2009 sees the centenary of one of the most important works in the history of Modernism, Filippo Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto." In celebration, the Tate Modern recently held a major exhibition on Futurism which I heard and read much about, but sadly missed. This year, however, is certainly a good one on which to teach a course on Modern Literature, which I am currently doing for the first time.

I prepared my first tutorial for the course around the theme of "Manifestos for Modernism." Whilst many of the literary and artistic legacies of modernism can be traced back to the Victorian period, making the periodisation implied by the term "Modernism" somewhat problematic, there is no doubt that Modernism made itself known as a break with the past through a whole raft of self-conscious essays, statements and editorials explaining and justifying the new aesthetic and rebelling against the Victorian tenets of realism. Not only do we have Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," but also the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting," the editorial manifesto in Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine Blast, Ezra Pound's "Imagist Manifesto," and Virginia Woolf's essays such as "Modern Fiction," to name but a few that spring immediately to mind. Tangentially, and somewhat earlier than these, we also have arguably the most important manifesto of them all, Marx's Communist Manifesto.



All of these manifestos shout, rebel against the establishment, stake a claim for the new and the youthful and the energetic. Just read the rhythms and bold, urban metaphors of the opening two paragraphs of Marinetti's piece:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Marinetti goes on (naively, with the hindsight of World War One) to celebrate the anarchic power of technology, especially the automobile as a symbol of liberation:

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

It is startling to read a work like this. It is also, to my mind, vitally important that we look at the manifestos for modernism, as well as the literary and visual aesthetics that resulted. This is because, in the present moment, we are able to accommodate modernist art and literature fairly smoothly, blunting the radical edge it once had. What our postmodern age lacks is a sense of the really reactionary art work, the truly rebellious, and as a consequence modernist works from the pre-war period can seem conservative rather than stimulating.

Consider the case of contemporary or "modern" art (that is to say, work produced over the last half century or so). Modern art galleries today are generally happy places, integrated into cities (such as my local, the Baltic). They have cafés and baby changing facilities and are places to take granny visiting on a Sunday afternoon. The accessibility of art in the UK is something to be celebrated. However, integrated into public life in this way, art rarely disturbs or shocks; it does not occupy a place in the avant garde of culture in the truest sense of that term. With the possible exception of images of naked children - such as Tierney Gearon's I Am the Camera, which led to a police raid on the Saatchi gallery - rarely does art raise the hackles, or seem to break with a tradition that can be traced back to the dawn of Marinetti and his fellow modernists.

Contemporary art draws on the full spectrum of horror, sex and violence in a vain attempt to cause outrage in a culture that is used to seeing all laid bare on the daily news, or in cinema; responses to images neatly and safely confined in a gallery are, therefore, typically liberal and mild. One knows that the visionary or rebellious artist has been incorporated by society when Samuel Taylor Wood struts down a red carpet hand-in-hand with a 19 year old hunk, wearing a ball gown that would not look out of place on a Hollywood actress. Now Wood is a brilliant artist who probably knows full well the irony that she is part of celebrity culture. Her video of David Beckham sleeping is one of the most haunting installations I have seen at the Baltic. But that is precisely the irony: how can one offer a critique or observation of contemporary celebrity society, which Wood seemed to want to do in this piece which cast Beckham as a kind of sleeping beauty, when the artist is a celebrity themselves? Marinetti and other modernists put themselves against the mainstream of society, which they saw as bourgeois and decadent, and producing art which was smugly realist rather than subversive. In the postmodern period, rather than artists and writers being reactionary, rebellious, or strongly analytical of a society from which they separate themselves, the artist and their works have become folded in with society.

Back to modernism, then. And the trouble with studying modernist aesthetics is that it seems - well - less than modern, in the sense that the manifesto writers proclaimed it to be. In a modern art gallery, one may grumble of a Damien Hirst that "It's not art." But rarely, if ever, would that viewer say the same of Picasso's Guernica. T.S. Eliot was recently voted the Nation's Favourite Poet. Unless people were voting purely on the basis of having read the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, this must be a striking indication that The Waste Land, in its day so groundbreaking and visionary, now seems fundamentally normal, accessible. The same goes for Ulysses, regularly voted the most important novel of the twentieth century, and recently claimed as a being a work for "ordinary blokes." In a postmodern artistic culture that expresses itself to excess in a vain attempt to differentiate itself from the "noise" of a mass media, the modernist poem, painting or novel may even seem quiet and controlled.



In one of the most important essays about postmodernism, Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson talks about the way modernism was passionately repudiated

by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial."

Jameson goes on to argue, however, that in the postmodern era - with the folding of subversive art into wider culture that I have mentioned above - such attitudes have become archaic:

Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s.

Whilst modernist writings were once seen as radical, today the radical is the canonical mainstream. Thus the single most important thing about teaching and learning modernism is, it seems to me, to recapture the sense of energy, verve, and sheer guts that drove many of the modernist writers and artists.

When teaching my topic on manifestos, I asked a question to illustrate this point. Although modernism is often associated with the avant-garde elite, the Bloomsbury group rather than the common reader, Marinetti's "Futurist Manfisto" appeared not in some niche literary periodical, but on the front page of Le Figaro. Just consider that for a moment.

Le Figaro is and was a respected, fairly conservative newspaper. In 1909, it was arguably the most prominent daily paper in France. To publish a "Futurist Manifesto," with all its anarchic sentiment and glorious rebellion on the front page is something the word "chutzpah" was invented for (the Hebrew word appropriately acknowledges that unlike other modernists such as Pound, Marinetti campaigned against anti-Semitism). Just imagine the Frenchman, chocalat au lait in hand, spluttering croissant crumbs across the broadsheet, as he scans from reading about the King's activities in the Elysses Palace and the Caillaux conspiracy, to the sweeping, assertive, bold and brash statements of the Futurist.

An indication of how far we are from the possibility of such a shocking juxtaposition today comes when we try to hypothesise a modern parallel. Thinking of our newspaper is easy: the equivalent of Le Figaro of 1909 must be the Daily Telegraph.

But who is to appear on the front page, dominating that left hand column, incongruous alongside the picture of a soldier returning from Afghanistan, or David Cameron wafting his hands? Where is our modern Marinetti? Who would be his parallel today?

In my recent tutorial, someone sensibly suggested Nick Griffin. But the bumbling leader of the BNP, though certainly anarchic, would also utterly lack any of Marinetti's imagination. As already mentioned, Samuel Taylor Wood has already graced the front pages in her ball dress, so she is too well-known to qualify. Damien Hirst would be a bit predictable, and might just be trying to raise the value of his works. Turning to the literary arts, one might think of the fiery Norman Mailer, or the quirky Thomas Pynchon. But the former has now passed away, and the latter's more recent fiction like Inherent Vice seems almost, dare one say it, accessible. All these examples are also past their 50s. Marinetti was just 33 when he published the "Futurist Manifesto," and there is a definite sentiment across the modernist manifestos that to be physically old is also to be tied to the ideas of the past, whereas it is the young who must carry the flag of modernity.

My lack of examples is not intended to bemoan that we no longer have a new generation of truly reactionary, truly modern artists. It is, rather, to highlight - - within a postmodern context whereby the modern seems fairly traditional and conventional - just how radical and thrilling that early 1900s moment was. It was a true paradigm shift in the arts, ranking alongside the advent of perspectivism in painting, or the rise of the novel. Where our next paradigm is coming from, that will take us beyond the post-modern, I for one do not know. Any ideas?

