The where I'm at with my photographic practice. Nothing overwhelming, apparently simple pictures, all taken within a short radius around where I live. But in among all that I'm always investigating light, form, time and space, examining a kind of structured complexity in the subjects and compositions. 

A couple of years ago I went to an exhibition of collage and other works at a museum in Edinburgh. I was immediately struck by the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins. The deep Prussian blue goes beyond colour. It’s the stuff of dreams. I decided to experiment with cyanotype printing and at last I’m able to share some experiences.

Digital Negatives 
I chose to work with digital negatives rather than printing botany or objects placed on the paper. That in itself took me several attempts with different transparency papers and printers. Eventually I found a transparency batch of decent quality (with the printing side clearly indicated - important) and used a good Canon Pro printer to lay on the ink. I haven’t drilled down into the excruciating detail around digital negatives. I simply do the monochrome and inversion transformation (in Affinity Photo) and make sure there’s plenty contrast. I’ve come to the conclusion that the choice of subject has more bearing on making a good print than the fine tuning of the negative. Cyanotypes have far less resolution than silver printing. If I wanted a pin sharp cyanotype picture I’d probably fabricate one digitally.

Coating
I haven’t yet managed to establish a workflow in my garage darkroom which is why I'm looking at contact printing. But it's hardly the easier option. The first thing I learned is that all the elements need to be set out in an organised fashion, ideally on a large table or everything goes south quite rapidly. Mixing the two chemicals is easy enough. You make two bottled solutions at the appropriate dilutions and keep them apart. Then when you want to make prints you mix them at 1:1 and use all the liquid because it won’t keep. After that, for me at least, it was trial and error all the way. First you need to choose good paper. I tried a cheap light acid free watercolour paper and everything came out washy and faint. Same with a Bristol Board - it didn’t have enough ‘tooth’ to hold the liquid. Eventually I had good results with a heavy textured art paper which I’ll stick with till someone persuades me otherwise. You can see for yourself the texture in the photograph. Coating the paper has to be done in dim light - tungsten is fine but no UV or the coated paper starts to develop. The liquid has to be spread evenly and deeply enough to soak right into the paper. I worked to a small quantity for each A4 sheet and it wasn’t nearly enough. I then marked out 4ml on two different syringes, clearly colour coded for each of the two liquids. I don’t think I mixed them well enough in my early experiments so I’ll be mixing in a test tube from now on and giving it a good shake. With plenty mixture I pour out a thin line and spread using a rubber spreader then work the chemistry into the paper using a brush. I take time to check that the coating is as deep and even as possible. I coat the paper on top of another cheap paper taped to a ceramic tile. Next the paper has to be dried. I forgot once and it all turned to mush. Some people leave the paper overnight. I make sure it’s light tight and leave it somewhere warm.

Contact
​The next step is quite easy. Place the paper (textured side up - not always obvious) on a hard surface like a ceramic tile. Lay the contact print ink-side down (I even managed to get this wrong a few times), place a plate glass on top and clamp everything together or light leaks in and fogs up the paper at the sides. 

Exposure
I haven’t worked out how to get the ‘correct’ exposure because it's an occult practice. In the forthcoming winter I’ll build an ultra-violet (UV) lightbox which apparently affords more reliability. Outdoors the UV is all over the place, from intense sunlight to overcast with very bright skies to quite cloudy to dull. In bright sun you see the paper change rapidly. Because I’ve coated and then placed my art paper on top of another cheaper paper taped to the ceramic tile I can tell from the coating on the cheaper paper how dark the exposure is turning. I can only go by what I see and so far, with good paper, I’ve managed to get a decent exposure but times can vary from between 30’ and 90’.  

Wash and Dry
Finally, the wash and dry. I place the print face down in a large plastic tray and jiggle it around a bit. After 10’ or so I use a fine spray on the garden hose and wash it face up in the tray for about 20’. You can see the chemistry wash out and the print change colour as you go.

Drying
A mistake I made with drying was to hang the prints up in a very hot conservatory. They hardened up and warped considerably. Now I dry in a dark garage at a much cooler temperature. 

Choice of Subject
I mentioned the importance of choosing the right kind of subject for a good print. This is very subjective but one of my first prints was of a tightly composed still life with good contrast between the three elements. I found it to be quite magical probably because I managed to get that lush deep blue. Some of my many failures came out on the green/blue side of the colour wheel.

Bleaching and Toning
​Apparently one way to get a good deep blue is to bleach the print in a weak solution of Hydrogen Peroxide prior to washing so I’ll experiment with that next. There are also some interesting methods of toning the prints, though I’m questioning why you’d do that when the point is to get the blue of the cyanotype. 

