The rooms become portals to unseen parts of the image, not just in the rest of the city, but rather the wider world. It is perhaps then, rather appropriate, that this image shows a hotel.

The image above, taken from a photograph of 1909 (amazing how we can just skip a couple of years) is particularly interesting, in that as well as being open, we can also see clear reflections within the window’s glass. This window serves again to take us beyond the boundaries of the image, into its hidden interiors, from where we might look upon that view reflected in the window. The same can be said to some degree about the image below, also from a photograph of 1909.

As an aside, it’s interesting how these two images, because they were taken in the same year, constitute in our mind’s eye a single moment; the year (in this case 1909) becomes just that – a moment in time. But what period of time separates the photographs from which these details are taken? Is it minutes, hours, days, weeks or several months? What happened between the taking of one picture and the other?

In the detail below (from a photograph of 1907)  my eyes are drawn to the the bicycle; not the make or the style, but the way it seems to reveal the presence of time, or rather an inconsequential moment in time. For me, it’s in these everday, unremarkable moments that the past is revealed – where history really comes alive.

Of course the man in the foreground looking at the camera, and those people walking up the High Street are subjects of a particular moment (cameras are, Barthes beautifully put it, ‘clocks for seeing’), but there’s something about the bicycle which expresses it better. Below is another a detail from a photograph of 1911. Taken again in the High Street, a few metres back from the one above, Carfax Tower in visible the distance.

In the image below, something in the window of a shop on the High Street in 1909 has caught they eye of the man looking in as well as the two men walking towards him. The man with his hands in his pockets also describes a specific moment in time; the way he’s standing seems to suggest that he’s just that second stopped; something very different to being ‘stopped’ – as in the case of the two men walking – by the shutter of the camera. But again it’s the bicycle parked at the side of the road which, for me, best describes the moment; or more accurately, its continuity – its place in a passage of time. Even though the two men walking have clearly come from somewhere and will no doubt go somewher else, the bicycle is still much the better way of representing a moment within the passage of consectuive moments, both before and after.

But why is this the case?

One might assume that in a photograph there’s no better means of indicating someone’s presence than someone’s image. The detail above shows such a person on the right. But somehow, the bike and the absence of its rider are more indicative of presence than the man we can actually see, just as it is – as I’ve described above – a better indicator of a single moment in a wider sequence of moments.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes:

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

Forgetting the bicycle for a moment and looking instead at the man in the photograph, one knows that he is dead. His frozen pose alludes to this anterior future of which Barthes speaks. He also writes:

“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…”

The idea of time engorged conjures up apocalyptic images of disaster; Time not able to proceed but growing nonetheless, swelling within the frame of the picture, the world shaking as it struggles to chew and to swallow. The man in the picture above must and will fall victim to this catastrophe (he must and will die), but the man who’s left his bicycle (and as such the photograph) will instead be sure to survive.

I’d assumed it was the act of leaving the bicycle which gave the bicycle its status in the photograph; the fact that whoever left it would be sure to return and pick it up in a matter of seconds or at most minutes; that it was the idea of these few moments which countered the blurring of time I described above (where entire years can implode to fit the space a second – which itself alludes to the idea of engorged time). But in fact, I believe it’s the rider’s escape from the photograph which instills in them – the bicycles – their appeal to the viewer.We know the rider must be somewhere and it’s as if he’s still there; as if the moment from when he left his bike (for example in 1909), to picking it up again is still ongoing.

The detail above is taken from a photograph of Cornmarket in 1889. Looking at the entire image, one can see that all the buildings shown have since been demolished, and as sad as this is when one sees what stands there now, one doesn’t find it hard to imagine. Buildings are demolished all the time – it’s a fact of life. But when looking at the detail above, with its open window, it seems less conceivable that it’s since been destroyed, that it no longer exists.

Such a thought doesn’t occur however when I look at images of people.

