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.

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...

Living in the past*

*Jethro Tull, Living in the past, 1969, Island records [also included on Living in the past (LP), 1972]
 In the enforced rest during this recent period of illness and recuperation, I've been trying to do things which don't take a lot of movement or brain power. One of the things I have been doing in lucid spells is going through old negatives.

Scanning old negatives to disk is one of those tasks which gets endlessly put off ... it ties up equipment and time which can always be used for something more urgent and/or interesting. This last few weeks, though, I've rigged up a redundant spare laptop to a scanner and tottered through to it when I felt able.

It's been an ideal task for the circumstances. There's about two minutes concentration needed, threading a strip of six negatives into the scanner, then clicking the necessary things in PaintshopPro (or whatever vehicle you happen to use for scanner import). After that, computer and scanner are left alone to do their stuff ... about 25 mins for the high resolution scans I'm doing ... and if I happen to be curled up in a fœtal ball when it finishes, well, it'll just wait until I next surface. After that it's another minute or so of clicking to save the results. Then start again with the next strip.

Seven strips to a sheet ... so if I'm feeling really focused, I can get on with something else in the 25 minute gaps and do a whole sheet in a day ... if I'm completely zonked, then a single strip or nothing at all.

Then there is the periodic business of moving the resulting files off the spare laptop onto my main machine, numbering them, adding them to the archive, tagging them ... all of which can also be done in bits and pieces of time, when I feel up to it.

At no time is there any need for real thinking, or scope for tragic errors ... if I make mistakes, the negatives are still there and I can always do it again.

To be honest, most of them are boring – either to me, who took them, or I realise that they would be to anyone else. The younger me was, I am discovering, very internal – or, perhaps I should say, even more internal than I am now. I look at some pictures and I remember the passion that made me, in pursuit of an idea, photograph this pale grey blur against that even paler grey texture ... but in the resulting photograph there is nothing intrinsically of any visual interest to me or to anyone else.

Roll after roll of film from a walking trip with my brother in France, forty years ago (see “What is lost and gained”, 26 Feb this year) record (with a very few exceptions) not the experience, or the land, or the people, or even my brother, but my obsession at the time with the use of poured concrete in architecture and civil engineering design.

Nevertheless, as my wise friend Luís said to me only this morning, “Even if they contain material you are not necessarily keen on now, all photographs carry some history in them and may be useful to someone” ... so I scan them, file them, and shall keep them.

The point of all this, however, is that every now and then I'm coming across pictures that amuse me, or awaken moments of memory, or just strike me as good and worth resurrecting. Some excite me. Some I look at and wonder why I didn't pursue their line further than I did.

Luís also said to me quite recently, again about these old negatives: “As you look at them, they will start to tell you stories”. He's quite right. As I work through the largely random order of these sheets, I am finding stories ... and, in particular, stories (usually, though not always, heartening ones) which I hadn't heard before about myself. I am hearing new, revelatory stories about my relationships with my brothers, with my ex wife, with a small piece of woodland, with photography as a medium.