Labels: Literature, Marinetti, modern art, modernism, Photography and Art, postmodernism

It is still dark when I set off, at around 7.00 in the morning, and a thick sugar of frost coats the ground. Though probably about minus 5, I am warm in my new Christmas gifts of a Merino wool base layer, and a fleece. Luckily, also, the track out to the farm is rutted and stony, and affords better grip than the greased tarmac of roads and pavements, and I walk quickly, hurrying to find a good spot before the dawn behind me finally breaks above the brow of Quarrington hill. Ahead of me the track remains a dark line, and I check behind me every now and then to see the pinkish light concentrated in the east, but meekly failing to break through and spread itself more generally across this morning world. At what point will that light colour change and shift, at once rapidly and yet somehow imperceptibly? At what precise moment does the vague gauze of oranges and pinks tip into daylight? I know that taking photographs at this time of day is the most difficult, because everything changes so fast, and a scene that looks good in one light has vanished by the time you can get your camera out. Happily, I have with me another Christmas gift, a Lowepro Fastpack, which allows me to carry all my gear and yet reach it by just swinging the bag from my shoulder. And so I can walk onwards, enjoying the remainder of the concealing night, confident that the moment a glance back shows me a good scene, I will be able to stop and shoot on the spot.

As I reach a line of trees, I see some possibility, and brush my way through tall grass, crumbling ice away as I pass, to reach a fence on which I can lean. Taking my camera out, I realise that if darkness is the enemy of the photographer - for without light, nothing can happen - the cold it often brings is his most able footsoldier. For it is only once I remove my gloves to fiddle with zips and buttons that I realise how cold it is. Otherwise snug in my layers, my fingers now tell me by their sluggishness that I need to get moving soon.



So I rather too hurridly dash off a few snaps, and set of again. It is only once I get back home that I realise that in my haste I have forgotten to check that the vibration reduction, essential for shooting in this poor light, was switched on. The blurry fringes of the trees in this image therefore tell the photographic weather.

Colour is now starting to smudge into the world. Firstly the grey greens of the fields, and then a rust of dead bracken. As I pass hedgerows, I amusedly set off anxious flurries of wings and leaves. But as I creep past the farm, and see the breakfast table through the lit window, with silhouettes cast against the walls, I feel somehow guilty. For what reason do I have to be out here, two miles from the nearest village, at this time of the morning, as others are only just getting up. I mentally note good reason for getting a dog number 36 - for of course dog walkers have an excuse at being about before the work day has begun. As it is, though, I wonder whether I dare, if challenged, admit that I am going out shooting - before revealing that my ammunition is a light sensitive electronic square, rather than a gun cartridge. Humour usually being at its most depleted at this time of day, I suspect that I would not dare be so witty, and just mumble something and be cast as a harmless hobbiest.

Anyway, I now hurry onwards, and find another half-shot in what is by now a duller half-light. I pause to watch a pair of squirrels squabble high in a pine tree. Their machine gun chatter seems somehow anachronistic in the quiet, but it is hard to tell whether they are really being agressive, or whether they are just circusing around, swinging and scurrying about the branches. It is with the gasp of the big tent audience that I see one of the squirrels suddenly lose his grasp and plumment, flailing, about thirty feet to the ground. I do not see him land, though I hear a thud. It is with relief that a long ten seconds later I see him scurry up the trunk again, to resume combat.

When I reach the ponds, it is not surprising that they are glassed with inch-thick ice. With the sun just now glowing in the background, the silhouettes, textures and washed-out colours in the scene are worth capturing.





But it is the details around about that are most interesting. Frost changes the natural world into a sharpened version of itself, setting off shapes and tracing lines of leaves with thin shards of ice.



After tarrying about the ponds with my camera out and gloves off, I am forced to move again. Just as I put my camera away, there is a rustle in the bushes ahead, and then not more than ten yards in front, two roe deer burst from cover and run across the path, leaping across the fence into the woods on the other side. I have often seen deer elsewhere on this walk, but never down by the ponds or this low in the woods, so I keep extra alert as I follow the path through the woods, looking out for further signs. Of course, now that I have my long lens out, I see or hear nothing. But instead I have time to muse that the last time I went this route, the bluebells were out, whereas today brown is the dominant colour on the wood floor.



However, it is easier going now, with the ground forged to an iron hardness by months of cold, that in spring, when showers turn it muddy underfoot. Soon I am retracing my steps back towards home, where the main road is now a buzz of commuter traffic. My day, too, starts, though I do appreciate the irony that as I sit at my computer, with the central heating having been turned off after its morning burst, I am colder indoors than I was out, where, bitter though the air was, I walked into my own warmth.

Labels: Photography and Art, walk, winter

It's that time of year again, when the photoblogging community slaps itself on the back and, to a selected few, issues the photoblog awards. Now I'm not in the running for any of these - and neither I should be, with the likes of Chromasia and Diane Varner out there. But I am proud to proclaim today that I am an award-winning photographer.

Yes, the award in question was for our local village show. Yes, I may have been competing against a ten year old's Disneyland snaps and a grandmother's photos of robins in her garden. But still, I am a bit pleased to have won the "Open" category and to have come second in the "Nature" category.

Now my winner in the first was one of my all-time favourite photos, this one of Mrs. Ishmael looking dreamily out of the window. I love the composition. And I'm quite pleased with the way I judged the exposure in the heat of the moment to get the cast of light just right, so that it falls off her face but leaves her back in shadow.

But I am a bit baffled by my nature award. Quite clearly, this shot which got second place was a posed photograph. Certainly, it's nice and sharp, and has a good bokeh (that's blurry foreground and background, to non photo geeks). But the light is falling wrongly across the owl's face, and the consequent shadow is just annoying. There should be a bit of sparkle in his eyes to really make it a worthy winner. In comparison, this other photo which I entered is far superior, technically and - to my mind - as a nature shot, capturing the spirit of the wildlife in action. But then, I guess it all depends on what the judges are looking for, skill or something to hang on the wall. Either way, I now have two rosettes hanging on mine.

Labels: competition, photoblogs, Photography and Art

A friend of mine, who is thinking of starting his own photoblog, asked me recently about the best way to ensure your photoblog attracts visitors. Now I must admit that I had never really thought about this analytically before. I use my photoblog for personal pleasure, and if it attracts some interest - and it does generate around 75 hits a day - then that is a bonus. But my friend's comment made me think that with a bit more thought and a little more effort, I could probably boost my profile quite considerably. So I have written the following five tips for creating an effective and popular photoblog, which I will start to follow more rigorously over the coming months.

Syndicate your photoblog. There are numerous directories out there that will pick up on your RSS feed and display your most recent photo. The big one is VFXY, but you could also cross-post to Flickr, Facebook and Picasa. If you run Pixelpost, as I do, you can take advantage of some of the plugins that allow these cross-postings to happen automatically, so for little or no extra effort on your part your visibility will increase significantly.

However, you should also be willing to add images to more specialised galleries. If I want serious critical feedback on my work, for example, I will post the relevant photo to Ephotozine.

Give as well as take. So you have put up your photoblog, and are now sitting in your armchair waiting for thousands of visitors to arrive, and the comments to start flowing. And when it does not happen, you sit in your armchair and wait some more. But why should you expect people to comment on your photoblog, if you are not yourself willing to go out and contribute to that community?

Before you check your overnight webstats, get into the habit of commenting on a different photoblog every day. Make your comments worthwhile - perhaps comment on a photo you do not like and explain why, rather than simply saying "good shot," which is nice but essentially unhelpful. If people start to value your input, they will also be willing to take a trip over to your photoblog and see how your shots compare.

Be warned, though. This is a technique for building constructive links with a community. It is not simply a way to build links to boost your Google site ranking, as to prevent comment spam most photoblog platforms set URLs in comment forms with the "nofollow" attribute, meaning Google's crawler will overlook these as links back to your site.