The image above is a detail from the same photograph. Like the building they stand against, all these men are gone. But this, unlike with the detail of the window, does not strike me as inconceivable in any way; quite the opposite. Perhaps it’s the open window which makes the building’s demise (or non existence) seem so unlikely. The open window is indicative of life, of the everyday aspect of life. Who would open a window in a building set to be demolished? But then, who would dress and pose for death?

Above, Cornmarket 1907. Another rider has escaped impending disaster.

Also Cornmarker 1907. A group of people talk at the southern end, nearest to Carfax. Their clothes (particularly those of the women) position them unequivocally in the time in which they lived.

A number of questions come to mind as I look at them and the scene around them. What are they talking about? What were the hot topics of the day? Where is the woman pushing her bike? (Wherever it is, it’s too late to escape the imminent catastrophe). In this image however, that which captures my interest above all is the rain on the pavement.

Just as shadows give life to a photograph (without the sun beyond the frame of the photograph there can be no shadows within it) so puddles and reflections on wet pavements point to a time before the photograph was taken and, – like shadows with the sun – to the clouds above and beyond the gaze of the lens. Barthes declares that “the photograph is without a future” and while this might be the case, there’s is no doubt they have a past.

Sometimes, photographs (without shadows, puddles, windows open and closed) can look flat and lifeless, as if they’re merely constructions (tableau vivant) designed in their entirety, as counterfeits for the reality they purport to be. They have no future, but, more importantly perhaps, no past. The rain in the photograph above however counters this; it gives the photograph its validity, it is a recognisable sign that something came before.

The detail above is taken from the same picture (Cornmarket 1907), and, rather sentimentally perhaps, I was drawn to the rocking horse in the window. One can’t help but wonder what happened to this somewhat peripheral object (peripheral in terms of the overall photograph). I can well imagine it languishing in some dusty attic, forgotten, even broken… although, of course it might be in very rude health, respected as an old family heirloom. And herein lies its point of interest. Whatever its current state – if indeed it still exists – here, in the picture, it’s yet to occupy the mind of the person to whom it belonged. It’s yet to form the memories which that person would have carried with them throughout their life, memories which they might have passed down and which might, to this day be talked about. Perhaps this rocking horse no longer exists as a physical object, but maybe somewhere, it continues to move in words, written or spoken.

The rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris by Walter Sickert

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The photograph below is a rather poor reproduction of a painting hanging in The Ashmolean museum, Oxford. It is perhaps, my favourite painting in the museum. Painted by Walter Sickert (1860-1942), it’s one which I have stood before for some considerable time, not least quite recently in order to write the following.

In my previous entry, regarding Cy Twombly’s Panorama, I discussed, albeit briefly, how it was quite impossible to fully appreciate a painting through a reproduction. Of course that much is obvious, but I wanted to write about this particular work to see just how differently I perceived it compared with the work by Cy Twombly, which, as I say, I’ve only ever seen in a book.

As can be seen from the photograph, one of the things I noticed straight away about this painting was the light reflecting off its surface. Not really anything to do with the painting perhaps, but, nonetheless it forced me to move, to find an angle where I wouldn’t be dazzled, and by doing so, I discovered something about the painting itself. What’s important here, is the fact that a painting isn’t just a surface on which paint is applied (although the appreciation of surface and texture can only be attained when faced with the real thing). Instead, a painting is as much about the space around it. Of course, Walter Sickert would have no idea that his painting would one day grace a wall in the Ashmolean museum, dazzled by the lights. But he would have walked whilst painting it, or rather moved before the easel. He would have stood in front, to the left, to the right, and this movement in the act of painting is, I believe, important in the act of viewing and appreciating the result.

So what do we see in this work? Well, it’s a road in Paris (the rue Notre-Dame des Champs), one on which the painter John Singer Sargent had a studio. Given the muted palette and bruised sky, the picture shows a scene from about that time of day when the night begins removing all the colours from the world, when the last light in the sky, makes all manner of colours that seem to last for just a few seconds. It’s a wet end to a day that’s more than likely seen nothing but rain. The concertinaed facades of the shops with their heavy paint dragged down the surface, the downward strokes of the windows in the buildings opposite and the vague forms from which the scene’s almost entirely comprised, all suggest the fading light and drenched air of an autumn or winter evening.

