I am really pleased to show some of my pinhole photographs as part of the first f11 Group exhibition at the wonderful Fishbone Gallery in Coventry. The exhibition runs from Saturday 27th June - Saturday 11th July 2009. See the Fishbone Gallery website for opening times.

Edge
Mesmerised; this place
of arriving and leaving.
Soul kissed by water.

I stood on the flat sand and made my exposure while the incoming waves petered out around me, the tripod legs cutting trails and swirls in the dying surges of water . On the horizon the wind was drawing clouds onto the sea and, as the breeze made me squint, the whole world seemed to open up in a lightness of pure, unfocused white; white sky, white sand and a disorientation which hid the steady sinking of my feet and tripod into the foam.

There is departing
in all these comings
and going is so much more
start than stop.

I found this oddly shaped piece of driftwood on the rocky shore and placed it in a crack between two stones where it traced a connection between the earth and the sky.

Standing by the water's edge, mesmerised, the edges all seemed blurred. Do pebbles belong in the sea or on the land? Where does the horizon actually draw its line between sky and water? What story lies behind the journey of this flotsam on the beach? Just an insignificant tale of man's propensity to litter and discard, or perhaps a tale of of shipwreck and heroism where life and death are thrown into their own sharp perspective? In that place where answers do not offer themselves readily, the questions seem strangely more acceptable, less agonising. The unknown, unfathomable but perfect.

Spending time by the sea always releases any creative blocks for me. The past weeks have seen my life filled with so many non-artistic duties and tasks which had pushed image making from my mind that I worried a week's stay in Pembrokeshire would see me flat and uninspired. In fact, the opposite proved true and refinding the coast felt like a reunion with a long-lost lover. This photograph was made in-camera using my beautiful spalted hawthorn 4x5 pinhole camera on paper negative.

Another pinhole from last year's stay in the garden at Dyffryn Fernant. From the recent unequivocal scientific statements on climate change (as if we really need reminding!) it seems that a messenger from the gods is perhaps what we need at the moment.

I recently completed the binding of one of my favourite texts, "Letters to a Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Since I read this book last year I have loved the wisdom and beauty of its language and the messages it contains. From first picking it up I knew that I wanted to illustrate it with pinhole photographs. The book was printed on standard 100gsm Conqueror paper in contour finish and using A4 guillotined to A5 short-grain allowed me to print to a page size of A6.

First, the signatures were trimmed and then pierced. As I don't have a plough I trim the pages as accurately as possible prior to binding to make the edge finish of the pages as smooth as I can manage. The result is usually not completely level but I find the slightly rustic unevenness suits me.




The pierced signatures ready for sewing.


Sewing the signatures.




Once the signatures are sewn the cover boards and spine are pasted in place. I chose to use a hollow back made from kraft paper rather than a rigid spine. The inlaid section is fully covered by the covering material and pressed down after pasting to make an indented area into which I place the cover illustration (see below).


The book starts to take shape now. The next step is to paste in the endpapers. I find this part the most difficult as a mistake can write off the whole book. The trimming of the papers needs to absolutely precise as does the application of the paste so that it does not touch the cover material and edges nor the inner pages of the book.


Once pasted, pressed and dried, the endpapers really finish the book beautifully.


The text pages of the book were laid out using Lyx.


I chose to bind illustrations into the centre of two of the signatures. The images were printed on a heavier grade paper than the text (Bockingford Inkjet Watercolour double-sided 190gsm). This makes the feel of the page flow slightly uneven when leafing through the book but it was a necessary compromise to allow the images to be reproduced as close as possible to photo quality.


The final stage was to paste and press the cover illustration into the inlaid section. Although this method of titling is more fiddly than the simple pasting on of a cover title, I personally like to use it for a couple of reasons: it is more stylish and crafted; and the cover photo is protected from abrasion when rubbing against neighbouring books on the shelf.

I am quite dissatisfied that, having had a relatively hard winter, I didn't seize the chance to work more on the Still Life in Ice series of pinholes. What I wanted to achieve was a collection of poems and photographs working hand-in-hand but somehow the poems didn't come and as a result I didn't put much in to constructing the images. Nevertheless, I did come up with one pairing which worked. As usual it has taken me some time to refine the poem and achieve the consistency and balance I sought between the haiku and the photograph. The photo didn't work on its own (this is what I wanted to begin with); the first draft of the haiku was reasonable but, alongside the image, both the words and the photo seemed somehow diminished and disjointed. The technique of putting everything away for a few weeks allowed me to review it with fresh eyes and suddenly a small tweak to the words, a minimal crop to the image and now I have a result which pleases me to the point that I wish I had been a little more persistent while the ice was with us.

Ice haiku
Thrilling now, daring loss,
mystery unshattered.
This is why we love

Finally, after three years of trying, I have had a pinhole photograph accepted into the highly-competitive Royal Photographic Society annual print exhibition. It has been an interesting process of entering and facing rejection for the work which I feel to be the most powerful I have produced whiist, at the same time, having my "snaps" accepted. I hope it doesn't sound ungrateful or arrogant to say that I have felt dogged by relative success!

Thankfully, though, this time round I had my personal favourite image accepted out of the many thousands submitted from around the world for the 125 print touring exhibtion which opens in London on the 19th May.

A pinhole photograph from last autumn. This was an amazing day when I walked with my son, Finn, for several miles accompanied by a male pheasant who seemed to enjoy our company and followed us like a dog.

I have recently been through a period of fallow; a time when I have felt the need to read, listen and reflect; a time during which many thoughts, ideas and feelings have been almost perceptibly shaking down and clearing. I love this process of consideration and learning which takes place beyond the purely visual. It seems odd sometimes that a lover of photography can go through fairly lengthy times of not wanting to look at photographs - neither his own nor those of anybody else. I do feel though that the visual aspect of one's sensibility is tremendously enhanced by engaging with other disciplines - music, poetry, prose, political ideas, philosophy to name just a few - and that coming out of such a period of thinking - one outside the boundaries of one's normal thoughts - engenders a creative momentum which adds much to one's familiar and habitual medium (in my case photography). I suppose it is natural to frequently experience this re-emerging at the onset of Spring but I now have the inkling of an unstoppable upthrust of motivation and inspiration.

Inspiration is something new I have started to include in this blog; the linking to sites and ideas which pull me along and make me remember, during those frequent times of forgetting, why I feel driven to create. This clip of Benjamin Zander - from what I believe to be perhaps the most inspiring website on the planet, TED.com - sums up for me why creatively engaging with life can be such a thrilling experience. It also serves as a reminder that, whatever we choose to do, the ripples and resonances of our actions may well reach and touch others' lives in ways we might never imagine.

Not very long ago I bought an old Lubitel on Ebay with the intention of converting it into a pinhole camera. Just from curiosity I decided to try it out as it arrived with me, complete with lens and an old roll of partly exposed ORWO film still inside. The blemishes are entirely and purely what showed on the film after processing without any kind of post-processing. I have to admit I really like the mystery and the imperfection of it. This is my hand, I think, even though I have no recollection of making the exposure. It does show on the film after an exposure which I know I made so was not on the film when I received it. I find myself intrigued and fascinated by this image which is most certainly mine but which I can neither explain nor recall.