A word is worth a thousand pictures. Well, not exactly. But even if you have a dedicated group of regular viewers, and have built good links with other sites, how are you going to attract casual browsers through the Google search box? Unless your image has been tagged manually, no automated robot will be aware that you have a picture of a stag rutting at dawn in a misty Scottish valley unless you state this in words.

So, talk about what you are uploading. Use the tagging feature on your photoblog platform to tie text to an image, and make sure these tags appear somewhere on the page. Also, describe the image in terms that are relevant, but that may also be picked up by a search crawler. You may - like me - have a nifty geotagging system integrated with Google maps, but why not also explain that this is a picture of "Robin Hoods Bay" so that the crawler will find it? I did on this one, which gets more hits per day than any other single photo.

Be regular. Once you attract regular subscribers through your RSS feed or regular visitors from other sites, how are you going to keep them coming back? If you fail to update regularly (and I'm thinking about once a week at the least) then do not be surprised if those hard-won friends start to get their photo fixes elsewhere.

Quality is king. Ignore all the previous suggestions. If your work is of a consistently high standard, you will attract attention and visitors regardless of any of the technicalities of building a well-linked site. As is true of the real world, talent always reveals itself no matter what the obstacles. Most of us amateurs, however, are simply using photoblogs for a bit of personal satisfaction, to generate a bit of feedback on our work and to learn from a community of more experienced photographers.

Even so, if you post your holiday snapshot of Aunty Mabel and the kids eating ice creams, do you really expect to get decent feedback on your talents? If you have put all your energies into obtaining hits via searches, through a high page rank and good metadata, are those casual visitors really going to stick around to see your smiling faces, no matter how attractice? Probably not. Are they going to be captivated if you have stunning sunsets, sharp wildlife shots, or compelling photojournalism? They may well do.

On the odd occasion, you may want to put something funny or ironic up, which is fine. But a photoblog is not for photosharing, for which there are other platforms. It is for producing a portfolio of your greatest quality work, or work whose quality is problematic and upon which you need feedback from those with more experience.

Labels: photoblogs, Photography and Art, search engine optimisation

The uncanniest thing about email is that whilst it allows us to connect instantly with others across the world, it also makes us into split, fragmented personalities. It all starts with the email address, in which a user is required to assume a new identity, one that sometimes marks their individual dispositions (flirtwithme001, physicsguru999), is occasionally ambiguous (is lovebeatles247 a music fan or an entomologist?) but which more often than not is a numerical hybrid of their usual name which ascribes some inscrutable rank to a person: Joe.bloggs.19, john_doe77. Are there really 18 other Bloggs in the world, average Joe's who were more alert to the advent of the web such that they signed up to email before you did? In the lottery of life, is it good or bad that John has been offered number 77 by some automated algorithm? Finally, there is the affiliation to the email provider. In the real world, my identity is not overtly, publically determined by the company I choose to bank with, or the shop I get my groceries from. With my email address, however, my relationship to Google or Microsoft or AOL is bound to my online identity, tied together by the winding hieroglypic of the @ symbol. Every time I mention my name, I unwittingly promote the corporation.

But, like a dog's collar tag, once assumed an email epithet cannot be shaken off without a struggle. Because choosing and remembering a different one in each circumstance would be impossible, you find yourself signing in to various websites with the same identity. In reality, I can don my academic persona and try to be eloquent when talking to my PhD supervisor, but I like watching football precisely because I am not required to shout encouragement in well-constructed sentences. Online, however, my many voices merge to a single URL, or "sign-in" name. You, reader of The Pequod, may call me Ishmael. But you will also call me so on a football chat forum, an academic blog, and a virtual book group. Whether you will be able to identify my different personalities simply through the tone of my typing is doubtful.

Having said that technology makes each of us schizophrenic even as it connects us to other people, when technology fails it also leaves us more alienated from others than before. Recently, for example, I sold a book via Amazon sellers (again, you may call me Ishmael here), but being away from home at the time I had to issue a refund to the buyer; I also sent an apologetic personal email. I was shocked when, a week later, I received an email demanding to know where the goods were. I explained about the refund, suggested that this would appear on the customer's bank statement next month, and thought and heard nothing more of it. Then, a few days ago, another message arrived, threatening to start complaint proceedings for the non-arrival of the item. Horrified, I replied again, attaching screenshots of my earlier correspondence. I suggested that the customer might like to check through their spam folder to check their software had not incorrectly filtered out my first email. Thus far, I have had no reply, and the effect is thoroughly disconcerting - for I have no way of knowing whether this final email has arrived, let alone been read or understood. Somewhere, sitting on the lines and webs that bind and separate us, may be some sort of digital demon, intercepting our email despatches en route and locking us into a surreality where we misperceive each other. From my customer's point of view, if the emails are not getting through she has every reason to suspect me of being a conman. From my point of view, I have done nothing wrong and my customer's emails are scandellous, even agressive. I don't even know my customer's real name, to look in an address book or find an alternative address: Shirls_038 could be anyone, and thus points to no one. No phone number, no postal address. When eerie disconnects like this arise, you realise how powerless you are when the spirits that surround technology haunt it in times of breakdown. In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream.

By contrast, although something also haunts the physical letter, it is a ghost with a human face. There is that strangely intangible sense of affection embedded in an artefact that has received the human touch; this is what Walter Benjamin described as "the aura of the original" in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production," an essay that seems more prescient with every development of digitisation. In the case of the original letter, I know that someone handled, creased, wrote, licked and sealed this envelope I now hold in my hand. Thought of in this way, is it not odd that opening an envelope requires me to touch the spit of a possible stranger? In what other circumstance is this acceptable rather than repellent? There is only one, and this makes the letter like a subtle kiss, connecting me to the person who sent it in sensual ways.

As Lacan - in one of his more lucid moments - punned, a letter always arrives at its destination. Unlike my email to my customer, shouting into the vacuum of cyberspace, a letter must arrive somewhere, even if that somewhere is a rainy gutter or the dusty corner of a sorting office. Even if it does not reach the one for whom it was destined, it has nevertheless arrived where it stops - perhaps where it was always fated to stop.

And when it stops where it the sender intended it to stop, finding its way to my breakfast table where it lies amidst a debris of cornflakes, having negotiated each of the four or five geographical stages (a country, a town, a street, a house, my name) there is something magical about its quiet, stoical purposiveness. In spite of all the opportunities for it to swerve away from its course, for it to trundle up the wrong motorway on a postal truck, to be diverted by a broken sorting-office conveyor belt, to be snatched from my postman's outstretched hand by a freak gust of wind, in spite of all these opportunities for escape, the letter reached me. And in helping it on its course, whole teams of people have been involved along the way, reading its address and pushing it into ever smaller geographies, funnelling it through countries and cities and streets to end in the narrow slit of my postbox. It has teleology in the very fibres of its paper.

Passing through physical space in this way, the simple fact of a letter, the fact of its arrival, is its own message, even before the envelope is opened and the words themselves read. This is why receiving a letter is almost always pleasurable, in a way email is not: the fact that it was destined for me makes me feel important, like a medieval king who knows he is smiled on by the stars. Someone wanted to reach me so badly, that he or she was prepared to put this flimsy rectangle of paper through the trauma of travel. And because it passes through physical space, as opposed to the encoded bit streams that flit through cyberspace, the surfaces of a letter can be read even without it being opened. I often wonder, when I write, whether someone in a sorting office has noticed how often my letters refer to a small street in Christchurch (home to my grandparents), or how I regularly receive envelopes stamped with the sorting code of parliament (responses to my Amnesty International campaigns). Flitting though it may be, as it passes the eyes of those in a sorting office, the surface of a letter is also a significant message for the person prepared to take note of it.