There are puddles in the street which soak up the sickly light of the cafe like a man with a sponge mopping up blood after a brawl. The road is somewhat sickly and the light of the cafe offers us a refuge from whatever is coming just around the corner. Two or three figures stand just ahead. Are they moving? Are they walking towards us? Away? It’s hard to tell. But a feeling of isolation, pervading the picture, is I believe augmented by their presence.

As I moved before the painting, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, the colours seemed to shift. The bluey-violet sky shimmered above the drowned buildings, and the reflections in the road revealed new colours the more I looked. Looking at the painting in the flesh, I felt – compared with looking at the reproduction above – that my eyes had to move in order to cross from one side to the other. In a reproduction, the spaces are of course greatly reduced and everything can be seen or grabbed in an instant. In the flesh (and this painting is very much about the physicality of the world) you look as you might when standing somewhere in town.  You look with more than just your eyes; you experience the painting with your body; one that stands alone before the canvas.

Returning for the moment to the glare of the lights, I found that when I looked at the painting from the right hand side, the glare subsided, and that all that remained were just a few specs where the paint was raised above the rest of the surface. Furthermore, from this position, the painting seemed to open up, as if the concertinaed lines of the shop facades were being pulled, expanding like bellows. Here, the street seemed to pull me on. Standing directly in front, it almost seems about to collapse upon itself.

I’m not trying to suggest that this is all deliberate on the part of the artist, but to emphasise the fact that the act of looking at a painting is a physical experience. Sickert would have known this street, he would have recalled what it was like to stand there. He would have moved before the canvas as he painted, and, as a viewer, the way I stand and move before the canvas reflects that. It is, in the end, the only way to get to know art.

www.nicholashedges.co.uk

Windows 1

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This image was part of a collection I bought a few years ago. I had no idea what I was buying at the time and was intrigued by the image reproduced below.

A young woman and a car

In the photograph, a young woman poses beside a car. The awkwardness of her pose and the uncertainty in her face suggests that she is attending a special occasion of some kind. In the second image below, she is joined moments later (or perhaps it was before) by a young man (her partner?) who also looks a little uncertain, not necessarily because of what he’s about to do, but rather because of what he’s doing at that exact moment, i.e. having his photo taken. Perhaps they are young lovers about to get married? Of course we’ll never know.

A young couple and a car

What intrigues me about these pictures are the details. Looking again at the second photo – which might of course, in the course of time, have come before the one above it (“…if things are perceived as discrete parts or elements they can be rearranged…” as Bill Viola writes) – a car has appeared on the left, moving into shot just as the shutter is released. Even though the young man has also ‘appeared,’ it’s nevertheless the car which gives us the sense of time passing; it is a vehicle for what Sontag describes in her book, ‘On Photography’ as “time’s relentless melt.”

Who was in the car as it drove past? Where was it going? Where had it come from?

History often comes to us ‘top ‘n’ tailed’, where all that went before the period in question, and all that came thereafter is removed, leaving us with an event which reads like a novel; conveniently packaged with a beginning, a middle and an end. To some extent, regarding this, the first image serves as an illustration, whereas with the second, the car tells us that something came before the ‘beginning’, and that something will follow ‘the end’. As a painter, Degas was inspired by photography, and used this device to give his works a greater sense of movement. It’s not so much a means of accentuating movement with regards to that which is shown, but moving the viewer into the world that’s hidden beyond its edges. 

Just as in the first photograph I looked at, my viewpoint shifts as I become aware of the image’s other protagonists. From in front of the couple, and in the guise of the person who took the photo, I glimpse the couple as if I can see them out the window of the car. It doesn’t last for long, but it shows how an image can be opened up by such small details.  

