Brianhuman's Blog

Is this propeller blade bolted to the deck of the Queen Mary 2 a sculpture or a spare handy for some transatlantic emergency?  It’s definitely sculptural and has a clean formal beauty, but can a piece of pure engineering be considered art?  Well, Marcel Duchamp certainly thought so; and this propeller embodies more symbolic meaning than much of the off-the peg public art dropped on buildings and spaces in doomed attempts to make up for their aesthetic and emotional short comings.  As a spare it might be comforting to the nervous passenger suffering Titanic anxiety – provided they don’t give too much thought to just how you change a propeller.

Photo: Propeller blade, QM2, December 2011

When I saw these water lilies growing in the corner of the lake at Quy Fen I was reminded at once of Peter Henry Emerson’s Gathering Water-Lilies (1868). Originally issued as a limited-edition photogravure print, the photograph of a man and a woman in a rowboat was subsequently published in Emerson’s first book, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads. Emerson, an advocate of naturalism in photography preferred to present his work in books or albums, with text to accompany the image.  In 1889 Emerson published Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, in which he explained his philosophy of art and straightforward photography, making the case that truthful and realistic photographs should replace contrived work by the likes of O. G. Reijlander and H. P. Robinson.

Photo: Water lilies, Quy Fen, Cambridgeshire, September 2018

Quy Fen is a wildlife haven and a rare place to find cattle grazing in the Fens – income from the grazing is shared by the neighbouring villages. In earlier times villagers had the right to cut hay or pea sticks on the land. A lonely memorial stone records: ‘Time how short.  In memory of William Ison who was on this spot killed by lightening 28^th August 1873 aged 29’.  Apparently he was making hay; it’s to be hoped that it was not metaphorical hay.  Globally the chances of being killed by a lightning strike are 300,000 to one.  The odds are 66 times longer in the UK, but still shorter than winning the Lottery.

Photo: William Ison memorial, Quy Fen, Cambridgeshire, September 2018

Annina Frances Human, 24th April 1947 – 31st August 2018

Saturday 25^th August 2018.  This morning walked along Cottenham Lode from Cottenham to Rampton, between Little North Fen and Great North Fen.  Sunny and breezy; candyfloss cumulous clouds over fields of russet linseed and bleached blond barely-harvestable barley.  At Rampton peace and quiet in All Saints church, the patina of the stone, plaster and wood soaked in the joys and sorrows of fifty generations.  Outside, restless swallows twittered and a hobby skimmed over the oaks.

Photo: Great North Fen, Cottenham, August 2018

David Hurn and Bill Jay argue that time is embodied in one of the fundamental principles of photography: ‘The exposure is made, and the image is frozen in time, at exactly the right moment’ (Looking at Photographs, 2000).  Time is critical in most photographs and its influences have shaped the medium from its very beginnings, from that era when exposures were long and there was no such thing as an instantaneous image.  Since then photographers have come to delight in ‘freezing thin slices of time’, perhaps reaching its apogee in the work of Cartier Bresson and the ‘decisive moment’. Catching a subject at precisely the right moment is one of the essential differences between a snapshot and a fine picture, Hurn and Jay claim.

Photo: Clock, QM3, December 2011

22^nd August, trip to RSPB Snettisham with J.  Overcast to start with, brightening later, mild and breezy.  Low tides had left the estuarine mud to be baked into a reticulated tawny shore by endless days of sun.  A rare chance to explore the creeks and pools and get close up to the cracked and rusting remains of the jetty left over from gravel extraction.  Samphire, sea lavender and sea purslane fringed the tideline; small parties of geese honked and cackled overhead; egrets, tiny flecks of white, fed out on the muddier creeks.  Time and tide turned slowly….

Photos: 1-5 Snettisham, Norfolk, August 2016

My photographic education continues: a copy of On Looking at Photographs – A Practical Guide, David Hurn/Magnum in conversation with Bill Jay (Lenswork 2000), has arrived from St Louis.  In the introduction they say: ‘Its purpose is to suggest how to look at photographs, how to understand them, how to think about them, and, as a result, how to use photography more effectively in your daily life.’  It’s a slim volume with no illustrations, so it will be words, not pictures, which will be doing the teaching in this case (and quite different from Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs).  And expensive words too, at around 70p a page – a reflection of the regard in which Bill Jay, who died in 2009, is held and the demand for his books.  The advantages and disadvantages of being dead – your work increases in value and you can’t benefit from it!

Photo: Cover On Looking at Photographs – A Practical Guide

It’s 45 years since John Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs was published.  I wonder how many photographers read it now (or any other critical texts on photography for that matter)?  I think he still has a lot to offer, his take on the very nature of photography, for example.  He talks about ‘pictures containing enormous amounts of precise information’ and the ability of photography to render an accurate description.  At the same time he recognises the importance of Honore Daumier’s dictum that photography can describe everything yet explain nothing.  The greatest photographers take their work beyond mere descriptions, imbue it with an expressive content and seek a symbolic role in the subject to transcend everyday narrative.  The photographer’s job is to transform the subject, not merely describe it.  The best photographs value complexity and psychological insights above the formal precision of the medium.

Photo: Dunwich Cliffs, Suffolk, July 2018