It is this fact that the medium of the letter is also a message about what might quaintly be called the "human touch" that makes it an apt space on which to create art. I am thinking here of the special form known as mail art or correspondence art, which is, according to the Dictionary of Art

art sent through the post rather than displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels, encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books, images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps, postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other art forms generally considered marginal.

The genre can be traced to Marcel Duchamp, with his postcard project "Rendezvous of 6 February, 1916." But given the contradictions of the cybernetic age, when information flows freely but in an ever less artful, ever more dehumanising way, mail art seems highly appropriate for it both defies the pace of cyberspace whilst enhancing and drawing attention to the sense of individuality intrinsic to a letter. (Having said that, I must now admit that my awareness of art post was first raised through this website, by a reader who sent me some [pictured below] in gratitude for my essay on memory.)


[Cascadia Artpost, Seattle, WA USA]

By virtue of its being produced on the surface of a letter addressed only to me, this is a unique work of art not only in terms of its form (for of course all artworks aim to be unique in this respect) but in terms of its audience which, contrary to the painting destined for the gallery or the modern installation, is potentially just one person, the addressee. Even though it can be photographed and displayed online, the nature of the letter as a physically communicative media ensures that more than most visual art, art post loses something by being reproduced, since the whole aesthetics relies on the spirit of destiny encoded in the fibres of a letter that arrives safely.

On the other hand, though I may be the only viewer who will understand that this is art rather than mere decoration, the fact that on its way to me the envelope will be seen by others can make it into a political space. If I pleasantly imagine that those in the sorting office note the fact that a letter has been sent to me when they read my address, more explicit statements can also be made on the periphery of an envelope. By choosing stamps that make a polemical statement, such as commemorating the Svalbard seed vault or the U.S. military's actions in Fallujah (as my mail artist did), an art post might have an impact on those who deliver it, if only by confusing as to which is the real and which the symbolic stamp and thus forcing someone to pause in their reading of the envelope.

As I was sent a set of stamps for my personal use, I was able yesterday to employ them on some correspondence at the post office. The counter clerk looked quizzically at the stamps - the "Remembering Falluja" set - as if to wonder whether this might be some unexpected conspiracy of a left-wing Post Office. Like some sort of Pynchonesque conspiracy from The Crying of Lot 49, perhaps if enough people take up art post, politics can be made to permeate the whole space of the postal system, information countering the entropy of war. Perhaps this may be fictitious speculation, but if, spookily, the nature of the letter is that it always arrives at its destination, if the letter fails to reach me there will always be the suspicion that some one else, their interest piqued, intercepted it en route. They are the alternative viewer of the art work or political message to whom the letter really wanted to display itself, in all its peacock colours.

And even if art post is a prosaic mode of art, we all understand that licking and pressing a postage stamp is peculiarly satisfying and can so sympathise with the nature of the artist who has decided to formalise this mundane delight. It is the sort of message that flirtwithme001 or physicsguru999 might make with their epithets - the difference being that the message can be changed at any point with a different choice of stamp in a way it cannot be once your online persona has been born into the second life of the web.

Labels: art post, identity, letters, Photography and Art, Technology

The day starts off unpromisingly, as we are woken at six by that sound of rain. I always find rain peculiar when camping, in that whilst a disincentive to emerge from the tent, this also provides peculiar proof of the success of the pitch, that the tent is waterproof and providing a defiantly simple home against all weather. There is also the less ideal fact that going to the toilet or making the morning cup of tea means getting drenched. By about eleven, it has eased off, and we drive towards Bolton Abbey, parking at the Barden Bridgecar park, where there is no charge; otherwise, parking on the estate leaves you £5.50 out of pocket. In spite of our awareness that the monies will be well-spent on the heritage of the countryside, this seems against the spirit and the art of rambling in nature.

On the other hand, this is a rich safari along well-maintained paths, through rugged and ancient woodland, following the course of the river Wharfe. Within five minutes of setting off, we have spotted our first kingfisher, which taunts us by flickering continually out of sight each time we almost reach his current perch. He is the essence of energy, a vital spark of blue; it is appropriate that kingfishers are the best sign of a healthy river, as something for which motion is such an apparent imperative can only be sustained by easy supplies of food. As if to confirm this observation, a few minutes later a heron pumps sedately overhead.

At a certain point, we turn away from the river and zig-zag our way up the contours of the valley, following the waymarked red route. Whether the red is for the danger of the precipitous drop that accrues to our left, or for the increase in cardiac activity required to climb it, I am not sure. As we move deeper into the woodland, however, the rain's earlier activities seem to have awakened something primeval; the perpetual mist seems to suck smell from the wet leaves and decaying undergrowth, and ferns surround us with their young spiral spines ready to unfurl into leaf over the coming weeks.


If the vegetation seems jurassic, it is apt that our next encounter is with one of the dinosaurs' ancestors. Ahead of us on the path, a rock stirs and lurches into motion; a common toad, unmistakable with his rough and dimpled skin, struggles his way into deeper cover (though not before I have had a chance to record the moment with a picture).


As we continue, we step from the Jurassic to the medieval. There, on the trees, peculiar "green man" masks entice us along, their porcelain eyes leading us, like Hansel, to a house made of sweets.


Or, at least, the ice cream shop. Here we pause momentarily, and I capture ducks skidding their way to the water; seen frozen in time, their landings are peculiar, like elderly gentlemen easing themselves into their seats, legs slightly ahead, wings reaching back to clutch to the air, but nevertheless landing with something of a drop and a lurch.


Crossing over the river at this point, our enticements along the path are no longer green men, but strange, fallen trees, with bronze coins inexplicably embedded in their trunks. Like uncanny growths, or perverted wishing wells, we are not sure whether they are acts of sculpture or vandalism.


Certainly, I am more excited by the discovery of one wholly-natural parasitism: this glorious fungal growth projecting from one mossy bough, the radial fans beneath them made clearly visible from this angle.


A little climb further on, and we reach our target. Seen framed through the trees as below, the abbey is a romanticist's misty, dreamy imagination set in stone, rooks circling the tops, a river beneath the abbey, and all long, long ruined.

Labels: Bolton Abbey, Environment, Photography and Art

There being no Euro 2008 on telly Because I am dedicated student of culture, on Sunday night I went to a debate entitled "What is Art?" which was being run as part of my university's arts festival. The panel comprised a philosopher, two directors of modern art galleries, a theologian, and the director of Resonance FM.

I will not rehearse the debate here, which meandered largely around familiar grounds, but I just wanted to note the way in which the various definitions put forwards in relation to the question might be used to transgress the boundaries between science and art. I jotted down some of the epithets each contributor put forward in answer to the "What is Art?" issue; these included:

• Accident becoming intention: the artist is never quite sure of the destiny of his or her work from the outset, and there is always the sense of the haphazard about art which is then justified as such only after it has been produced
• Reproducing consciousness in others: the artwork acts as a vehicle for the imagination by which the viewer can occupy the perspective with which the artist views a particular aspect of the world
  
• Pleasure: art is that which generates a response that transcends (note the romanticism) or stands beyond further expression or deconstructive analysis
  
• Utility: art can have a public function, either memorialising events to be shared by the community, or by generating a sense of excitement about the potential of a region or city (something the Resonance FM representative completely overlooked when he derided the Angel of the North as worthless kitsch - hardly something that will go down well with the residents of the rejuvenated Newcastle Gateshead, a destination whose numerous cultural sites receive more visitors per capita than London)
• Vision: this one, not surprisingly, was contributed by the theologian, but is probably not too far removed from the ideals of pleasure and reproducing consciousness in others

All of these examples seem fairly mainstream in aesthetic debates, although naturally no one example is capable of containing the full range of what might be, or what has been, considered as art (or, with equal applicability, literature or music). And the one thing missing from the list was ideology: art is whatever a particular culture defines as such because it suits the norms or incarnates the values that the culture wants to perpetuate. Clearly such a view is not one that curators of publically funded galleries can subscribe to. But enough Marxism; I want to focus really on the way in which each argument survives the translation across the disciplinary divide, into the sphere of scientific activity.

