Living in the past (4): odd couple

Like many of the negatives scanned so far, this one dates from the nineteen seventies.

I mentioned in the first "Living in the past" post that some of these photographs told stories about my relationships, including one “with a small piece of woodland”. This picture is part of that story and relationship ... but part, also, of another.

I have a whole series of negatives taken, like this one, of insects seen while lying flat in the long grass of clearings within that woodland. This one, of an odd couple sharing a grass stem, appealed to me particularly. I wasn't always interested in printing my negatives once I'd seen them ... but I made a lot of prints from this one, exploring its possibilities.

One of those explorations led me to make an intermediate lith film copy negative. Lith film (for anyone not familiar with it, or too young to remember it) was designed for production of photolithographic printing plates and yielded a very high contrast, almost pure black and white image with no intervening shades of grey. Since the original negative is fairly grainy, the greys were partly preserved as textures.

I was pleased with the result, and printed a 500 by 750 mm poster from it.

My father, at that time, was on a long and lonely nine month unaccompanied posting, far from my mother, on the fringes of the Arabian Sea (not a million miles, as it goes, from where my youngest brother now lives). I rolled up the poster, put it in a tube, and posted it to him.

Goodness knows what he thought, when the tube arrived in his billet and he opened it. Of all the things to receive, when far from home and hearth: a stylised poster of two ants. I had sent it, thinking back, because I was pleased with and proud of it, and wanted to show it; in retrospect, a pretty egocentric impulse.

But, when I next saw him, after his return, he had the poster amongst the things he had packed up and brought home with him. There were thumb tack holes in its corners, and traces of Blu Tack on the back. It was battered, torn and repaired in one place with adhesive tape. It had not just been kept; it had been put up on show in a hot bunk room, for months on end; when damaged, it had not been discarded but restored for continued display. It had not been left behind when he left; he had kept it, just as he kept things that I brought to him when I was a child.

Today

With Julie H and her early explorations particularly in mind.

Today

It's a mystery

Mysteries come in all shapes, sizes and kinds.

My first attempt to reach Topsham, yesterday, went well for the first couple of hundred kilometres but was thwarted in the last five ... a threatened suicide closed rail and road routes for long enough to lose me the evening. My second try, today, seemed to be following suit, as a fellow rail passenger was taken ill in the same last stretch and had to be airlifted out; but the evacuation was swift, and I arrived in time. Such an unlikely coincidence on the same line, on two consecutive days, constituted my own small personal contribution to the mysteries of the universe.

The mysteries for which I had come, however, were well worth the effort. I was there to see Ray Girvan (of JSB blog) play bayan for Estuary Players' production of Tony Harrison's The Mysteries, and even though I wasn't able to stay to the end of the evening, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The production was staged in the main body of St Margaret's parish church, and wonderful use was made of the setting: stage in the altar area, music section in the adjacent arch, audience in the pews. Eden's tree of the knowledge of good and evil was embodied in a human figure holding the fatal fruit. The shepherds and magi seeking the Christ child arrived (with sheep and dromedaries respectively) up the main aisle. The humour of the original mystery cycle was perfectly handled, with modern twists – the lamb taken by Mak the sheep stealer, for instance, being played by Shaun the Sheep, while the dromedaries were accompanied by Monty Python and the holy grail style clipclop sound effects.

Not that the humour was over dominant. The story of Abraham and Isaac (from Genesis 22), from which every fibre of my being has always recoiled, here became something to draw me in and break my heart. Mimed, to the solo accompaniment of  a haunting song from the music section, it highlighted the human pain at its heart, moved me to tears and became my high point of the night. Truly beautiful.

My only regret was that I couldn't, for much of the time, isolate Ray's bayan (my original reason for being there) from the amplified electronic instruments around it. He came through identifiably at times, probably because I was consciously tuned to listen for him, but was often lost as an individual voice – but his playing was, of course, a component in the overall success which is what really matters.

This is, I realise, a bit late to be singing the praises of a production whose last night I have just left. But if you are within reach of the Estuary Players’ next venture, I thoroughly recommend marking it on your calendar.

Living in the past (3): turtle diary*

*Russell Hoban, Turtle diary. 1975, London: Cape. 0224010859.
 