Windows in photographs have always interested me for much the same reason. Within the context of an image, like those above, they provide a means of escape, or again, as in the case of the first photograph I discussed, a means of concealment. They act as eyes, reflecting – literally – the world around them; the world beyond the limits of the picture’s edge. Spatially and temporally, there’s always more to a photograph that that contained within its borders; and for me, a photograph’s appeal, often resides in how it allows access to these spaces.

In the detail below, we can see in some of the windows, the sky and the trees reflected from beyond the frame of the camera; another way in which a camera can capture that beyond its reach.

Windows are also evidence (or perhaps reminders) of ordinary people living their everyday lives without a thought for the subject or subjects below – in this case the couple on the pavement. They conceal those who are perfectly oblivious to the chemical annexation of whatever inconsequential moment in time is being captured. And as a result, this invisible population can often breathe life into a photograph well beyond the stage upon which the action is taking place.

In his book ‘Camera Obscura,’  Roland Barthes describes a portrait by James van der Zee, of a Black American family taken in 1926. Barthes writes:

“On account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait.”

What Barthes perhaps means, is that the necklace has a provenance, and therefore seems to speak more about the woman’s life than anything else in the photograph. It is a cherished object, worn perhaps for the occasion of the picture (just as the necklace has perhaps been worn by the young lady in the images above). For me, this is, in a way, analogous to the windows in the first picture and the car in the second, for they are small details compared with the picture’s subjects, but details which, nonetheless, build for us a bigger picture of the world the subjects inhabit.
 
The closed windows in the building then, reflect the world beyond the edges of the photograph, they provide evidence of a world beyond the stage. Furthermore, they are windows onto the stage, through which those sitting, standing or passing behind might, just like the driver in the car, catch a glimpse of the actors.
The open windows however provide us with something a little different. Open a window and the outside world pours in; sounds, smells, the noise of the traffic and passing conversations. In other words – life. They serve to animate the scene, again just like the car, and through them we can let our imaginations wander, to discover for themselves, more of this world long since vanished.

Secret Police 2

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I want to look at another photograph from the book ‘Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police.’

Leaving aside how the photograph came to be taken, this is, I think, a stunningly beautiful shot. Its tonal quality, the grain of the picture’s surface, the soft focus and the gradation of light from the centre of the photograph to shadow at its edges, all make for an image which revolves around the child and which, we might say, celebrates the innocence of childhood. There’s a sense of wonder in the boy’s face, his eyes staring at something we cannot see in the distance. And yet there’s also a sense of foreboding (light becomes shadow); in the figure on the pavement behind them, in the solitary car on the road, the grey concrete blocks and the double lights of the lampost which mirror the shape of the child’s eyes as if they too are watching, not what lies ahead, but what is down below. There is perhaps no point in looking ahead to the future, but the boy does it anyway.

Besides the boy and the street lamps, only the car has eyes. The woman beside him is wearing dark glasses, the figure behind is little more than a blur, and even the tower blocks seem blind without their windows. No-one inside is looking out. People are there to be looked at, nothing else. And yet the boy stares ahead, oblivious. His body is tense – perhaps from the cold – as if he’s about to run towards the future.

Of course there is one person in this image I haven’t mentioned, and that’s the person who took the picture; a  member of the Czech secret police following the woman and her child. However, unlike with the previous photograph, I do not feel I’m there within the frame. I’m very much an outsider looking in. But given how the photograph was taken (perhaps from the surveillance officer’s waist) my viewpoint is subsequently low, as if I too am a child, accentuating the sense that this is a photograph about the boy, or rather childhood: innoncence in contrast to its loss under such a regime. But these of course are interpretations made some 27 years in the future. The fact is, that this was a photograph taken for the purposes of surveillance, for control. In reality, it’s far from being the beautiful photograph I said it was earlier.

Yet it is still that: beautiful.

Over time its purpose,  as an object of surveillance, has slipped away, leaving it open to aesthetic appreciation. But there is an awkwardness here, something uncomfortable in the fact, and this is an area to whcih I’ll be returning.