If accident becoming intention defines an artwork, does this not also describe Alexander Fleming's petri dishes, left unintentionally on a windowsill but leading to the understood phenomena of antibiotics? If art is the reproduction of consciousness in others, might this not also be the effect of scientific writing, the conventions of which should allow any other scientist to step into the shoes of his predecessor and see the world - albeit within an emotionally neutral framework - as if through his eyes when he conducted the original experiment? Certain scientific writing, such as The Origin of Species, has a clear aesthetic quality, able to generate pleasure in its reader through rhetorical means; but I suspect that the moment when the most dispassionate paper generates new knowledge is not unlike the moment in literature or art when you recognise what you had always known to be true in the world, but never quite so succinctly or elegantly expressed. The ideals of vision and utility pretty much speak for themselves.

I suspect that the most viewed images (artwork?) of the last couple of weeks were not paintings or photographs in a gallery in London, but those astonishing shots captured by the Phoenix lander on Mars, some 35 million miles away. What is so remarkable is the self-consciousness of the shots: here is little Earthbound me, looking at an image taken by a man-made machine, which is looking at itself (or at least its leg), on another world. The pictures are a medium for the mind, vicariously transporting me imaginatively so that I can feel what it must be like to fly (there's transcendence again) beyond Earthly limits, to plant my foot on another world. I am not sure that cognitively, my response to these images is far removed from that which I might have standing before a Picasso. Science might in and of itself possess aesthetic qualities, as a recently-published book entitled The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments implies.

On the other hand, bringing art and science into uncanny proximity encourages me also to note a contrast that might provide my own epithet to use in response to the question "What is Art?" With apologies to Heidegger, I would suggest there is between art and science a general difference between being and becoming.

As I have suggested above, science has many of the same agendas as art, though the methods and tones in which the enterprise is couched seem superficially different. However, the test of success for the process of science is a test of ends, of being; the test of a successful piece of art is one of bringing that art into being, of means floating independently of specific ends. There is no such thing as art, but art describes the process of creating the artefacts which might be given such a name.

The ideal scientific experiment will be replicable numerous times, with no unexpected deviation from the predictions of the model or formula. The model or formula may initially be revealed by accidents like Fleming's mould, but once that process has become known science aims to remove any possibility of the accident happening again; the test of scientific knowlege is its predictive quality: that the same conditions will produce the same state in comparable situations.

Art, however, is a process rather than an end, the becoming about of that entity that might (or might not) be named art once the process is complete. One of the panelists (the one for whom art was defined by its pleasure-giving capacity) noted that he played the accordion very badly, but that he enjoyed the experience of making music, even if his listeners found his results unbearable. Musical notation might be said to be like scientific writing, in the sense that it is a formal recording system that enables anyone able to read the system to reproduce the original product. Except, of course, the whole point of musicality is that there is no such direct correspondance. The accordion player may not be able to reproduce the notes with perfect fidelity, but this does not necessarily mean that the process of reproduction is - for him - unmusical; it is a process of becoming, of discovering a connection between the self and the music that is not definitively posited or founded in the score. One might make a similar point about literary language, in which the creative word floats freely of their author (even if, contra Barthes, the author is not quite dead), such that freshly creative interpretations of the same material are possible, even encouraged.

For the scientist, however, the failure to reach the anticipated end when he conducts an experiment signifies either a failure in the hypothesis, or in the methodology he is repeating, or that conditions not present in that original moment have had an unanticipated effect; such "errors" can, of course, turn out to be very purposive in leading science down new paths. However, the fact that if the second experiment fails to produce the same state of being as the first this must lead to further experiments means that the reproduction is not self-contained, containing within itself its end or purpose.

By contrast, for the accordian player, the fact that he fails to reproduce the notes with the fidelity intended by the composer is essentially irrelevant to his or her personal enjoyment and investment in the process (or becoming) of reaching that end (or being); he or she may want to reproduce the notes more accurately in the future, but the process itself will remain satisfying because it is one of new creation personal to him. Indeed, if the player reaches professional standard, the test of his ability will not be whether he can reproduce the musical consciousness of the composer by translating the score through the medium of the instrument, but the degree to which he or she is also mediating, that is to say, translating and interpreting the music in a newly productive deviation from the original intention.

So what implication does this contrast between being and becoming of science and art have on the question "What is Art?" Essentially, I think, it is to signify that the question what is art can not be grounded in any intrinsic quality of the artefact; nor can it be left ungrounded by talking romantically about metaphysical pleasure that cannot be referred to the mind of the creator or receiver; nor is the idea of utility particularly workable, given that econometrics cannot predict the social value of Guernica as opposed to the latest Damien Hurst installation.

Rather than a top-down approach to the question, by which the art is produced and we then must try to categorise it, the contrast between being and becoming operates in a bottom-up direction: art is whatever is produced with a sense of artistry, or art is the process of generating the thing that has the potential to be named "art." Though a tautology - or hermeneutic circle - it is a feasible definition because it refocuses attention not on the receivers of art but on the producers. The links that bind a viewer to art (or whatever is classified as "art") are potentially unrelated to any quality inherent in the artefact, perhaps intruding through ideology or preconceptions of what good art must do; on my model, there is a very definite connection between the artist and the production (art does not just spring from thin air), and any response to "What is Art?" must attend to the materialities (whether the cognitive processes in the mind of the artist, the nature of the medium being worked) that relate the artist to his creation, not those that flicker between a creation and a viewer.

Additionally, in spite of my contrast between science and art, this does not exclude the former from the potential of the latter: the child's process of discovering that a prism can split light into the rainbow may be treated as the artistic one of the child becoming conscious of a world otherwise hidden; likewise the process of the scientist discovery when something does not happen as expected might also be classed as art under my definition, no matter what the formal properties of the final result. If Fleming's experience of the growth of mould catalysed, for him, a comparable sense of personal growth, the process was artistic, regardless of the aesthetic qualities inherent (or not) in the green goo at the end of that becoming. On the other hand, not all science may be experienced with this cognitive way in the person conducting the experiment, whereas all art, or all science that is art, must be.

Labels: Photography and Art, Science and Culture, What Is Art

Anyone who has a hobby or interest involving technology has to have a pinnacle product, the example that is simply the best that it can possibly be so that once you own one, you can only ever look down upon the rest of your field. If you are a motoring enthusiast, for example, then it is pretty hard to beat a Rolls Royce Phantom or a Bugatti Veyron. Or if you are into home audio it is probably the Kharma range of hand crafted speakers. For photographers, there is only really one flag at the top, and it bears the name Hasselblad.

But even if you are a professional, the whole point about these products is that you cannot simply buy one. It is not just the cost, but the exclusivity: when there are only 300 Veyrons in the world, you cannot just pop down to your local showroom and slap a cheque on the table. Further, these things matter not so much for what they are, but for what they represent about your psychological investment in your hobby, and there is a sense in which owning one without being able fully to appreciate it devalues both your field and the product itself. So there is no point in using a Kharma speaker if you do not have ears attuned and trained to the nuances of the sound in produces. And even if I had the £15, 000 or so to buy the latest Hasselblad H3DII, it would be hard to enjoy using it. I would always be conscious that with my limited photography skills and repertoire of techniques, it would be equivalent to me owning a Veyron but only ever driving it at 30 miles per hour. Great engineering deserves great and appreciative users.

