Gorbals « leo photophile

First post

My mother, when a student at St Andrews University in the 1920s, wrote an article for the college magazine. It had a two-word title, the second one being Bibliophile. The first word I have forgotten, but it wasn’t biblical and certainly not bibulous. She had a love of words, my mother, which she passed on to me, because I love words too and sometimes give them a meaning of my own. My neologisms, however, along with my visual sense, came from elsewhere. So I am Photophile and this is my college magazine!

I love black and white photography. I can’t remember when this started. Probably when I was around eighteen, no earlier than that, but by my late teens, I owned a secondhand Zeiss Ikon camera and took pictures of anonymous things with it. Well, not anonymous exactly; my word for it was innominate. That word meant to me something that no one would notice, or rather might notice, but because it had no name, would devalue. I took pictures along country roads, for instance, because I felt something ineffable about being there – some brooding presence – in a place that no one had marked, only passed by on the way to somewhere else. But, of course, it had to look that way! And the pictures were unremarkable, though I preferred to think of them as eliptical. They are all lost.

The other word I had for things like this was interstices. It meant that in between recognizable things lurks the unrecognized. Another word that pointed in the same direction for me was chinks. Chinks came after interstices. Whereas interstices referred to the unseen, something visible showed through the chinks, which opened momentarily like a tear in a skein or the space between two buildings as the train rushes past. It may well be there’s something quirky about my way of seeing. And that’s fine.

One writer who comes close to this apperception is Andrei Platonov, especially in his The Foundation Pit, like when Voschev addresses a dead leaf that had fallen to the ground: “You never had any meaning in life. Stay lying here – and I’ll find out what it was you lived and died for.”

Andrei Platonov, died 1951

Olga Bobrova says about Platonov’s writing: “His prose seems to push the reader out into an open, unfriendly world. It makes one feel lonely, suffer together with its characters and struggle in the search for truth and the meaning of existence.”

At the moment my favourite photographer is Josef Koudelka.

But here is a photograph I took in the late 1960s as part of a series on Gorbals people. These two had really relaxed into being themselves by the time I got the shot. This used car dump was their stamping ground. I was influenced by a remark of Ken Heyman’s about engaging with his subject.

Gorbals ladies

Shortly after this, the old Gorbals disappeared. Its rundown but impressive wide streets of tenements were torn down and replaced with high rise. Here is how one Gorbals website puts it:

After the Second World War, attempts were made to rehouse those in sub-standard tenement blocks by moving them to new estates on the edge of the city – though the sprawling local council estates of Castlemilk, Easterhouse, Pollok and Drumchapel created just as many social problems. In the Gorbals, the old buildings were demolished and new high-rise flats arose in their place – as filing cabinets for people. The old community spirit of the area was thus largely destroyed.

But it easy to romanticise in hindsight:

Step bairn, Gorbals 1975

I have only just rediscovered this negative. This young girl was exceptional, quite unlike the sort of slum dweller I had encountered. I don’t remember what she said, but I do remember it was a flight of fantasy she was conducting when I clicked the shutter. By then I had graduated to a Nikon F. The picture is called Gorbals spirit.

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July 30, 2006 Posted by photophile | Andrei Platonov, black and white photography, Gorbals, interstices, Josef Koudelka, Ken Heyman | 1 Comment

About

July 2006

Through a glass darkly is my metaphoric allusion to looking through the lens of a camera, awaiting the psychological moment (in the dark). It is also the title of an Ingmar Bergman film I saw a long time ago, and because of one scene in that film, I always remember it: a view of a northern lake in the midnight sun hypnotises the camera. I hold that scene within like a communication with an unknown self. Perhaps had I something of the imaginative grasp of Robert Musil, there’d be no need to take photographs. Here is part of a sentence from his strory The Perfecting of Love: “now and then it happens that one sees something in the distance, an unfamiliar thing and walks towards it, and at a certain point it enters into the circle of one’s own life; but the place where one was before is now strangely empty.”

To the woods

It is, of course, a phrase, from 1 Corinthians 13, followed there by another phrase: “face to face” as a now-and-then, a before-and-after. So, as usual, quite a process is constellated in the space between. This web-space, to an extent represents, a space between. Images are one of the things that tag to such happenings, words also, but ineffably, in one way or another, meaning eludes one.

And now a picture to hold that space.

Who am I?

I think my search for meaning in empty spaces may partly derive from growing up in a culture of mystification. Walker Percy has an interesting slant on this. It is pivotal to his novel The Moviegoer? I’ll have more to say about Binx Bolling sometime. By the way, I am Lyon, hence Leo. I am called that after my father who died when I was five. The woman in my imagination is Lyones after a character in Arthurian legend. Anyway what interests me is the meaning that momentarily emerges from the subliminal choices that register the activity of imagination – in an apparition, or a form of words, perhaps in the threatening surprises of a psychoanalysis – when I sense myself prompted towards a reality other than what I was thinking was real, the way of being I was accustomed to. It seems like a moment of acceptance of aloneness, not such that instills despair, but rather suggests a precarious balance above an abyss of unknowing, an insupportable freedom. In the next breath perhaps, he says, Musil, that is, ” a moment always comes that is like an abyss, and, left behind at its brink, there stands a sick person whom one does not know and who is gradually fading from sight.”

The next picture is from the spring of 1986 – a rusty incinerator aboard the crane barge Thor in the Fortes Field 140 miles offshore in the North Sea.

Case-hardened

21 August 2006

And now I’m picking up the thread again. And time has passed. And a phrase has come to mind: an image darkly forming is the phrase. It is the title of a book, and a Jungian might well take it as a metaphor for individuation. Jung thought of the progress of the soul as a night sea journey; he talked of Jonah and the whale. It is not a metaphor, however, when used another way, as a rather nice way of referring to the photograph: an image forming in the dark, first in the split-second piercing of the dark inside the camera, then developing in the dark of a tank and at last in the obscure light of the darkroom, and before all that, conceived in the dark processes of the mind’s eye. I want to use it in another sense to mark a trend in my interest in picture taking. I mean an image formed of the dark. Brassai’s Paris by night, has the glossy magic of the sensuous and romantic dark.

Prostitute at angle of Rue de la Reynie and Rue Quincampoix From “Paris by Night” 1933

In contrast, there is an image by a young Israeli photographer that cast a spell on me very different from that of the brilliance of the dark of Gyula Halasz Brassai. Sensuous, yes, but there is nothing sensual or romantic in Calanit Schachner’s picture. It takes me back to being a boy sitting in the darkened local cinema and being confronted by the unthinkable, moving black and white pictures of the relief of Belsen on the Gaumont British News. That this had been going on at the same time as my everyday life as a schoolboy! What I couldn’t get out of my head was the footage of the interior of the crematorium. And people can deny that these terrible things ever happened!

Space 5 (from Attic)