Panorama by Cy Twombly – Part 1

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The first painting I have chosen is Cy Twombly’s 1955 painting Panorama.

The first thing to say about discussing a work of art which one has only seen in a book, is that any view is going to be extremely restricted. To be fully appreciated, art (whether paintings, installations, sculpture and so on) needs to be experienced. The impact of a painting can be felt as much with the body as the eyes, and a reproduction found in a book will only reveal a fraction of its ‘story’. (I never cease to be amazed  – and indeed, depressed – at how people when standing before a painting in a gallery will choose to view it through the screen of their camera, rather than look directly). This difference between experiencing a painting and seeing it in a book is itself an interesting area to research, and one I’ll be looking at over the coming months. Nevertheless, reproductions can still tell us a great deal, so with this in mind I shall begin with the painting shown above.    
I have always been drawn to a certain kind of aesthetic, one which you’ll often find in places of decay, where time has taken hold of a building and chewed upon it like a dog with a bone. The aesthetic of time or the passage of time is beautiful in its relentlessness; from crumbling walls and cracked plaster, to buckled paint layers and the weary look of old books and photographs. It’s something which, for whatever reason, captivates me, whether I’m there amongst the glorious ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum; walking down a hot and dusty street in Siracusa; looking at a long abandoned tomb in Montparnasse or standing in my old school, just before its scheduled demolition. Indeed, it was in my old school that I photographed the window sills, scratched with the names of bored pupils from the 1970s, and it wasn’t so much the names that interested me, rather, the look of those names; an aesthetic which we find in Cy Twombly’s Panorama, painted in 1955.
Before Demolition

I can anticipate what many might say when confronted with a painting such as this. ‘I could do that’ is a usual retort, or even worse, ‘a child could do better.’ Which is of course not the point. Whenever someone says ‘I could do that,’ I always point out that they haven’t, and that, in all likelihood, they’d have no reason to try. ‘I could’ in this instance, is just another way of saying ‘I haven’t’. And while I’m not going to extol its virtues as a great work of art, a work of art this painting is and one which, for whatever reason I’m particularly drawn to.
But why? What is it about this piece that I find so engaging?
Without wishing to sound too shallow, first and foremost it’s the look of the painting which appeals. Looks matter for me in art, but that’s not to say art should be beautiful (nothing could be further from the truth); but it needs to be engaging. In order to hold the attention of the viewer, in order to attract them in the first place, you need to trigger something within them. To use a rather crude analogy, it’s rather like the cover of a book and the subsequent opening line. Get it right and your story with its deep themes and intricate plots may well get the chance to be revealed. Get it wrong and no matter how perfect the rest of the book, the potential reader will never get to know. As I’ve said, this is a crude analogy, and I don’t wish to dwell on the idea of a painting being analogous to a book; but nonetheless artists have something to say and how they say it matters. Of course there are no rules governing taste, and what one person likes another will dislike, or even hate.
In the case of Panorama, it’s a painting I’ve come to love.
Looking at this painting (a detail is shown above) is like looking at a wall upon which people have scratched words and names, which then over time have lost their shape and meaning. The scratches are words or signifiers reduced to a new kind of text yet to be deciphered. Not that as a viewer I’m trying to make sense of all the lines or even groups of lines. This isn’t a game of ‘pick-up-sticks,’ where individual elements are teased out from the apparent chaos.

Sicily

Something which in a moment was possessed with meaning, means nothing now, and all those moments, layered one on top of the other, create as a result, a palimpsest of ambiguous symbols signifying a strange kind of nothingness; a presence which at the same time is also an absence. People come and people go, and in some respects, this painting is for me a work about time – about the simultaneity of what I’ve just described: presence and absence.