So for most of us ordinary folk who are neither lottery winners, nor experts in our field, we have to lower our ideals to a more realistic level. It may not be possible to own a Kharma speaker, but if you put a Bang and Olufsen in your living room, you will notice the quality immediately, and people will still draw a breath when they see that you have one. You may not get on the waiting list for a Bugatti Veyron, but buy a Ferrari Maranello and you will still turn heads in the street.

And, for we photographers, if the Hasselblad is a niche product there is one legendary brand of cameras that most of us do lust after. This is the camera beloved of the Magnum photographer and its founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the camera used to document the human world over the last half century, most notably today used by the great Sebastiao Salgado. This is, of course, the Leica.
There is an air of mystique surrounding the Leica. With its quirky, 1950s looks, it seems to refuse the advance of technology, implying instead that someone back then discovered the alchemical secret of the ideal camera, and hence the Leica has no need to be incessantly developed and upgraded like a Nikon or Canon. As a rangefinder, the Leica has no mirror, and its shutter instead produces a legendary whisper, barely interrupting what Bresson termed the "decisive moment" when the photo is captured. And, unlike a professional SLR, the Leica is small, unobtrusive and subtle, which is why Bresson found it ideal for his candid photography.

Whilst for under £100 you can today pick up a used Nikon F4 body, among the best 35mm SLRs ever produced, a Leica M4 body, often viewed as the best of Leica's legendary M series cameras, will set you back £1000. It is a price tag just exceptional enough to retain its air of exclusivity, but tantalisingly within reach to make it a realistic dream.

So it is with great sadness that I read that the Leica brand has not withstood the transition to digital. Michael Kamber is a top photojournalist, who used a Leica M8 - the first digital incarnation of the M series - in his recent assignment in Iraq. This was the sort of assignment to make any photojournalist reach almost automatically for a Leica. War reporting demands a camera able to take reliable shots almost instantaneously, to be unobtrusive in socially sensitive situations, and to be rugged enough to withstand harsh environmental conditions. In spite of the admirable record of the 35mm Leicas over the past half century, however, the latest digital Leica appears to have failed in all three respects, according to Kamber's report: the camera at times failed to start; its memory card slot is difficult to access, making it hard to swap cards when a soldier is threatening to search the photographer; non-recessed or flimsy buttons kept switching as the bumped against his flak jacket; it had severe issues with exposure and white balance; it performed poorly in low light.

Although damning, the review appeared quite objective, as the sample photographs (and their comparisons with a Canon 1D) showed evident deficits. I am not sure quite how to describe my response to the article. If I say it was as if a religious believer had stopped believing in God, that probably overstresses my sensibility, but there was certainly a sense that the reliable star towards which I was unconsciously aiming my photographic learning curve had suddenly become unstable, veering uncertainly. Although usually one buys a better camera to facilitate one's photography, the inverse was true for the Leica: I knew that when my photography became good enough, I could justify owning one. Of course, the Leica M4 has not suddenly become a bad camera just because its latest variant appears deficient. That, I guess, remains the gold standard (to the Hasellblad's platinum). But it is a gold now tarnished; or, perhaps a better metaphor, it is as if the bloodline of the great cameras, and their great users, has become bastardised.

Labels: Leica, Photography and Art

The act of reading has to be one of the most uncomfortable activities devised in the name of leisure. Consider what is asked of the reader, when presented with a book. Here we have a device that dictates its own position with absolute authority. It is to be held not more than fifty centimetres from the face, else it will truculently dissolve its meanings to an inky smudge. The arms must therefore lock themselves at right angles to the body, neither moving forwards nor wavering, lest the print give up its contract with the eyes that are desperately trained on a sliver of word at a time.

Of course, one can rest the book at a table, or upon a desk, in which case all manner of props come into play, all with the sole purpose of keeping this object static. For it will insist on moving. Should you dare turn your back for an instant, pages will spontaneously leaf themselves backwards. Thus are pens, scraps of paper, food, tissues all recruited to mark the spot, such that the book over time becomes marked with an indelible debris of tomato ketchup, tea stains, snot. If you do keep attention for long enough, though, the book will become restless, transferring its weight from its right half to its left, necessitating subtle shifts in whatever tower - usually constructed from other books - you had devised to prop it at a forty-five degree angle.

Worst, though, is the trial of reading in bed. One's vision of the bedtime reader is the hairnetted housewife, herself propped by mounds of downy pillows, her dog-eared romantic novel supported by a mound of goose-feather duvet. Here she half-lies, half-sits, in perfect readerly comfort, until her husband's foot is heard on the bottom stair, from which point a scurry of activity ensures that, by the time he reaches the top, lights are off, she has been asleep for hours, and it is not only the novel's romance that has been tidily closed for this evening. But this warm vision of domestic ritual is impossible to enact in any house other than the snug double-glazed mansions of middle England. Dare to live (as does this reader) in a damp, stone cottage, for example, and night brings with it a tyranny of cold, that taunts the innocent reader with a Catch-22. For in this environment, one must choose whether to sacrifice the body to the mind, or vice versa. If one chooses to snuggle deep into the blankets and preserve the body's warmth, the arms alone can be allowed to protrude, but must do so vertically, holding the book directly above the peeking head; arms thus soon tire, and the book is cast in shadow from the anglepoise above. The alternative is to turn to the side, contorting the spine and using creased elbows as support for the rapidly leadening neck. Finally, one can satisfy the body's craving for warmth, and simply sleep, leaving the book dead on the bedside table. It is wrong to suppose that intellectuals are dedicated to the life of mind rather than body; witness the goose bumps, the back ache, the dry eye, all sustained in refusing dreams in favour of the imagination invested within this small cuboid.

Of course, all these exertions and stresses are worth it, for the worlds to which the good novel will remove the reader can dull the ache of limbs better than any pharmaceutical. The keen reader lives for those moments of total immersion, when he or she forgets that this physical world exists at all. But such moments are made more ideal by the sudden discovery - the sudden happening upon - a reading position of infinite comfort which, having been found, allows the activity to be sustained for hours. Such positions are not signposted; they are not marked in a library or known in the ergonomics of a favourite chair. They are hidden, like secrets, around the everyday house. They come upon one who, having stood to put the kettle on, finds himself standing at the kitchen window with the light cast just perfectly on the page. They are lurking on the bottom step of the stair, when one meant to go and fetch something but has suddenly thought to sit and reopen the book which distracted him from the job in the first place. There is one on that particularly mossy patch in the garden, which, when hit by the warming sun at the right moment of the day, accommodates your posterior like a King's silk cushion.

And there! There is one in Peter Vilhelm's masterful painting "Girl Reading in an Interior." She is leaning against the sharp edge of a hard-looking chair reading an open book, or perhaps a thick letter. It should be uncomfortable, but is instead the picture of comfort happened upon fortuitously. Diagonally from upper left to the floor in the centre, is cast a sunbeam. From right to left, her weight is pressed on a delicate outstretched leg, and she has found herself as featherweight as the cast of incorporeal light that her stance mirrors. She did not mean to be here. She had been en route from the imagined front of the picture - the position of the viewer - through that closed door on the left, through which surely awaited some vital task or arduous chore. But something diverted her, and she found herself suddenly in this unfurnished, anonymous corridor - far removed from her designated "reading" chair in the stately drawing room of this comfortable suburban house - totally exorcised from her body, living completely through those other consciousnesses nested deep in the words on the page.

