Shadows Archives - Nicholas Hedges

The Past in Pastoral

June 9, 2015 by Nicholas Hedges

July 1st 2016 will mark the 100th anniversary of the infamous Somme offensive. Having already made a lot of work about World War I, I want to mark this anniversary with some new pieces, working around the theme of ‘shared moments of pastoral’.

There have been numerous starting points which, in no particular order, I will outline below.

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.” Paul Fussell

“Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful – the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while clots of bright dandelions, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth. Nearly all the better trees have come out, and the birds sing all day in spite of shells and shrapnel…” Paul Nash

‘The next day, the regiment began the long march to the Front. In the heat of early summer, nature had made attempts to reclaim the violated ground and a deceptive air of somnolence lay on the landscape. “The fields over which the scythe has not passed for years are a mass of wild flowers. They bathe the trenches in a hot stream of scent,” “smelling to heaven like incense in the sun.” “Brimstone butterflies and chalk-blues flutter above the dugouts and settle on the green ooze of the shell holes.” “Then a bare field strewn with barbed wire, rusted to a sort of Titian red – out of which a hare came just now and sat up with fear in his eyes and the sun shining red through his ears. Then the trench… piled earth with groundsel and great flaming dandelions and chickweed and pimpernels running riot over it. Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron, a smell of boots and stagnant water and burnt powder and oil and men, the occasional bang of a rifle and the click of a bolt, the occasional crack of a bullet coming over, or the wailing diminuendo of a ricochet. And over everything, the larks… and on the other side, nothing but a mud wall, with a few dandelions against the sky, until you look over the top or through a periscope and then you see the barbed wire and more barbed wire, and then fields with larks in them, and then barbed wire again.”

As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.’ Neil Hanson

“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.” Filip Muller on the murder of a friend in Auschwitz

Photography: The Colour of Shadows

August 25, 2014 by Nicholas Hedges

As shown in a previous blog, this is a picture of my grandparents’ garden in Headington, Oxford, taken sometime in the mid 1970s.

This was, growing up, a very special place for me…

…I remember well my grandad’s vegetable patch, the plastic greenhouse and the Victoria plum tree (all shown above); the brick outhouses with their giant spiders (in which the red tricycle was kept); the large apple tree and the wooden lattice-work gate. I remember too the giant Christmas tree (pictured below behind the fir tree), planted – when the tree was considerably smaller – when my mum was a girl.

The following two photographs were also taken in Headington, some 60 years earlier at the time of the First World War (or a few years before – the second photograph is possibly 1908). They are by one of the pioneers of autochrome photography, Ethelreda Laing and show her two daughters, Janet and Iris.

What’s interesting about these photographs is that they were taken in what is now Bury Knowle Park at a time when the house was a private residence. What makes them even more interesting is the fact they are in colour. But what is it about a colour photograph that enables me to better connect with the referent? (This is a subject I started to discuss before: see ‘Empathy and the First World War (Part 2)‘.)

The photograph below shows me and my brother in the garden of the house where we grew up, also in Headington.

This photograph which, like the photograph from Bury Knowle, shows two children enjoying the garden, was taken c.1974. Looking at it now, I’m drawn to the patterns of light and shadow on the fence behind.

The fences were always well creosoted and when the sun shone they exuded a wonderful smell. I can smell it now, just by looking at this image, but what is more, I can feel the pattern of sun and shadow, the sensation of the cool dry earth below – the smell of the firs. It’s a synaesthetic image in that I can almost taste the pattern.

If the image above was in black and white, I doubt I’d have the same response. When we look at an image in black and white, it seems to me that our memory is stimulated less than if the image is in colour. When looking at photographs taken long before we were born this hardly seems to matter, but when looking at a colour image – such as that of the girls above – taken long ago, something strange seems to happen.

It seems to me, that a colour photograph is more likely to trigger a physical response than one which is black and white.

First of all, I’ll look at a selection of black and white images.

The image below is of my mum and dad. It was taken c.1960 in my grandparents’ garden (as can be gleaned from the windows – seen in the second image above).

This image, of course, elicits a response in that I recognise my parents and the location. But that is all.

The next image was taken at Carfax, Oxford in 1893 and shows St. Aldates looking south towards Christ Church.

The image also elicits a response in that although most of the buildings shown have all disappeared, Tom Tower – in the distance – is still standing. I recognise the location as one I have experienced countless times before – although of course I could not have experienced what is shown in the photograph.

Looking at the photo more closely, one does begin to establish an empathetic response based on more than just recognition.

Again this is something I have talked about before but here, empathy is established through the movement of the man and woman. They have no idea that they are being photographed, an obliviousness which is vital for an empathetic response. It is an image of now, of the everyday. We can easily imagine the man and woman, unfrozen by time and the camera’s shutter, continuing up past the old Town Hall towards Carfax, deep in conversation.

But how do old photographs differ when they are in colour?

This photograph was taken 13 years after the one above and what strikes me about it, is the fact that like the one above, taken in my garden, I can feel it. And what I feel is the temperature difference between the shadows and the lawn where the sun is shining. I can imagine the texture of the grass and the tree, I can hear the wind and feel the air; and yet this photograph was taken 108 years ago. The shadows are living – they are not dead as they can often be in black and white photographs; they have a colour.

The same can be said of the next image, taken during the First World War.

One can feel the light, the heat of the sun; the cool of the shadows. Again the shadows live. The image too is abundant with texture which I know would be absent if the image was in black and white.

It seems to me that I’m responding to these images kinaesthetically; my mind, memories and experience read them, which is why perhaps I find often these old colour photographs – while amazing – so unsettling. My mind reads them, my body feels them and yet when the image was taken, I did not exist. There is a conflict between existence and non-existence; the age old tussle between life and death.

