Perfect Days is a 2023 film directed by Wim Wenders. Hirayama works as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo’s smart Shibuya ward, across town from his modest home in an unimproved neighbourhood. He repeats his structured, ritualized life every day starting at dawn. He dedicates his free time to his passion for music, photography and books, which he reads every night before going to sleep. Hirayama treats trees as friends and spends time gardening and photographing them. He has a sandwich every day under trees in the grounds of a shrine, and takes photos of their branches and leaves with an Olympus mju. Niko, Hirayama’s niece, shows up unannounced; he lets her accompany him to work and the two photograph the trees in the park.
On his free day Hirayama takes the film to be developed and collects the prints from the previous week. He takes the wallet of prints home, kneels down to open it and places the pictures he wants to keep in a tin box, he has a cupboard full of them. He destroys the rejected pictures.
Perfect Days is a wonderful film (concept, directing, acting and so on) and Hirayama’s photography is but a small part of the way in which his character is developed. I highlight it simply because it was a powerful reminder of the joy of analogue photography. Digital photography offers endless creative possibilities and undoubted convenience and economy, but with it we sacrifice the serendipitous joy of the first sight of the developed film and contact sheet or opening the wallet of prints from the processing house. The deferred gratification is at one with Hirayama’s approach to life, which owes a lot to the idea of being in the moment. His response to the impatience of his niece to go to the sea is to say, ‘Next time is next time; now is now’.
See also posts14th August 2021, 8th May 2023 and 7th July 2023
Scholars Cottage, Old School Drive Reydon, 4th July 2022
A visit to Snape, a short drive south down the A12.
One never knows quite what to expect at The Maltings, the temporary exhibitions of sculpture on the edge of the Alde marshes are always full of surprises. Today it was work by Lawrence Edwards (b. 1964, Suffolk), Heft and The Tribe. Massively powerful and menacing bronze figures over two metres high, rough cast with blurred features, they turned their knotted backs on civilization and headed for the marshes as though looking for the primeval swamp out of which they might have climbed.
Tribe, Lawrence Edwards, Snape, July 2022
Lawrence’s practice has long been a way of exploring the eternal entwining of man, nature and time. He casts his own work and is fascinated by human anatomy and the metamorphosis of form and matter that results from the lost-wax process. Figures like those at Snape express the raw liquid power of bronze; and the process marks he retains tell the story of how each work came to be imagined and created. I’ve never come across Edwards before; think of British sculptors and the names Hepworth, Moore, Caro, Kapoor and Gormley come to mind. Maybe Lawrence’s work is too figurative for some in the art world.
The immediate impact of this work was to make much of the art on display in the various galleries seen trivial, lacking in depth and emotional intensity. Too often there was a sense of artists churning out paintings, figures and decorative pieces, to a formula and hoping to find a market. The comparatively modest prices seemed to reflect this – art aimed at the passing tourist trade with its tendency to impulse buy.
We shared a Buddha Bowl and a crab salad for lunch in the River View Café looking out over the reeds to the tidal River Alde and hoping in vain for a marsh harrier to fly past.
Back at Reydon, I explored the housing development of which Scholas is part, a successful mixture of new build and conversion of the old school. House martins were nesting under the eaves of Pitches View, which I took to be a care home. I carried on to the early 14th century St Margaret’s church, which sits quite isolated from the village along the Wangford Road. Swifts wheeled around the church screaming joyously; swift calls were being played from the tower and they became repetitive and tedious. The big churchyard and the adjacent Southwold Cemetery were unusual in the absence of grand memorials to members of local families. Both are dominated by simple upright headstones, decoration extending only to the choice of lettering and some etched images. There is one exception and unusually Pevsner gives an extended description: ‘Large Monument in the churchyard to Mrs Watts, signed Paul R. Montford, 1921. A boldly stepped base and on it three bronze figures: a gentleman in a cloak, a demi-nude man kneeling and weeping, and an angel with up-spread wings.’ A grave in the Cemetery raised a smile: an inscription commemorating Stephanie Ann Holt (Granny Cuckoo) 8.2 1948 – 6.1.2017.