Labels: Girl Reading in an Interior, Literature, Peter Vilhelm, Photography and Art

Poor Phil Smith. There he was at the turn-on of the Ipswich Christmas lights, wielding his swanky SLR camera, when he was hauled out of the crowd by a police officer. Demanding to see his licence - he neither had nor needed one - the police officer then used stop and search powers, ordered all the pictures to be deleted, and instructed Mr. Smith not to take any more. Perhaps if Mr. Smith, like the rest of the crowd, had been using mobile phones or pocket cameras, he would have been all right. The trouble was, he looked a bit too professional for the policeman's liking. He may even have been a terrorist.

In reality, as the BBC's report explains, it was the policeman - a special constable - who was entirely in the wrong, as the Suffolk Police later admitted. Nevertheless, the incident does indicate the problems of photographing in public, in a general era of paranoia about bombs and paedophiles. Take this advertisement from the Metropolitan Police, which warns "Thousands of people take photos every day. What if one of them seems odd? Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take."

Now I have taken thousands of photos, and I am - hands up - a fanatic...when it comes to photography. But if one of my photos seems odd, it is due to my creative limitations rather than my designs as a terrorist. But I can quite easily imagine a situation in which I take a photo of a public building (which will invariably include CCTV cameras) and then - like any good photographer - keep a record of weather conditions, location and the like, for future reference on my photoblog. Observed to be doing this, everyman is a potential Smith, if he happens to wield his camera at the wrong time or to look a bit weird - and don't we all, squatting and peering with one eye shut through the viewfinder?

Recognising the current state of affairs, MP Austin Mitchell, a keen photographer and chair of the Parliamentary All-Party Photography Group, has now tabled a motion in the House of Commons, calling on the Home Office to educate police about what powers they do have to prevent photographers, and to educate photographers about their rights.

The law, as it stands, says that "you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private" (Solicitor Hanna Basha). Photographers have every right to take photographs in public places, although - quite rightly - there are restrictions around certain public and military buildings, and under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without suspicion if the area is considered a likely target for attack (hardly likely in the case of the Ipswich Christmas lights, unless you consider ex-Eastender Letitia Dean a political target). Nonetheless, this (surely?) does not mean that they have the right to order the deletion of images if they are subsequently found to be entirely appropriate. It certainly does not mean that serious photographers need a licence to work in public places. Nor does it mean that they require the written permission of everyone they photograph (imagine the hassle shooting the London Marathon!).

If you are a keen photographer, or just a concerned citizen of a liberal democracy, I urge you to write to your MP asking them to support the motion, or at the very least to sign the petition on the Downing Street website. I have just done this, although living in the countryside the greatest danger to my photography comes from the cow rather than the policeman.

Labels: Austin Mitchell, Photography and Art, terrorism

About a year ago, when I first got my Nikon D50, I promised to post a review once I had experienced using it. Well, so busy was I taking photos, that this has got put off until now. Having said that, I have realised there is not much point me posting a review, since others have got there before me and done so in more detail than I could hope to reproduce. Digital Photography Review have prodded, probed and tested the technical quality of the camera in their typically rigorous way, and the camera came out trumps. Nuff said.

So rather than a review, an unreview. Let's start with the premise that I, like most other people, love this camera. For my uses, it is nearly faultless. But not quite. In my unreview, then, here are the five things I dislike about the D50:

1. There is no LCD backlight. Although the eyepiece information gives shutter speed and aperture, it does not display ISO, metering pattern, or white balance setting. For complex night time shots (such as this one), a backlight on the top LCD display would be of great benefit.
2. Probably my most common error when using the camera is that I forget to change the ISO with each new shoot. If I go from shooting at night at 1600 to shooting during the day (which might require 200), I end up with noisy pictures in the latter. Of course, this is not so much a fault with the camera as with my bad practices: I need to get into the habit of resetting all my manual options every time I finish a shoot. Nevertheless, for an entry-level DSLR a warning in the viewfinder when the ISO is set too high would be a help. Additionally - though not necessarily a function you would expect from a camera in this price bracket - an ISO priority mode would not go amiss.
3. As far as the quality of the photographs goes, when shooting in RAW at low ISOs it's difficult to see how the quality might be improved (given that megapixels matter little when publishing photos primarily to the web, as I do). However, one consistent problem (and one that is by no means unique to the D50 or to Nikon's in general but is common across many cameras) is that the white balance can be off when under tricky lighting conditions, such as incandescent bulbs or scenes with a large bias to one colour. If shooting in RAW, this can usually be rectified; these shots of the cathedral, for example, were way off in the original and required post-processing to match the true colour of the stone. However, the photos I shot at my sister's graduation were more problematic. Here, the people were standing in the sunlight against a shaded green backdrop of shrubs and trees. Because of the green bias in the scene, the skin tones came out wrong and, skin being notoriously difficult to colour in any circumstances, trying to process these to match the tones on the portraits with the colour of the background proved very difficult. Of course I could/should have manually set the white balance for the skin tones beforehand, or used white balance bracketing. Nevertheless, for a casual user, such advanced features might be difficult to use, and you would rely instead on the automatic functions of the camera, which are not quite perfect and foolproof.
4. Another technical issue is not with the camera body, but with the standard kit lens, the 18-55mm DX. For my relatively undiscerning eyes, it is quite difficult to tell how the quality of the image with this lens might be improved: it is sharp at either end of the focal range, provides good colour rendition, and is relatively fast with its 3.5 aperture. The autofocus is relatively responsive. However, the manual focus is very slack. For macro work, if you need to focus manually and are pointing the camera down the focus ring will slide around. It lacks the solid feel of an older, heavier, manual lens, such as the Vivitar 210mm I have borrowed before.
5. Finally, as is the problem with all technological toys, I want more. An ISO that runs from 100 to 3200. Ten or more megapixels. A burst mode that runs to more than 4 shots when in RAW mode.
   

But is this lust enough to prompt me to upgrade? At some point in the future, and if I continue to enjoy my photography, then I would. As second-hand Nikon D80s or D1xs appear on Ebay, the temptation would probably be too great to resist. But I have no idea how much these cost at the moment, because I have not bothered to look. When I was deciding which camera to buy, I spent hours browsing the second-hand market and reading reviews. Apart from questing for a longer lens, I have not visited Ebay since I got the D50. This has to be a good sign.

So how, then, has my photography changed through the use of this camera? Oddly, in spite of all the high-tech wizardry, the feature that has made the greatest difference to my photography is also the most mundane component: the battery. With a battery life that runs to several thousand images, as opposed to less than 100 for my Coolpix 2100, I am able to pick up my camera bag and go without any preparation. I go to town, I take my bag. From my computer desk I see the evening light start to change, I grab the camera and run. Because I do not need to worry about whether the camera is ready or not (and when the battery does start to go the indicator gives you about 100 shots of leeway to get to a power point), I can shoot on impulse. Spontaneous images such as this sunset, or this frost, would not have been possible without having the camera always by my side.

And because of the fact that I now use the camera several times a week, familiarity has bred an understanding of shutter speeds, apertures, sensitivities, focal lengths and so on, understanding that I could not have gained with pleasure from a textbook, or without a great expense of film through a conventional SLR.