I am probably not unusual in this: that I generally try to do the right thing but all too often turn out, in retrospect, to have gotten it wrong.

My continued scanning of old negatives, however, reminds me that there's one thing with which I can, in a modest way, be unequivocally satisfied: that I was once a small, insignificant and peripheral cog in an obscure corner of the large effort to constrain a rapacious international trade in exotic animals.

At that time, in the mid nineteen seventies, millions of wild tortoises were extracted (anodyne word) annually from wild habitats in Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Turkey and the southern USSR, then shipped to pet shops predominantly in northern Europe – particularly Germany and the UK.

The economics of the trade encouraged barbaric collection and shipping methods which resulted in only five percent of those millions actually arriving for sale. The remainder either died en route or arrived so damaged (broken shells, gangrenous or severed legs…) that, unsaleable, they were simply dumped.

Nor was arrival alive in the pet shop an end of it. Because customers preferred smaller, cuter tortoises, the trade emphasised those. In the wild in, for example, Morocco, a small young tortoise would not hibernate for a whole long winter as it had to do in northern Europe. It would hibernate during a cold spell, then emerge to feed during warmer intervals, replenishing nutritional stocks before returning to a another period of sleep. In a northern European home straw box, this was not an option; the small, immature tortoises favoured by pet buyers, unable to store sufficient reserves for the required time span, all too often starved to death during the long winter.

My part in the slow, painstaking efforts to change all of this was nothing spectacular, you understand; nothing that any other small cog couldn't have done, and did do, in many other places. Taking photographs to document, evidence, and publicise abuses or breaches of such laws as could at the time be brought to bear. But, as it went, I was the small cog that happened to be turned in my particular corner of the world – and I'm content with that.

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Living in the past (2)

I'm honoured to have had one of my old negative scans turned into a “fiction fix”.

See Call me...

Express delivery

Last night we watched a comedy in which three friends are in an immobilised cable car with a pregnant woman when she goes into labour. The whole thing was wildly unrealistic, but we nevertheless scoffed at the utter incompetence of the characters in the face of this emergency.

After it was over, though, I started to think. The male character was completely useless ... but, truth be told, I was choosing to forget that  my own first human birth was, in terms of my own part in it, an even more inglorious occasion – happy in its outcome only through good luck.

Nineteen years old, with fellow student Jon, I dropped in on friends Karl and Hannah in their small town home. Hannah was heavily pregnant. Karl wasn’t there: Hannah, tired of his fussy worrying and pacing, had ordered him out of the flat for a night on the town with his friends to give her some peace. She welcomed us in, sat us down, and went to put a kettle on. Then she screamed. We rushed through to find her on all fours, on a wet kitchen floor, wide eyed, gasping and panting.

Wide eyed, gasping and panting ourselves, we ran around in a headless chicken manner and flapped our hands uselessly until Hannah caught her breath and called us to order. She told one of us to go out to the telephone in the square, call the midwife whose number was pinned to the kitchen door frame, then find Jon and bring him home.

I would have welcomed the chance to be out doing something and away from the centre of useless responsibility, but Jon reached the door first so I was left alone with Hannah.

Hannah, though only twenty and in her first pregnancy, took charge with natural authority. She sat me in a chair, held my hand, reassured me.

I discovered later that, at under two hours, it was an unbelievably quick and easy delivery – but at the time it seemed to go on for ever. Hannah saw me through it, patience itself most of that time though there were a couple of stressful moments when she shouted at me to “stop being a useless wanker”.

I did as I was told, breathed deeply and stopped panicking when instructed.

By the time the midwife arrived, I was holding a hastily wiped baby girl roughly the right way up and Hannah was plying me with heavily sugared coffee. Jon, who had had to visit many cafés, pubs and bars in his search for Karl, returned with him some time after that to coo in an inebriated manner over the baby.

Having seen a fair number of deliveries since then, it's easy to forget, easy to pretend to myself that I've always been where I am now. But no; I really shouldn't judge the characters in the ski lift comedy. In fact they stepped up to the plate better than I.