In conclusion I’d say it’s worth persevering. With some time and effort I might be able to produce a decent series of still life prints and then later experiment with actual botany or interesting tree prints. 

Throughout the darkest days of the pandemic I spent time trying to understand historical and contemporary practices of still life photography and painting. This led me to my own experiments with still life photography. Although I’d love to be able to gracefully happen upon compelling ‘found’ still life compositions, just by having a camera ready at all times, I’m drawn to the reflective processes of selecting and setting up objects, working with colour, form, perspective, depth of field and of course light. There’s also the problem of choosing and setting up tables and backdrops which are almost as important as the objects themselves, something I underestimated in the early experimental phase. I decided from the beginning to work only with natural light and am fortunate to be able to set up my compositions in two domestic locations, one with a fairly even north light, the other with a south facing, less unpredictable but wonderfully diffused light, especially in a short window during the Scottish spring and autumn.

By way of research I began with a close look at the Dutch still life painters of the 17th century. I can never have enough of that period, be it still life, landscape or domestic interiors. This led me to more modern painters like Nicholas de Stael, Pierre Lesieur and Giorgio Morandi. In photography I was particularly interested in the work of Josef Sudek, Laura Letinsky and Andrea Modica. I could go on at length about the work of these artists.

There’s a lot of literature on still life painting and photography but two books in particular helped me understand the deeper mechanics of still life art. Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century is a book to be read and re-read. Then there’s Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked: 4 essays on still life paintings who came at the subject from some very interesting perspectives. I’ll quote, paraphrase and comment freely upon some of the points that struck me.

The removal of the human body is the founding move of still life. The same of course could be said about nearly all landscape photography and painting. Obvious yes, but I’m led to ask why.

Bryson then introduces the notion of still life as an investigation of rhopography (the big word for little things) from rhopos - trivial objects, the discarded and useless, things excluded and passed over. In this I find parallels with some contemporary musical and sonic practices, some of which have been at the core of my own works over the year, for example musique concrète which often seeks out disused, found and forgotten objects for their sonic properties. One could also find some common ground within musique brut, arguably the sonic equivalent of arte povera.

Attention itself gains power to transfigure the commonplace. I understand this to mean that we have to spend time with still life, to slow down and pay attention, to allow the transfiguration to take place or emerge. Again, parallels with many of the musical and sonic practices that interest me.

Bryson makes the argument that there’s a disinclination (in early still life painting) to portray the world beyond the far end of the table. A lot could be made of this in terms of frame, content and concept. In my early fumblings I struggled not only with the table itself but found myself in the midst of heated conversations between the focal length of lenses, angles of shot, table size and orientation. I still have some way to go to resolve these conflicts. This is of course unique to photography - painters can design their backgrounds and angles in an infinite variety of ways.

Objects are made to appear unreal or unfamiliar. This becomes apparent the longer you gaze at paintings in particular. In my recent series Evidence I’ve found myself tapping into this tradition in a more immediate manner by masking objects (disused, forgotten and found) in what look like forensic evidence bags.

Cultural memory, an authentically civilised world. This fascinates me, if we extend to the idea that the best evidence of civilisation, the memories of past civilisations, are most often manifested in the objects left behind. And that these might be the humble objects of domesticity.

If it looks good it is good. I was told this by a former academic at a riverside meeting in a well-appointed fishing bothy by the river Tweed. I think he'd been a long time outside of academia because he'd obviously lost the capacity for independent thinking. What he was trying to tell me was that if a landscape looks good, for example one of the well manicured estates of say a very wealthy Borders landowner, then all is well with the management of farm and land. Which of course is utter nonsense and merely serves to embed specific types and patterns of land management into the social consciousness. All of which brings me to a new photographic project.

After several years of hard work, research and experimentation, I found my way gradually into an emerging photographic practice which I think I can sustain and develop with some value in the outcomes. That's as far as it goes for now.  More than five years research and a good intention at the end of it. Obviously I don't live in the fast lane when it comes to creative work. Furthermore I don't have the time or the inclination to jump around more than absolutely necessary. With music, which I consider to be my established practice, I spent and wasted a lot of time poking my nose into corners that were best left unpoked.

If we want to put things into boxes I've been working photographically with still life and landscape, both of which carry the potential for complex understandings of ourselves, our deep history and our attitude to the natural environment. Let's leave still life aside because I still have some work to do there. With landscape I had very quickly rejected the idea of making a one-off fantastic competition winning shot (not that I ever seemed able to produce such a thing) and instead delved into a research-based approach to establishing different series of images, made and remade over reasonably long periods. Something verging on the long-term and large-scale, which is how I work with music. I gradually folded this down into a radius of a few miles from where I live simply because this is the most accessible landscape I can find. And a rich seam it has proved to be.

