Darkness cloaks me like a superpower. On this side of the curtain I am invisible to the class and I watch them carry on their daily lesson, small and inconsequential, oblivious to my gaze. I grow tall and powerful in this space. It is only a small area of the classroom sectioned off for the storage of materials, but in here, breathing in the smells of pencil lead, fresh paper and glue, I am almighty like the omnipotent God they teach us about.
Ivan - The Divided Self: The Altar Boy
Complex aromas of frankincense, candle wax and communion wine mix together in the pale archaic light. The starch stiff white robes constrain me in angelic posture and I shift awkwardly on my knees. I hear the autonomic recital of the priest, murmuring with rhythmic precision, the words of the mass that he has spoken a thousand times before. His ancient hands tremble over the Eucharist in solemn consecration and I ring the bell to signify the miracle of that moment.
Our connection to the land
I’ve been working recently with Laura Pannack, my favourite photographer with whom I’ve been lucky enough to develop something of a friendship and, more recently, a mentoring relationship. I pay her of course – love needs to be fed – but it’s been among the singularly most rewarding and productive engagements I’ve ever had.
Laura has been helping me develop direction when it comes to broader themes in projects, identifying how to create a photographic vision based on the themes I want to explore and then how to translate that to a single image. We’ve been using that dialogue to give direction and focus to my work with Ivan on what I guess will by default come to called ‘The Divided Self’.
At the moment the project is still very much focused on Ivan and his experience of psychosis rather than psychosis in general. As much as I would like to be able to take a more open direction to a project theme, in the same way that (ostensibly) portrait photographers such as Laura do, or indeed Alec Soth, Kovi Konowiecki and, in particular, Bryan Schutmaat, whose work I adore almost as much as Laura’s, I find myself still inexorably drawn to the person and the corporeal.
Nevertheless, these images represent an effort to break a little with the corporeal and find a way of representing it within the context of the environment. I often try to think of how literature might inform my work and see whether there might be parallels between the authors I’ve enjoyed in my life and the themes they themselves address. Steinbeck and Hardy immediately spring to mind as authors who ostensibly write about their characters’ relationship to, and connection with, the land.
With Ivan, the principal theme is his connection with the land and how that provides him with a source of succour and comfort. It always strikes me that he is most alive and engaged when he is outdoors, so the idea is to develop a series of images of him in a more varied landscapes, connected with the land.
Bright Young Things
Four years ago I shot a project based on the transition from youth to adulthood and used the skate park in my local town as a base to work from. That location is interesting because each generation of young adult tends to congregate around the area, forming social groups and developing strong bonds. The location is a focal point in the town; if you want to engage with the next generation of our adult society and find out what they care about, what their hopes and dreams are, this is as good a place as any to explore.
I’m always nervous about engaging with this generation however; the vile cynicism and neuroticism of our society means that even the most open minded and progressive of individuals would caveat their thought processes when you explain that you, a middle age male, are photographing ‘young teenagers’. It is a form of bias of course, but like all other forms of bias, has little to do with deep seated structural prejudice. It is simply what Daniel Khaneman called system one thinking or what psychologists have called ‘heuristics’ since the early 19780s.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated and intrigued by these ‘bright young things’, the representatives of their group being anually refreshed at the skate park as one generation moves on to explore their adult lives and the next group begins their own initial foray.
Uncle; Godfather
My uncle, also my godfather and my mother’s youngest brother, has always been a significant influence in my life. I used to explain the closeness of our relationship by virtue of the commitment he had made to be my godfather, but as I got older, I became increasingly aware that his view of religion make this explanation unlikely. A more reasonable explanation was that we seemed to connect at more significant level than the otherwise close relationships we all enjoyed as cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces in my mother’s large family. My uncle and I share a closeness forged through being of similar, though sometimes augmentative, mind.
In the early 90s his first marriage unexpectedly broke up. I was in my early 20s at the time and keen to engage and be engaged and so through phone calls and frequent visits I followed the course of his life through this break down and separation and then, joyfully, into a new relationship. We became much closer and I spent the Christmas of 1994 with him, revising for my final university exams with Janet, the woman he had recently met.
Janet was a particularly special person, a rare combination of poise, elan, intellect and grace, equally as capable of debating the finer points of Kant as hosting a dinner party of exquisite finery or being a consummate mother to her three children. Her influence on me was momentous. Between her and my uncle they persuaded me into a life changing decision.
Their relationship was fairy tale; two people finding each other late in life when perhaps the ultimate ideals of romance, passion and intellectual engagement had become somewhat opaque with the patina life tends to result in. Despite some initial setbacks, the product of ill-tempered influences that wrenched at Janet’s sense of loyalty to the family ideal, she and my uncle were married and their life was bliss.