Retrieving data day queries

Perhaps the most famous data retrieval case in the history of science comes from sixteenth century orbital mechanics. Copernicus had laid the foundations for a viable heliocentric system; Kepler stood ready to finalise it. Between the two, both problem and solution, lay the mysteries of Mars: "the wanderer planet". The data which Kepler needed already existed, in a database of naked eye observations painstakingly constructed over two decades by Danish philosopher Tycho Brahe.

The problem was twofold. Brahe had nailed his colours to a mixed system at odds with that of Copernicus; and his data were his claim to posterity. He employed Kepler as an assistant, but jealously guarded access to the full observational data set.

Kepler did, eventually, gain access to the data. It wasn’t easy, nor always amicable (though allegations that he murdered Brahe to achieve it have been discounted), but it was done. He still had to learn how to retrieve it productively, but six years of mining and analysis finally bridged the gap to produce a final, successful, validated model.

Things have changed almost unrecognisably over the four or five centuries since Copernicus, Kepler and Brahe, but some features recognisably remain amid the new. Investment in research is balanced against the advantages of shared access. Boundaries, proprietary or otherwise, remain between researchers and data repositories. Murder and less extreme espionage methods may be rare (though not unheard of) as means of gaining access to data stores, but Kepler would no doubt recognise in essence the processes of negotiation and persuasion which allow those boundaries to be permeated.

The biggest early twenty first century data retrieval issue, however, is a different one. Acquisition in large quantity is becoming ever easier. Storage is, in relative terms, becoming cheaper. The headache often becomes how to ensure that one retrieves the right data for particular purposes from the ever ballooning volumes which are thus becoming available.

And then there is the problem of storage format obsolescence. Unlikely as it may seem, digital information which is by definition recent and (you might think) ought to be more easily accessible, and more carefully curated, can sometimes be harder to reach than older analogue stores. [More...]

New kid on the blog

Just a quick alert ("be alert – the world needs more lerts!") for a new addition to my "Other voices" blog roll on the left.

Kate Raynes is a seriously interesting and impressive person ... I've referred to her before in The Growlery ... though under another name (this one is her arts persona), so you'll not have a lot of luck finding her ... you'll just have to take my word for it, and keep an eye on her blog, instead:

http://www.kateraynes.com/blog.html

A different point of view

In the novel Fault lines, Kate Wilhelm writes of one character, a photographer, who has a friend pull him around a shopping mall in a small cart so that he can photograph the world from a child's viewpoint. Seen through the eyes of Wilhelm's first person narrator, the resulting photographs are:

...marvelous, and frightening. The world the child sees is different, a scary world of distorted people that changes as adults sit down, or stand up, that makes common buildings with short flights of stairs become imposing, looming structures that threaten to smother a small child. Hallways become nightmares of shadows and distances that seem endless. That explains our own nightmares a bit, I thought, staring down the hallway of the public library that I knew so well, but that was now strange and menacing, caught from this angle, three feet from the floor.

It's an experiment which I have often thought of trying myself ... but, as with so many other things I think that I will do, it has never happened. That hasn't reduced it's hold on my imagination, though.

As a child, I remember wandering around museums. I was very interested in what museums hold, but didn't much like the museums themselves. Not just because they were old, huge, dusty places, but because they withheld from mw what they were supposed to reveal.  A glass topped case of Roman coins which I would have liked to wonder at was placed at the height of my nose ... so all that only reflections of the ceiling were visible to me. I retreated into books, instead, where the roman coins were laid out for me in a way that I could actually see.

Museums have (as I acknowledged a few years ago) changed beyond all recognition since then. Children are invited in to experience materials placed with them in mind. And I applaud the change. I have taken children as young as three or four around museums of all sorts, delighting in their delight at new worlds unfolding, overjoyed to hear them ask for repeated return visits on future occasions.

Art galleries have gone some way in the same direction, but not nearly so far. I have taken the same children to exhibitions of sculpture, conceptual installations, and all sorts of other experiences which they have embraced in myriad ways from which I learnt new worlds in my turn. Two dimensional forms (painting, photography, print making, etc), however, serve children less well.

Geoff, a reader of and occasional commenter upon this blog, is a wheelchair user with “eye level 42 inches from ground”. He recently sent me an email from which I've extracted the following (slightly edited, with his permission):

We went to an exhibition of Wild Life Photographer awards. As usual, many of the photographs were hung so high that I could not appreciate them. The same problem, at the same venue, the same day with the National Portrait Awards exhibition except for the very large paintings.