I'm always looking at the work of other photographers, far more so than I do with other musicians. Robert Adams had a substantial impact when I was quite young as did the work of several English landscape photographers, both historical and contemporary. But it was the work of the English landscape photographer Jem Southam who paved the way to an understanding of how I might proceed. Southam works in terms of decades, visiting and revisiting his chosen sites in and around a part of South Devon where he lives, refining his vision and understanding of place. At first I thought his pictures were very good, of course, but then the penny dropped and I began to see the layers of meaning - cultural, poetic, social, historical and so forth, all wrapped up in photographs that are unspectacular from one perspective but undeniably brilliant from another. Pictures which accrue interest the more you look at them and read or listen to his ideas.

I'm currently foraging around the length of the Jed Water, the small river that flows through Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. I recently followed it upstream to its source and discovered a massive tree felling operation in the forest around the upper reaches of the river, just short of the border uplands at Carter Bar. These ugly sitka spruce matchsticks, underneath which nothing grows, are simply a commodity. The forest, the Dykeraw plantation, is owned by Tillhill Forestry. Some of the documentation on the forest and its management are edifying, especially when they talk about environmental impact. Sitka is ugly when it grows and even uglier when the plantations are clear-felled to leave a scene that resembles a Paul Nash painting of the aftermath of trench warfare. Absolutely no redeeming features. Whatever happened to 'if it looks good it is good'? On entering Scotland from the A68 you see huge tracts of land torn out of the hillsides. Public amenity destroyed for some kind of profit, perhaps subsidised by the public purse (though correct me if I'm wrong). My vision for Borders forestry is based around a 100 year plan by the way but that's for another time. 

Nonetheless this is what I have to work with. An intriguing gentle river that starts its journey near the border then courses through the felled forests, gaining some small majesty along its course through wide plains and tight valleys, flanked at times by eroding sandstone scars (including James Hutton's Unconformity no less, just five hundred metres from my house), till it bends around Jedburgh Abbey, past two rugby grounds, finding its way at last into the Teviot and from there to the Tweed and the sea. There's an enormously complex bundle of human and natural history in there. I've had it on my doorstep for two decades and regret that I'm only now beginning to see it as a relevant photographic project.

I recently published Jericho as a digital download and before that I wrote three short articles on recorded sound and sympathetic magic.  I'm currently at the R&D phase of a new project for radio called Contagion. This will combine my interests in electroacoustic composition and photography, taking account of the ideas developed across the three Marcel Mauss articles in the form of spoken word layered with different sounds. 

The pandemic has forced many of us to dig deep in our respective practices. Some good work in different media is emerging from engagements with the domestic and other immediate environments. In Contagion I want to look at and listen to those objects in the domestic and personal environment which carry sympathetic resonance of the kind discussed in my articles on Mauss and magic. Listening will involve activating and energising objects of interest, paying attention to interior and exterior spaces and using recording technologies to reveal sounds beyond the everyday experience. This will be followed by a deep consideration of the musical potential of such sounds though this won't be a musical composition as such. Looking will require taking stock of the hundreds of possessions accumulated over years that we insist on hoarding for sentimental or even irrational reasons, then figuring out how to represent these as photographs, whether as still lifes or as elements in a documentary investigation. An (anarchic?) archive.
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Even if I am experimenting I like to work methodically so I decided quite early on to categorise my still life experiments into three areas of activity: colour, form or assemblage, ie the shapes and composition of the objects and how to work with the table or tables in my studio. I could add light to those three but I have a good diffused natural side light and haven't yet taken to artificial lighting slight remains as constant as natural light can be. In fact the whole business of getting the table right - the angle, height of shot, colour of cloth, backdrop, is perhaps the most problematic of all and I still haven't found all the solutions. I do often wonder how other still life photographers solve these matters.

​Here we have three corner shots, all jpegs straight from the camera (these are test shots after all) with slightly different arrangements of four simple elements. For me the most successful is the first shot. The apple distracts the eye and the angles are too obvious. The second shot uses a wider aperture which throws the apple slightly out of focus and I think this enhanced depth of field pulls the eye around the image more effectively. The light however has changed in number three, for the better I think,  and this is one of the most interesting aspects of working with natural light, the changes between shots and a measure of unpredictability which perhaps goes against the grain in a studio setting. But it teaches me to look ever more closely which I believe is one of the cornerstones of becoming a better photographer.