Of course we know that this is the work of one man, but even so, there is a sense of a multitude of meanings. If it’s not a collection of thoughts, then it’s a mass of independent actions; a multitude of presents, wrapped up in a simultaneous slab of the past.
The shades of grey, smudges and rapid scrawls, also call to mind a blackboard, on which someone has poured out their thoughts in the hope of distilling them down into an equation – a simple truth. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of the blackboard (as well as mathematics); the half revealed texts and mathematical symbols, the swirling smudges of rubbings out, the dust and the physicality of thought. (I’m only glad we didn’t have whiteboards or even worse, smartboards when I was at school). This could be a painting about obfuscation, of concealment, where something has been scratched out and hidden from view. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, a painting that is looking, searching for that something which remains elusive?
We can follow lines, from one to the next in our own search, but we’re always held on the surface; we cannot penetrate the painting’s depth. And depth there must be, for the work could not have been made in an instant, but gradually over the course of time. It is then a panorama, viewed in a moment, and made of many thousands.

Secret Police 1

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The first image I want to look at (taken from a book called ‘Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police’ from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes; ÚSTR, Prague 2009, 1st edition) shows a scene captured from the window of an apartment block in May 1980.

The net curtain hanging in front of the closed window serves to conceal the identity of the photographer, not only from those outside, but also from us as we look at the picture; more so even, than the fact the photographer is standing behind the camera. Nevertheless, despite the fact they can’t be seen, one is aware of the photographer’s presence. It’s almost as if the camera has captured something beyond the reach of its lens; the secret policeman is out of sight, but never out of mind, just as he was every single day, throughout the time of Communist rule in what was then Czechoslovakia.
The net curtain serves to obscure our view of the world outside, but far from removing us from what is taking place down in the street, it seems instead to immerse us in its here and now (or rather there and then). It becomes the means by which the light from that single moment in May 1980 is frozen, rather than the click of the camera’s shutter.

As I look at the photograph, the identity of the voyeur is both concealed and revealed. The space before the net curtain (that inside the room) becomes the world around me now, here in the present. I look at the image in silence (or to put it another way, I watch the image) and become aware of my breathing as well as every little noise around me; the hum of my computer, the ticking of a clock, a bird singing in the garden. It’s as if the plane of the photograph has moved a few inches forward, as if the photograph begins just beyond the curtain, with the pot of old flowers on the window sill. We are the secret police, watching through the window 30 years in the future.

This paradox is one of the consequences of photography, whatever the particular photograph we’re studying. In fact, however we research the past, we become like secret police, following people, keeping notes, putting notes in files. We document their lives as if we’re trailing them, following them down the street, around buildings or even in their own homes. And yet of course we’re always far in the distance. We follow on behind, yet we’re always way ahead. 

Returning to our image, we can assume the person being followed is the woman entering the apartment block opposite. She turns a little, as if she’s aware that she is being watched. At first glance, it’s as if she’s also being watched by the children on the right, but when we follow their gaze, we can see that two of them are looking beyond the frame of the photograph, somewhere down the street to the left. The woman being followed – our ‘target’ – is glancing that way too, as if something has made a noise. Perhaps that noise startled whoever was watching enough to take the picture?
As I look at the photograph, I rewind the scene a little. There’s the noise and its aftermath, then, in a flash I’m there walking through the doorway, stepping into the shadows beyond, my footsteps clattering, mixed in with the noise which slowly falls away in a receding echo. And as my viewpoint shifts as the observer, so I move between the scene’s protagonists at which the plane of the photograph falls away completely. Was it perhaps a broken window they heard?
Back in the room (and here in my room in the present day) I lean back, as if to avoid the possibility the target might turn her head completely and look up at the window behind, at that from behind which I’m looking 30 years in the future. I look away from her and ahead at the windows opposite. There are two of them, one open, the other closed, both dressed in the same net curtains through which I’m also peering. The sound I’ve described has found its way through the open window, carried on the wind,   along with the children’s conversation and the woman’s footsteps below. Is there someone there too, hiding behind the curtain? A neighbour looking to see what the noise was, or another member of the secret police following the same person, or even someone else? Or perhaps it’s someone else entirely who stands opposite, looking like me at a photograph somewhere in the future, one in which I’m looking back from behind a net curtain, there in the window across the street. 