Of course, knowledge is worthless without its application, and the camera is the tool that gets done the job of what starts with the artistic, seeing eye. Are there images that I would not have shot before, because I had neither the experience gained from using a digital camera, nor the functions of an SLR as opposed to my previous compacts? Looking at the last 100 images that I have posted to The Pequod, the answer is a qualified "yes". Of these, about a quarter would have been impossible without advanced equipment, reliant as they are on my ability to control aperture or shutter speed. A further 25 or so were quite experimental shots, which I would probably not have expended film on. This leaves about half the photographs reliant not at all on the quality of the camera but the intrinsic quality of the original scene. But as I admitted in a post very early in my photographic career, great cameras play a minute, technical part in great photographs. Great photographers, on the other hand, always make great images. It's just that when the two work together, the results can be spectacular, and I have more confidence that one day I (though not a great photographer) will produce the idealised, unrealisable perfect shot with this camera, than with any other.

Labels: Nikon D50, Photography and Art

One of my favourite proverbs about the joys and struggles of writing comes from Walter Benjamin: ""In the areas with which we are concerned, insight only occurs as a lightning bolt. The text is the thunder-peal rolling long behind." Inspiration, when everything suddenly becomes clear, is a mere flash in the process of creativity, and everything after is the solemn grumble of getting that one idea onto the page in words (as of the last few weeks, when I seem to be finding writing unaccountably difficult, my intellect certainly seems stuck in this clouded and muggy phrase).

Rereading Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," though, moments of striking illumination abound. Benjamin's opening paragraph meditates on the way Marx's critique of capitalism was a prediction of how it would affect the proletariat, rather than an analysis of its conditions of the day. Coincidentally, read from the twenty-first century, Benjamin's work seems similarly prophetic.

Unlike the hand forgeries which preceded lithography, photography, film and audio recording, Benjamin argues that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries placed art in an era of mechanical reproduction, which necessarily changes our perception of art itself. In particular, Benjamin argues that the "aura" of an original, "the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" is depreciated and lost in the reproduction. Further, the authentic work of art had its original value in ritual, and what mattered was the fact of its existence (visible to the spirits) not its display before man. In the age of reproduction, however, art is intended precisely for its own exhibition since the place of its birth, such as a temple or sacred site, is irrelevant when it can be copied and placed in any context; thus an alternative cult – the "theology of art" for the sake of art – is born.

Projecting these ideas, I wonder what Benjamin would have made of modern art. Benjamin observes that "From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense." I suspect he would have welcomed Warhol's cloned visions of Marilyn Munroe or drinks cans as endorsing the concept that in an age of machine printing and photography, there can be no such image that is original, only versions of each other. On the other hand, consider contemporary installation art, which is criticised precisely for its self-indulgence, its theology of itself. Here, works such as Tracy Emin's "My Bed" alienate the masses because it cannot be reproduced for them to observe anywhere or anywhen other than the one particular gallery in which it is installed at that moment. Denying the possibility of mechanical reproduction, this restores the value of the original, precisely because of its dependence on context to give it credence as "art" rather than an artefact of the everyday. Once created and installed in a gallery, there can only be one unmade bed; once any other bed (the one I get out of each morning) is similarly "unmade," it lends value to the original, rather than (as mechanical reproduction does) depreciating or losing the essence of it. As Benjamin observes, "Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority." To unmake a bed, as we are all capable of doing technically, is to acknowledge the "aura" of Emin's original act of unmaking as making a new artwork; it is this awareness that anything attempting to reproduce the original will actually be fake that underlies the comment that "I could have made that" and the counter-argument, "But you didn't".

In the literary arena, as well, Benjamin's work seems prescient, though because of its understanding of the history preceding its moment. Andrew Keen has just written a book entitled The Cult of the Amateur; its subtitle – How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture – implies the empowering of the "cult of the amateur" as a new result of a recent technology which takes the possibility of reproduction to infinity. Keen argues that the world of Web 2.0, in which content is generated by the user rather than the traditional model of a single authoritative producer, calls into question the reliability of information, preventing true creativity and argument from flourishing. But is the age of the blog, You Tube and Wikipedia really as radical as Keen makes out? Here is Benjamin (remember, this is 1936, not 2006):

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for "letters to the editor." And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man's ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

Not having read Keen's book (and not sure as a blogger that I want to), I am unable to comment on the validity of his polemic. But Benjamin does reminds us that rather than riding the crest of the radical web in our critiques, we ought to go back much further into the origins of mass (re)production in the nineteenth century. I suspect that Keen's complaints will turn out to have many precursors, and in being too wary of the future he may overlook the fact that he is himself the intellectual product of a collaborative past in which singular authorship was a misnomer.

What captivated me most about Benjamin's essay, however, were his comments on that other key interest on mine besides the literary, photography. Benjamin has much of interest to say on film and the relationship between the actor, camera and the viewer in comparison with that between actor, stage and audience in a theatre; he makes a comparable number of incisive remarks about the still image as well, remarks I hesitate to paraphrase, and thus fail to do justice to the wonderful fluidity of Benjamin's argument. Rather, I would quote one paragraph in full:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions." Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

That last sentence articulates what excites me most about photography. Whilst I enjoy taking landscapes and nature shots, there is inherent in these a nostalgia, which I identify after reading Benjamin's essay as the loss of the invisible aura of the scene: the context of the walk on which the landscape was shot, the wind in the hair and the cold flush of a cheek momentarily forgotten as a scene unfolds, the excitement of seeing the rare butterfly crossing the path. In contrast, photographing abstractions, using the lens to travel and make accessible the "unconscious optics" of the world, is creative in a way that is in itself original. The camera both isolates the world in its frame, and flattens two of its dimensions (time, and depth). Whilst they may not be the finest images, I love it when I am able to wield this visual scalpel to excise from the original scene, and to create something new, a work of art in the age of digital reproduction. Here are three such examples:

Labels: Photography and Art, Walter Benjamin

I started out my photoblog in an attempt to learn photography, through getting feedback on my work. I quickly found, though, that as with my own comments on other photoblogs, most comments tend to be complimentary, and along the lines of "good shot." This is always nice, but it is not particularly instructive. Rather than a failure of the collective imagination, this is partially due to the inevitable difficultly of articulating in words what makes a good picture. But, having taken photography seriously for a few years now, I have come to the conclusion that another reason for this lack of direct advice is that in the art there is not much to "teach," let alone to "learn." What I mean by the latter is that, with modern cameras in the digital age, much of what used to be a skill of metering, focusing, developing is now done automatically, or is pretty self-evident simply by getting to know your camera and post-processing software. On the technical side, one comes up to speed pretty fast. Further, on the creative side, most images fairly obviously compose themselves, following the golden rule of thirds much of the time, whilst any bad composition can be improved in post-processing.

That is not to suggest that photographers don't get better. I hope that I have improved, and think it's fantastic that today we have such a lively web-based community in which to interact and exchange ideas and images. But I think that my improvement lies mainly in my being able to see intuitively what will make a good photograph (take my Fountains Abbey shots, for example) rather than my ability to use my tools in any special way. I have learnt more by practice, and less by actively learning.

The point of this lengthy reflection is that my most recent post is, I think, a rare example of a photograph I have learnt to take, through reading books and through looking at other photographers' work. It is an image I could not have captured before, not just because I would not have "seen" the shot in the moving sea, but because I would not have had the technical know-how. Walking around Tynemouth lido at dusk, I realised that I could execute a technically more difficult shot. In this case, I wanted a long exposure that captured the sense of movement in the sea, but being handheld I knew I couldn't really use anything much longer than half a second if it was to look like sea, rather than a blurry mess. So I decided that by using a bit of flash, I could capture the rocks sharply but, by setting the exposure manually, could also keep the sense of dynamism in the sea. I am really pleased with the outcome, not just because of the shot as a finished product, but because I was putting into practice a technique I learned. I am not, and will never be, a naturally gifted, hence great photographer; but it is positive to realise that I can improve through time and with experience.

Labels: Photography and Art