Three years later, Janet found a substantial lump in her throat. A biopsy revealed it to be a secondary cancerous tumour; the search for the primary revealed she had both aggressive bowel cancer and multiple other secondary tumours. Her prognosis was poor and she was given approximately 12 months to live.
My uncle was with her to the last moment. In early December 2003, in the very early hours of the morning, he awoke to hear her breathing, a soft wind rattling in the shallow pool of her lungs. He said to her quietly ‘I think it’s time to let go’ and then she died.
My own grief for her passing was both overwhelming and, perhaps naively, unforeseen. I hadn’t been prepared for this. We all grieved for her loss and it took a long time to come to terms with her passing. My uncle was able to move on and find new love, Katherine, in her own way equally as special as Janet and with as much warmth and love as you could ever hope to find in the person you wish to spend your later years with.
My uncle and I still see each other and talk though the spirited debate has moved into areas that are now less productive or rewarding. The more gratifying experiences are simply to be in his and Katherine’s company, to enjoy their wonderful home and vast gardens that have been lovingly cultivated. Their garden is a bounty as is their company.
On my most recent visit, I wanted to make his portrait and I wanted to find some small sliver of memory for Janet as well. I felt perhaps that there were remembrances of her passing that he and I needed to share just one more time. This portrait is the reflection of her passing, the moment they both let go. It is that memory I asked him to hold for just one moment. Afterwards we hugged and cried a little and then drank tea on the veranda and were at peace in his garden again.
When I grow up, I want to be a detective
A cool morning in early July 1998, deep in the Dumfries countryside. The ancient forest canopy whispers to gurgling river by which we camped and in which this morning we swum. 20 children aged between ten and 15 had just spent their first night wild camping, cocooned in their sleeping bags, bedded down on a huge tarpaulin sheet on the ground and beneath an equally vast sheet tied between a dozen trees, Above that the trees and the stars. Nothing else.
This is as far from south London as you can get without travelling to another planet.
We have struck camp and are making our way back to the cars. I’m carrying a small child, smaller than the others and the three year old son of our camp leader. This small child does not know me but they cling to me, tired and trusting. I feel his warm breath on my neck. For the first time in my young adult life, I feel my paternal instinct rise up though my stomach and into my chest.
Fast forward 22 years and am now that father I first conceived of back in that Scottish forest.
Small boys, and girls, should climb trees (and camp under them) but instead for the last three months we’ve been filling them with our own fears and anxieties about the outside world and the dangers that others represent to us. We could fit the risks from the virus on a pin head - turns out that it really isn’t any more dangerous than flu if you’re under a certain age (and if you care to do some research., which of course most people don’t), and yet the stunted looks on our children’s faces tell a very different story.
Time to climb trees again and live free.
Adrian - The Star Garden
So it looks like we have another three weeks of lock down. After that, I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘screwsocialdistancing’ started to trend and as I sit here this morning and think about that, I can see myself readily taking to the streets to join such a protest. I can feel my own mental health beginning to fray. I feel mostly fine, but the subtle signs that our bodies send us to indicate all is not well are there. I’m not sleeping so well, my temper is shortening and I’m finding it hard to concentrate.
Periods of great social upheaval and change often provide us with unique opportunities to see our otherwise fixed mindset from an oblique angle; they allow us to more readily imagine the otherwise unimaginable and perhaps change the things we wouldn’t otherwise countenance changing.
I am not challenging our response to this pandemic just yet. It was very apparent that we faced the very real risk of NHS capacity being reached and patients who would otherwise survive being offered alternative places in an early grave. And yet when you compare our response to this virus with say our response to homelessness, mental health, addiction, poverty etc, it’s quite remarkable how catalysed we can be. In comparison to the virus, every past effort to solve those deep seated social problems would make Hamlet look positively zealous.
Star Garden is where my friend Ivan keeps his sheep. It’s where he lived for several years in a caravan that he shared with the mice, sometimes the sheep and almost certainly a whole host of other companions that we might find distasteful. It is where he experienced malice and oppression, was called all manner of unspeakable things that sully our humanity and as the hatred in others grew, so did his psychosis. This space however represents his escape from that dark place. It is where he is most happy and the most applied to productive work. He still has his caravan and still stays there from time to time to tend the sheep. He has built a workout station from scaffolding poles that he uses to perform remarkable feats of strength and agility.
It is also the home to two other young men who otherwise have no place in society. I do not know what brought them here but I am sure that what keeps them here is the dark pit of their mind that is infected with a virus we as a society are ambivalent towards and unwilling to address. It is the place these young men go to, like so many others, to be forgotten.