An Introduction

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“Such is the photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see.”
Roland Barthes

The aim of this project is to write about photographs; about those things they let me see but which they cannot say. I will select, mostly at random, photographs from some of my books, as well as those in my own collection and write whatever comes to mind as I look at them. From time to time I might discuss them in light of the work of writers like Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, but my aim is to keep things simple, insofar as I will write about my own personal experience of looking at, and on occasion, holding each of the images.

Photographs are like the night sky, or as Susan Sontag writes – ‘the delayed rays of a star.’ They show us something that was and is, but which at the same time isn’t any longer. Each one is a paradox where the act of looking creates a space in which the observer and observed (as regards photographs taken before we were born) are both absent and present at one and the same time. A whole new dimenison is opened up, where the presentness of the past becomes most apparent. It’s as if the act of photographing slows the light from the photographed being or beings to the point of being still, without it actually coming to a complete stop.

Looking at a photograph is not only a visual thing, but something which brings into play our embodied imagination. The term ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ is often used to describe the phenomenon of watching dance on stage, where members of the audience feel with their bodies what is happening in front of them. And while photographs might seem like static images, the image itself, like the light which caused it to be made, is merely slowed rather than stilled. With our embodied imaginations, we can speed the light up and see, indeed participate in what came next in the seconds which followed.

Light and Sound

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Whilst updating the Family Tree section of my website, I listened again to part of an interview I recorded with my Nana in December 2007. She died just under a year later and the three hours I spent with her that afternoon, talking about her life have come to be amongst the most important I can remember. And whilst the content of our conversations were often moving, listening to it now, two years after her death, I began to think about how the act of listening to her, now that she is no longer with us affected me, comparing it to how I feel, when looking at photographs of those who have died. Does the difference between the two media, between light and sound, change the way we respond to the past? And if so, how?

Fragment: GPS to Midi

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I’ve been looking for a way of converting GPS data to midi as part of a project based on a fragment of mediaeval pottery which I found in the Museum stores at Standlake in Oxfordshire. The GPS data derives from a walk I made around the area where the pot was discovered during an excavation in 1986 (St. Aldates in Oxford).

Part of the project articulates the idea of the pot’s creation (on a potters wheel) by using a turntable on which a vinyl record will play a fragment of an audio piece, the rest being composed of silence (or at least the crackle of the vinyl). The idea for the audio composition was to create something using GPS data. But how could this be turned into midi information?

The image below shows the route recorded on my GPS device.

Fragment Sound Walk 01 Garmin

Originally, I’d coverted the data into midi (via photoshop) as in the image below, but the result was too complicated, and not a little messy.

Fragment Sound Walk 01 Midi

It was whilst considering how one makes paper snowflakes, that I went from cutting holes in a fragment of paper to the holes of old piano rolls. What I needed was something which was more like this. Instead of trying to copy the line of the walk completely therefore, I have instead blocked in notes where there are points on the GPS map as in the images below.

Firstly, in Photoshop, I combine a screenshot of the map with one of the midi inspector in Cubase.

Fragment 1

Then, where there’s a circle on the GPS line, I create a note in the nearest ‘box’.

Fragment 2

The result, when compared with my earlier attempt is now much neater and easier to work with.

Fragment 3

Heavy Water Sleep

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Continuing from what I was discussing yesterday (see Humument), I decided to make a start on my own ‘Humument’ by reading the first page of Pilgrms of the Wild by Grey Owl, using the text to describe something about the moment in which I was reading it. Given the snow and the freezing conditions outside, I was surprised at what I came up with, and very pleased with the result. The image below shows the original pages with my amended version below:

It goes to show how this technique can lead to unexpected, and in this case, rather beautiful results. I would never have thought before of describing snow as ‘water sleep’, but as my eyes scanned the page, the combination of words lept out at me.

