Surprise photos

I loaned Jimmy a camera that had an unfinished roll of film inside. So he finished it and sent me the prints. These are their stories.

Lost photos found

I gave up on finding these photos ages ago, and found them buried with some other bits and pieces I also hadn't seen in ages.

In memory of a real tree

This tree (on the far left) is gone now, probably as some sort of a safety measure to do with the road. These are two photos I took in August 2008, I found the whole scene eerie for some reason. The banal location - a Knocknacarra suburb made up primarily of B&Bs - made it all the stranger, as if the combination of a full moon shrouded in cloud, a twisting road and smooth, towering tree were not meant to be placed in this context. But now the tree is just a stump and a scene like this won't ever happen there again. Which doesn't really matter, does it? It's just a photograph after all. I'm sure there must be plenty of other people who have noticed it and missed it; I suppose I'm just glad I have a record of it at least.

"Lovely in Loughrea"

A spin in the car and the opportunity to photograph some trees near Kilreekil that I'd only ever fleetingly seen over the years from the bus to or from Dublin, but the bus doesn't even go past here anymore since the motorway came to town. I had a Super 8 camera and another medium format camera so only took one or two with my regular one. I didn't take all that much of them though, it was nice to just be so close to them.

Then we went to Ballinasloe and I bought a lamp. It was a good day.

Incidental Graffiti

Similar in a way to the previous post, these are markings on street furnishings and walls made either directly or indirectly by people; incidental graffiti (which is possibly a crap name for it but oh well). One of these, the "you" photo, is purely a result of my selective interpretation of a chance occurrence, so in a way it doesn't really count... but the rest are more (semi) natural occurrences. Some, like the second last, are caused by nature while others, like the last, are caused by human activity and are generally incidental. Stains made on walls by I don't know what, lines of a dead creeping vine traced onto a building and bright scars etched into concrete as a result of a long past and forgotten minor accident. It's difficult to see these things because they're so blatantly unimportant, but once you do see them they're everywhere.

Days of Film

I hadn't gotten any colour prints in ages, and I hadn't done any mini projects for a while, and I hadn't just walked around with a camera for a while, so I did.

"The sign says up so I must go up"

The return of the rain meant the return of my long coat with the torn pocket big enough to fit a proper camera. The weight as I walk is a comforting burden, and the camera slips in and out of the pocket easily enough. I took the neckstrap off ages ago to try carrying it in my hand, á la Henri Cartier-Bresson in a piece of footage from a documentary about him, showing him at work. It creates a bit more space in the pocket and is less hassle to handle, what with the neck-strap's tendency to get caught in buttons and wrapped around fingers. But it also makes a sort of psychological statement of intent; holding the camera as you walk cuts out one of the small procedures required to take a photograph and shortens the time in which the decision of whether to take or not to take is made. There are less excuses to chicken out.

I've been meaning to make a proper go of this idea/observation for a good three or four years - photographing things you see on the ground in a city. Random patches of missing tarmacadam, litter and detritus, chunks of road markings chipped away and smoothened by foot and wheel and the textures and forms you get within them. I generally try to photograph them from directly above, as I feel the distortion added by odd angles overtly changes the nature of the forms - I don't want to put too much of what I see in the photographs themselves. It's like looking at clouds I think; everybody has the capacity to see something completely different. Generally people see what they want to see, I think. It's not as if a person would look at something of insubstantial form and go out of their way to see something they didn't want to see. Or maybe that's just me. I just like drawing attention to these kinds of things, and can't help but routinely search the ground for odd shapes or textures. They look especially exotic when it's raining, as in most of these.

I'm not finished collecting them; I suppose I never will, but that's ok. These are the kinds of thing I like to photograph when I feel I can't face involving people in the picture; instead there are only residual traces of people - their minute actions that leave an indelible mark on their surroundings, which they then largely ignore.

Jaunt [Fire it Keep ear]

I love a contact sheet

Contact sheets are my favourite things to make in a darkroom. The photographs are so small you can't really see the imperfections that you know are there and you will eventually see when you enlarge them. On the contact sheet every image looks like a perfect little self-contained universe, neatly arranged and segmented along with the others around it. They tell a story in a way the single image can only really hint at - like the short synopses you'd read at the start of each chapter of old adventure novels. Plus, they're real easy to make and sort of satisfy the need for instant gratification...

These are all quite badly 'scanned' (I just photographed them with a digital camera), hopefully I'll get to use the scanner at school and get some decent files, but for now I just want to make sure I've recorded them. The one above is about the trip I took to Limerick and Cork supporting the 202s and Patrick Kelleher. About half the images were destroyed either by my increasingly fault-ridden camera or just by a freak roll of film, which is pretty disappointing but I'm happy with what wasn't destroyed.  

Christmas at home, taken with a borrowed camera.

I had the idea one day when I was home and killing time before work to just quickly take vertical photographs of windows, but it branched out to include rivers and archway entrances, and then I kind of forgot about the windows a bit. I had the resulting contact sheet in mind; I think I liked the idea of applying uniformity to subjects that were only tenuously related... I had the word 'Ways' in my head while doing it. It was fun, running around trying to spot specific subjects, and I tried to continue taking only vertical photos for the rest of the roll, though I obviously forgot what I was doing at one point.