There is no time in the past; all those things shown in the images above are as much a part of the past as each other. All there is to separate them is a rule against which, the increasing improbability of my coming into being is measured.

Shadows 3

July 7, 2013 by Nicholas Hedges

I was looking at something recently which made me think of the work I’ve been exploring around the backdrops used in World War One postcards, such as that below:

The idea of movement has played a key part in my ongoing research, and I’ve been thinking for some time of giving these backdrops a sense of movement which, I realised I could do by videoing the shadows cast by trees onto a canvas, as per the video below.

Another shadow is that in the photograph below, taken on the stairwell of William Wordsworth’s school in Hawkshead, in the Lake District. The shadow is something he might well have seen in that very same place over 200 years ago and as such, is something that is simultaneously both ancient and fleeting – much like history itself.

History of course comprises events that are by their nature transient. A shadow is also an everyday occurrence – something quite insignificant; and yet behind every significant historical event – including those of our own personal histories – lies a vast, incomprehensible network of everyday events. It is mind-blowing to think that every one of my ancestors had to lead their lives exactly as they did in order for me to be born me. From the time (literally) they got up every day, to when they went to bed, everything they did in between had to be as it was. One step out of place and I would not be here.

Shadows 2

April 17, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Recently I bought ‘The Book of Shadows’ (edited by Jefferey Fraenkel), which I found whilst browsing in Blackwell’s bookshop, a book of found photographs all of which contain the shadow of the photographer along with that which is photographed. It’s something in which I have been interested for some time with some of my own family photographs containing just such shadows.

It called to mind as I flicked through the pages, looking at photographs such as that below, the words of Austerlitz in W.G. Sebald’s book of the same name, in which the character Austerlitz states that fortifications:

“…cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

In many respects, the same could be said of any building or even, individuals. We all cast the shadow of our own mortlity before us, and, in respect of what Barthes has written in Camera Lucida (“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.”) these shadows in these pictures could be said to be just that.

Below is one of the images from the book. There is something poetic about this image in particular, in the way the train tracks lead us to the distance, to the future, almost as if they are there to transport this shadow of the photographer’s own ‘destruction’.

Below is one from my own collection showing my grandfather, my aunt and my mother.

Shadows 1

April 9, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

I’ve lately been reading ‘A Short History of the Shadow’ by Victor I. Stoichita which begins by explaining how the art of painting and sculpture first came into being (at least in the minds of men like Pliny and Athenagoras, before the cave painters of Lascaux, for example, were discovered) through the tracing of shadows. In his Natural History (xxxv, 43) Pliny says:

“Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs…”

Athenagoras recounts the same story as follows:

“The manufacture of dolls was inspired by a young woman: very much enamoured of a man, she drew his shadow on the wall as he slept; then her father, charmed by the extraordinary likeness – he worked with clay – sculpted the image by filling the contours with earth.”

As Stoichita writes: “What is fairly apparent from both texts is that the primary purpose of basing a representation on the shadow was possibly that of turning it into a mnemonic aid; of making the absent become present. In this case the shadow’s resemblance (similitudo) to the original plays a crucial role… The constantly changing real shadow of the beloved man will escort him on his travels, while the image of his shadow, captured on the wall, will remain a memento opposed to the movement of the journey and will therefore have a propitiatory value. The real shadow accompanies the one who is leaving, while his outline, captured once and for all on the wall immortalizes a presence in the form of an image, captures an instant and makes it last.”

The verticalizing of the shadow – the projection of it onto a wall – and its likeness to the person from whom its being projected are both, according to Stoichita, “vital functions of this surrogate image… The lapidary details pertaining to the mechanism of verticalization are extremely important, since Pliny would certainly have been aware – as more than one passage from his work indicates – of a whole early metaphysics on the shadow (particularly on the shadow recumbent on the earth) and of its links with death. On close examination the text reveals its hidden meaning: on the eve of her beloved’s departure, Butades’ daughter ‘captured’, so to speak, the image of her lover in a verticality meant to last forever. Thus she exorcised the threat of death, and his image – making up for his absence – kept him forever upright, i.e. ‘alive’.”

Returning for a moment to the story of the lovers, Stoichita argues that this story appears incomplete, “Pliny has eliminated an important episode located somewhere between the young woman creating the silhouette and the final likeness being installed in the temple. This episode, without which the meaning of the extract is greatly diminished, is the death of the beloved.” Stoichita goes on to suggest that the story should actually read as follows:

1) The girl crates a surrogate image, which has a dual purpose: it must remind her of the face of the lover who is leaving (to go to war) and must exorcise the danger he is in.
2) The young man dies (probably heroically, probably on the battlefield).
3) (Because the beloved dies) the father creates a semblance whose function is to duplicate the one who has disappeared. This double has a ‘soul’ (in the form of a shadow) and a ‘body’ (in the form of the receptacle of this soul).
4) The clay semblance becomes a cult object in the temple at Corinth.

This semblance made by the girl’s father becomes therefore a funereal figure, an object “which ensures the young warrior – who, in the prime of life, falls on the battlefield – everlasting glory by immortalizing what he was in the eyes of subsequent generations: his name, his exploits, his career, the heroic end that establishes him once and for all as a man of excellence, one of the noble dead.”

I found this version of the story particularly interesting, as it ties in with the work I’ve been doing on World War I, during which of course millions of men left loved their ones, never to return. One can imagine each of their shadows drawn in outlines on wall right across the world, merging to become a single amorphous shadow blanketing the ground.

Stoichita also makes an interesting distinction between shadows cast in the day and at night. “Once the image is captured on the wall, time stands still… a shadow in sunlight denotes a moment in time and no more than that, but a nocturnal shadow is removed from the natural order of time, it halts the flow of progress.”