My plan is to rework a page a day – not necessarily every day – and to rework the same pages with the Diary of Adam Czerniakow in mind.

A Humument

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In January this year, I used words from two seemingly unrelated books to create an installation in Shotover Country Park as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. The piece was called The Woods, Breathing, the title coming from an entry in the diary of Adam Czerniakow, who was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto up until his death in 1942.

In his diary, on January 19th 1940, Czerniakow describes a book he’d read, of which, he wrote: ‘The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.’ The book was Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl, and his comment is especially poignant given the horrors of the time in which he was living. It’s as if in the book, he found the freedom he craved, freedom which vanished as soon as the book was closed. The previous year, a few months after the start of the Nazi Occupation, he wrote how he was ‘constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times.’ There is a sense then, when he describes Pilgrims of the Wild that he is also envying the author, Grey Owl.

I’ve always seen Grey Owl’s book as a map, as in many respects all books are, maps through fictional landscapes, half conjured up in the minds of the author and his or her readers. Having read Czerniakow’s diary, reading Pilgrims of the Wild bought me closer, not only to him but to the time in which he was living, as if reading the book was a shared experience; as if we were walking through the same landscape, emerging at the end in very different places. That is not to say of course that reading the book enabled me to understand what it was like to live in those terrible times – nothing can ever do that. But by reading the words he would have read, it was as if I was following in his footsteps.

Looking up from the page, gazing out the window at the sky made me consider the present, the moment in time in which I was living. The sky was that of the book’s landscape, and that which Czerniakow would have seen outside his own window. We must remember, although it seems quite obvious, that the past too was once the present. By understanding this, we can begin to find indviduals lost to the pages of history. We don’t know what it’s like to experience the horrors of Nazi persecution, but reading the book beomes a shared experience, both mentally and kinaesthetically. It is an everyday activity, which opens up a crack through which we can glimpse the past.

Tom Phillips’ ‘treated Victorian novel’ – A Humument – (a page from which is pictured above) has always interested me; the technique of taking a text and changing it to make something entirely new is appealing for a number of different reasons. Every conversation we have, letter we write or note we take borrows from conversations, letters and notes spoken and written over the course of centuries (depending of course on how long the language has been used). Similarly the way we move, whether walking, sitting, standing or reading, borrows from the ways people have moved, again over the course of many hundreds, if not thousands of years. For me, Tom Phillip’s technique as used in The Humument articulates this. It’s as if we’re in the same landscape created by the original work (A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, first published in 1892) and yet are making our way through it in an entirely different way, as if the words are breadcrumbs on a trail, most of which have long since vanished.

As we walk down streets today, across parks, or through woods, we find ourselves within the same place as those who walked there a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred years before. We use the same words, we move the same way, but find ourselves interpretating the place quite differently. But it is the same place.

I want to useTom Phillips’ technique and create a new work from Pilgrims of the Wild, a page from which can be seen below; a work that articulates both my time of reading the book and that of Czerniakow’s.

Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl

Sail

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Carrying on with the work I did in Australia, I’ve spent the last couple of days videoing the canvas ‘sail’ that I made there, which was itself made from the pattern of several walks made around Newcastle, NSW. This work (‘Repaired Sail of HMS York (1828)’) is in many respects linked to a piece I made for my third Mine the Mountain exhibition called  ‘Old Battle Flags‘ and is about the feel of the wind – the wind being something which although one may read about in history (particularly in the context of sailing) one can only experience in the present (of course the same could be said of everything else, but in light of the theme of this residency, the wind is especially pertinent).

This piece is about the disparity between language and experience. The wind we feel today is the same wind that’s blown over – and indeed through – the centuries and millennia. In winter the wind may blow from the east, from the vast and distant land of Siberia – a place well beyond the horizon but nevertheless a place which exists all the same. 

The sail is made from my own past experiences, and the wind a reminder of movement in the past – that which is missing from the pages of history. It’s also about the everydayness of the past – something which we take often for granted like so much else but which is integral to our experience of the world.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024