205A Anniska Apartments, Kardamili, Greece20th May 2022
After yesterday’s cloudy start, today dawned bright and clear. The first rays of the sun breasted the mountains and picked out the white houses on far Messenia; light flooded the street at eight o’clock. Eleni hosed down the steps and the terrace and laid the dust on the street.
Belogianni Beach, Kardamili, Greece May 2022
After breakfast I wrote some more of the Mani Memories memoire for an hour, struggling with dates and events in the 1980s. I walked down to the Plateia for coffee to clear my mind. The waitress remembered me and smiled, ‘Double espresso?’ That was nice, but actually I wanted an Americano; I ordered carrot cake too. A passing fire truck sounded its siren to the surprise and delight of two sloe eyed toddlers. Tables filled with English and Norwegian jazz buffs here for the International Jazz Festival, founded in 2014.
It felt like a morning for idling. Along the main street I dropped into Equinox, the most intersecting of the shops – art materials, art works, books (Mani in English, Greek and German) and a little gallery with a library for sitting reading with a tea or a coffee from Kalamaki across the road. I thumbed through a glossy volume of photos by Nellys: sculpture and monuments; none of her more contentious stuff, the nudes on the Parthenon and the proto fascist lauding of the racial continuity of the Greeks since antiquity. I bought a small book of photos by Silvanus – sombre figures emerging from candle-lit shadows – he was a monk, took up photography in Kalamata and is now a photographer in Athens. Silvanus was the Roman god of the forests. At Iridia I bought a glass dish, a slumped bottle marbled with amber, cyan and malachite, to complement the clear glass piece Nina and I bought on our third visit here.
Back at Anniska, a violinist and pianist were practising in the bar. A blonde, curled on a sofa, murmured phrases of lyrics. It was all sketchily fragmented. On the terrace their music blended with the breeze in the trees and the sea washing the rocks below. There was a certain melancholy to it: perhaps I was ready to go home.
When they had finished I turned to trying to write about Nina as a person. It should have been easy, yet I found it difficult to capture her subtlety and complexity, to make it both loving and honest.
After an early supper I strolled down to Belogianni Beach for the sunset and the Jan Inge Melsaeter Quartet playing at Gialos. TC, T C Hawkins ‘God’s own travellin’ blues man’ and Vietnam veteran from New Orleans, put a lifetime of experience into ‘All of Me’, ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down’ and a stunning personal interpretation of ‘Summer Time’. The bright hard light of the sinking sun cast long shadows.
A last glass of retsina, left over from Lelia’s, sitting on my balcony to end the day. The headland across the bay was black under an orange sky shading up into a crepuscular blue. Inland the hills fell into shadow dotted with lights twinkling below the silhouette of Agia Sophia. The cone of Mount Elias caught the last light.
Here’s another new call for submissions from Shutter Hub.
The second online exhibition in our Curate for the Community series, DREAMS & VISIONS explores ethereal and abstract imagery in an escape from reality through the imagining of otherworldly visions.
There are moments when the camera lens becomes a conduit for translating the intangible into the visual. Through the eyes of a photographer, ethereal landscapes and abstract concepts take on concrete form, capturing the elusive qualities of dreams and visions. The interplay of fundamental elements like light and shadow allows for images that transcend the boundaries of reality, offering glimpses into the subconscious and the fantastical.
DREAMS & VISIONS is a call for entries of surreal scenes, distorted perspectives, and manipulated subjects to serve as the language through which photographers articulate the ethereal nature of dreams, inviting viewers to embark on a journey through the realms of imagination.
Whether through long-exposure techniques, multiple exposures, film, toy cameras, or digital manipulation, we invite photographers to stretch the boundaries of the visual experience and storytelling, where dreams and visions weave narratives that transcend the limitations of words.
Some image entries will be showcased on Instagram throughout the open call and afterwards, with all selected entries featured in the group exhibition on the Shutter Hub website.
Water Nymph, Jean Goujon, 1547-49, Victoria and Albert Museum
Water Nymph, Jean Goujon, 1547-49, Victoria and Albert Museum. The original stone reliefs were part of the decoration of a public fountain in Paris. Goujon’s style seems to take inspiration from Italian sculpture.