It is not about me being in a wheel chair – but as much about children.

There were, there on that day, many children who gave an awkward upward glance gave a shrug of disappointment and walked on, eventually giving up and wandered around, seemingly bored.

On a previous visit one of the stewards said that when she takes her grandson he takes his binoculars! On that occasion there was an A4 print at least 12ft from the floor level.

I have noticed, when observing people hanging exhibitions, that they reach up above them to hang the picture. I wonder why? When asked, they do not know.

A polite positive complaint to the venue has no effect whatsoever.

So, please, when visiting an exhibition, if you see the hanging in such a way, perhaps suggest that children are important.

I reckon that exhibitions should be hung my midgets, dwarves and people in wheelchairs.

Large paintings are, as Geoff notes, less of a problem. Walking around the Tate Modern in London, I see children standing for longer periods than most adults, drinking in and puzzling out a Jackson Pollock canvas larger than themselves ... but passing by smaller works without a glance. The difference is that large paintings automatically come down lower, where a child can first of all be drawn them and then actually see them. There is also the fact that large paintings are often not behind glass, so as the child looks up ward from first point of contact s/he does not lose the image in reflections. The smaller images which these children ignore are hung, usually, at an average or tall person's eye height and therefore above that stratum within which a child's world exists.

I don't pretend to know a pat answer to this problem.

Anyone who has been to one of the big blockbuster exhibitions which pull huge crowds, knows why the picture hangers reach above them: it enables more people to see the work, over the heads of the crowds. But that only applies to those of average height or taller. I took ten year old Dan to the big Gauguin, maker of myth show at Tate Modern a couple of years ago and, while the high hanging let me see work which would otherwise have been hidden by the thronging visitors, it was no use to Dan: I had to hold him up so that he could get the same advantage. In the end, he opted for fighting his way to the front of the crowd wherever there was a large piece of work and staying there, ignoring the rest of the exhibition entirely.

When I hang my own exhibitions I tend to hang each image one third above my own eye level, two thirds below. Since my work is usually about A3 sized (roughly 400mm × 250mm or 16ins × 12ins), and my eye level is about 1.63m (that's 64ins, for comparison with Geoff's comment), I am definitely part of this problem which I would like us to address.

What to do?

If I (or anyone else) hung an exhibition at a median eyelevel of one metre or so, it would not solve the problem, it would change it. It would immediately become inaccessible to most visitors – catering to a minority by excluding the majority.

That doesn't, however, mean that nothing should be done. It means that some other answer must be found.

Perhaps there could be special children's exhibitions, as there are children's sections in libraries. While that might be an interesting idea to try out, however, I don't like it as a general solution – it ghettoises rather than including.

Hanging work on multiple levels would be one approach. Some pictures at one metre, some at one point six five or higher. Children and others with a lower viewpoint would be drawn in by different images from those with a majority perspective; both groups would then have to put in a little work to see more.

Another twist on the same theme would be duplication of every image at both levels; but that would involve expense which I don't see artists or curators going for eagerly.

Then there is he possibility of dual floor levels ... a raised walkway in front of exhibited work could allow children, wheelchair users, and anyone else with a lower than average point of view, not only to see the work at its own level but to get in front of the uncaring hordes who so often block them from seeing it at all. I quite like this idea, despite the practical issues (mostly related to health and safety) which occur to me: such issues can, I'm sure, be solved.

A different approach, suggested by a colleague when we discussed this yesterday, would be to have low tables on which reproductions of all exhibits (possibly in book form, possibly as individual cards) are placed for easy browsing. This seems to me a valuable idea but I would prefer to see it as an addition rather than an alternative. On its own, I fear, it would simply relegate children and other low view point visitors to a second class audience which only sees second hand reproduction content. 

I'd be interested to hear your take on this, and your alternative suggestions for tackling what I believe to be a real and important problem. You can, of course, comment to this post ... or, as most of you seem to prefer, write to the email address on the blog masthead.

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Kate Wilhelm, Fault lines. 1978, London: Hutchinson. 0091325909