Looking back to past travels taxes the fallible memory. Mostly, only high lights and low lights come into focus with the remainder blurred impressions. Photographs, diaries, souvenirs and accumulated ephemera help, of course, but they are still partial – snaps of smiling people are taken on sunny days. In trying to capture the essence of the experience of a holiday, a place, it is easy to sink into the armchair of nostalgia, the sentimental yearning for that which is irrecoverable, the past where you cannot go. Time is the barrier: you cannot travel back in years; and if you can return to the place time will have remade it.
My series Mining the Diaries is approaching the end, there are just two years and six trips to explore bringing the total to just over 100, stretching from 1968 to 2023. Each entry has been a pleasant and often exciting reminder of the travels (as I like to think of what have usually been holidays) I’ve been privileged to undertake. In writing each piece I’ve relied largely on my diaries and photographs and I hope each entry is an accurate reflection of how it was, or at least how I saw it. But each is like a fly in amber, frozen in time. I begin to have a nostalgic view of the places described, a sense of how I want them to be, and indeed perhaps that is how some still are, though development and ‘progress’ will have changed most and many will have had their sense of place lost to the surge of tourism. As I look back at them questions about how they have changed come to mind. Has the modest apartment in Tossa de Mar been submerged under a rash of hotel development? Do crab boats still go out from the beach at Sheringham? Do ponies still drive carousels in Brittany? Is the Crown Range Road in New Zealand still unsealed? What is life like in Cuba now that Fidel Castro has gone? Has the charm of Ano Perithia been eroded by new development? What has happened to the people I photographed, the card players returning from a day trip to Boulogne, the wedding couple in Aigues Mortes, the children at the mosque in Aleppo, how have their lives worked out?
I would particularly like to know the fate of those children, for nowhere can have changed as much as Syria.
We travelled to Syria with a group touring the country for nine days in September 2010. Our night stops included Damascus, Lattakia, Aleppo, Deir Ez-Zour and Palmyra; we passed through towns and villages on the way to visit Krak des Chevaliers, Ugarit, Saladin’s Castle, Aphamea, Hama, the Euphrates Dam, Rasafa, Doura Europos and the desert city of Palmyra. We spent three more days exploring Damascus independently after the tour group departed. As a group we had an ‘approved’ itinerary, but we were not sheltered from the disparities that existed nor from the problems that had beset the country – the uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama and its bloody aftermath in 1982 was mentioned when we were in the town – and outside scheduled visits we were free to explore by ourselves. The only warning we had was not to take photographs of government buildings, military installations and the enormous posters of President Assad. In the final three days we walked freely around Damascus pretty much ignored by the Damascenes. We had no inkling of what was to happen just a few months later.
Peace and prosperity in Aleppo, September 2010
What began as minor demonstrations against the repressive regime of President Assad in January 2011 became nation-wide mass protests in March. The uprising was met with police and military violence, massive arrests and a brutal crackdown, resulting in thousands of deaths and tens of thousands wounded. The uprising became an insurgency, then a civil war. Twenty-fourteen saw the rise of the so called Islamic State and there were four million refugees. The Battle of Aleppo began in July 2012, the minaret of the Great Mosque was destroyed in April 2013 and the city fell to government forces in December 2016. In January 2017 the Islamic state destroyed the facade of the Roman amphitheatre and a tetrapylon at Palmyra. By the end of 2023 the civil war had largely subsided into an uneasy stalemate. Hopes for regime change have largely died out and some regional governments, about 30 per cent of the country, may be willing to engaging with Assad. In 12 years of war: over a million Syrian civilians were killed; half of the Syrian population has been internally displaces or made refugees; and roughly 90 per cent of the infrastructure has been destroyed.
Looking back now to the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the country and the palpable sense of history, the destruction is almost too painful to contemplate. But it needs to be addressed.
Issam Kourbaj, The Kiss, 2023
In his new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj responds to the ongoing conflict in his home country. Titled ‘Urgent Archive’, through installation, sculpture, performance and works on paper Kourbaj explores the themes of destruction, loss memory and renewal. He mourns and honours the missing (dead, detained, refugees) and allows that desolation of the destruction to permeate the exhibition space through installations using repurposed material. The sense of it now being a hidden conflict is enhanced by the use of Arabic text, inaccessible to most visitors, in the art work. A changing installation of shelved objects from Syria addresses issues around land, severance and fragile transience.
Issam Kourbaj, Abundant, No Abandoned, and Don’t Wash Your Hands: Before the Quake, Aleppo City and Citadel
In the piece Abundant, No Abandoned, Kourbaj uses powdered pigment to depict the area of the lost cities, where we had a leisurely visit to the Monastery of St Simeon, to suggest the extremes of what it might mean to live between abundance and abandonment, beauty and danger, life and death. Don’t Wash Your Hands: Before the Quake, Aleppo City and Citadel, made from Aleppo soap, is one response to the destruction of the ancient city.
Seeds appear in many of the works and have metaphorical value relating to resilience and rebirth; one piece Despite the Fall is inspired by the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos, who wrote, ‘they tried to bury us; they did not know we were seeds’. In another work, ‘Is it from a grain of wheat that the dawn of life bursts forth; and also the dawn of war’, a seed taking root in these contested lands also has the potential to be used as a weapon of war. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas lost control of the vital seed bank in Aleppo when it was partially destroyed in the siege.
I cannot recognise the place I visited here. And there is no place for nostalgia in my reflections on Syria, only sadness, anger and a feeling of impotence.
A session presented jointly by Alasdair, Andrew, Tim and myself looking at ways of achieving visual effects and alternative imagery.
Alasdair: using old SLR lenses on digital cameras; tilt adaptors; and the Lensbaby.
Andrew: refractions in water; show shutter speeds; and infrared filters.
Tim: in-camera techniques including, zoom burst, rotation burst, multiple exposure, HDR, intentional camera movement and combinations of them.
Brian: lensball; Bug Eye viewer; double exposure; and cyanotype.
The pictures shown will be available at https://www.zimbushboy.online/photoforum2023-2024
I think to call the session ‘Creative’ was something of a misnomer. Achieving strange and sometimes unpredictable effects is not the same as being creative, or at least not in a more purist photographic sense. It runs the risk of being trickery (gimmickry) for the sake of it and is often best suited to graphics/illustration. The techniques need to be used carefully and are not substitutes for true creativity and inspiration. Trying them out should be seen as play and exploration that might stimulate new ideas for picture making.
Shutter Hub has released the following on the recent open exhibition (see blog 12th December 2023).
‘The Shutter Hub OPEN 23/24 ran from 27 November 2023 – 16 February 2024 at the ARB Building at Cambridge University, bringing together over 130 international photographers and promoting the future of photography through diverse and creative imagery.
Ken Rutherford, Soho Girl
We were delighted with the positive reaction to the exhibition – a reaction so positive in fact that the exhibition was extended! Originally due to close on the 02 February 2024, it’s run was extended by two weeks and the exhibition ended on 16 February 2024. It saw visitors from around the world and we had educational visits from colleges and universities, including a group from Anglia Ruskin University studying curational practice.
Our Best in Show award was created as a fun and engaging way to involve more people in responding to photography, it’s very much about audience participation and connecting people through images.
The votes have been counted, and we’re pleased to announce that the Shutter Hub OPEN 23/24 Best in Show accolade goes to Ken Rutherford, for his image Soho Girl (shown above). Congratulations Ken!’
Graham Wickens presented travel photographs by members of the Forum. Ten people submitted around 40 pictures – mainly in colour, just a couple in black and white.
Destinations ranged from the Hebrides and Felixstowe to Nagasaki and Chatsworth and from Hanoi and the Vatican to the Panama Canal and the Okavango Delta. Subjects included people, architecture, mountains, beaches, statues, planes and the sea.
I submitted photographs taken in London walking from King’s Cross to the Royal Academy on 22nd February – a dreadful wet grey on grey day, but I tried to make the best of like an unlucky tourist. Walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, I was drawn to red lanterns at the end of Gerrard Place and followed them down to Newport Place, called Al Fresco Square on the Chinatown map. On to Piccadilly Circus – full of real tourists under umbrellas – gloominess added drama to illuminations and wet the pavement became a bonus. At the Royal Academy I photographed a section of The First Supper (Galaxy Black) by Tavares Strachan, part of ‘Entangled Pasts’ exhibition – it shows Haile Selassie (1892-1975) flanked by Zumbi dos Palmares (1655-1695) and Mary Seacole (1805-1881). Photos below.
Brian Human 1, Newport Place, London, February 2024
Brian Human 2, Piccadilly Circus, London, February 2024
Brian Human 3, The First Supper, Royal; Academy, London, February 2024
Mercury and Psyche, Adriaen de Vries, 1593, V and A Museum
Mercury and Psyche, Adriaen de Vries, 1593 (V&A Museum). The winged messenger of the gods, Mercury, carries Psyche to be reunited with her lover, Cupid. The entwined figures create a sense of movement and demonstrate De Vries’s compositional skill. The Museum acquired the cast in 1865, indicating a Victorian taste for the style known as Mannerism.
We walked down to the chapel at St Nons (it had become something of a pilgrimage) and lit candles. Swallows flitted in and out over our heads and perched twittering quietly on the rafters by empty nests.
The clouds were breaking up; the sun turned the calm sea to silver and beyond St Non’s Well a field of barley invaded by corn marigolds shimmered in the breeze. Groups of young people in tight black wetsuits made their way west along the coastal path for a strenuous day of coasteering.
Whitesands Bay, Penbrokeshire, July 2021
We spent the afternoon at Whitesands Bay. It was busy – families had set up camps on the beach and swimmers and surfers revelled in the unusually blue sea white-lined by a procession small breaking waves. We walked to the south end and sat on the sand silently absorbed by the sea and mentally measuring a slowly rising tide. Gulls soared overhead like visiting spirits. We swam briefly, invigorated by the cold, the salt, the waves, a full sensory experience. I love the waves breaking over me. I love that sense of warmth when I’m out, dried and dressed. I love the salt and sand on my skin.
Archaeologists were excavating St Patrick’s Chapel near the car park. Little is known about its history – the earliest written record is from 1603, though it is clearly much older. It is threatened by coastal erosion and excavations since 2019 have revealed over 100 burials to date; radiocarbon dating has shown that the cemetery was in use from the 6th century to the 11th century. A volunteer was working on a skeleton buried in the sand, literally digging with a teaspoon.
Late that evening in the silent house I sat in my room looking out across the cathedral under a soft hued sky of greys, yellows and blues. Carn Llidi was capped by cloud; gulls headed silently and purposefully south. Suddenly a flock of rooks and jackdaws exploded clamourously from the trees. They settled and a last scream of swifts played chase round the cathedral.
Weavers Cottage, Spinners Lane, Southwold, 20th May 2021
The weather continued to be grim for May: wind, rain and cold under leaden skies. It didn’t keep us in and bracing walks were rewarded by the sense of overcoming adversity, still, going out was as much a duty as a pleasure, (not that we would be lying about sun bathing if we were having balmy days).
In that spirit we drove up to Covehithe. The by-road road down to it from the B1127 was delightful – overhanging oaks and birch and banks of green and cream cow parsley and alexanders (horse parsley!). We parked outside the hamlet, a couple of hundred yards short of the church. A footpath led south from there, past fields of waving barley and paddocks with scores of pigs truffling in the mud; Covehithe Broad, a pewter expanse of water and soft reeds spread towards Easton Wood. The path left the fields and ran parallel with the cliff edge, through a tunnel of blackthorn and umbellifers, to emerge through dunes onto the wide sandy beach studded with stones. The dunes rose slowly to the north to form the cliffs of around 15-20 metres at Covehithe. The low cliffs, 2-3 metres high, were pocked with sand martin nest holes – a few solitary birds skittered by, usually one could expect to see them busily going in and out of the holes.
Covehithe, May 2021
We walked north benefiting from a back wind, which sent small waves rolling up the beach. The cliffs stepped up slowly, friable umber coloured sandstone with horizontal bands of flints. They erode easily through high tides and water running off the fields – Covehithe may disappear completely in 100 years, some say much sooner. We picked up pebbles in an endless variety of shapes and colours and kept a few. Previous walkers had decorated a large rock with delicately balanced stone sculptures.
Back at the hamlet we explored St Andrews Church, a curious arrangement in which a thatched brick building of 1672 sits within the ruins of its very grand 14th century predecessor. We decided it was too cold to picnic outside among the broken pillars and ate our sandwiches in the car under a proud oak.
