INDECISION

Been experiencing something of a creative dry spell recently; definitely not feeling myself. My stomach is a constant knot of tension and anxiety, and frankly I feel awful. But I can't stop - that's the worst thing to do.

So, if I can't make anything new, I guess the logical next step is to chunk out a cubic shitload of artist research... here's some people I find interesting at the moment.

ROBERT FRANK

This guy has made some pretty kick-ass stuff, working mainly with street photography but also doing some film-based pieces as well. He had the opportunity to work under some seriously big names in photography, such as Diane Arbus and Edward Steichen in the 40s and 50s, and even hung out with Jack Kerouac a few times. Jammy git.

 An example of Frank's early street photography from the series The Americans.

This kind of work made up the majority of his early portfolio, as he documented his extensive travels across America.

Later on in his life however, things did go to shit for him; despite these recent fugs of indecision I have been experiencing, one thing that makes me feel better is that I never had it as bad as this guy. In the space of 5 years, he split up with his long-term wife Mary, and lost both his children - his daughter Andrea died in a plane crash, and his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia and subsequently killed himself a couple of years later. Brutal stuff. 

Sick of Goodby's - Multiple exposures, visible distressing of negatives and ambiguous yet for some reason strangely moving subject matter. Powerful stuff.

As you can see, this definitely influenced his later work; there is a distinct separation between this and his earlier, documentary based work. This piece in particular, Sick of Goodby's, conveys to me a feeling of monumental loss and mourning. This brutally dark style dominated his work throughout the 80s, and he gained a reputation as something of a recluse.

When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.

 - Robert Frank

BARBARA KRUGER

Another artist that combines found image with witty slogans, to make powerful poster-like works that sometimes smack of propaganda. The text has a pithy and aggressive format, often making a commentary on feminism or consumerism and is presented in bold white Futura font on a red background. 

Kruger's work also incorporates a sense of irony; often the images she uses as backgrounds are culled from the magazines that sell the ideas she is disputing. 

Who is bought and sold? Who is beyond the law? Who is free to choose? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?

- Barbara Kruger

JACK KEROUAC
Well known as one of the pioneers of the Beat Generation and one of the progenitors of the hippie movement, Kerouac was something of an underground celebrity until after his death in 1969, famous for his spontaneous and exhaustively detailed style of writing.

This excerpt is from one of Kerouac's most well known texts, On the Road, an autobiographical novel telling of his road trip adventures around America with Neal Cassidy in the 40s. While drafting the manuscript of this text, it has been said that Kerouac cut up strips of tracing paper wide enough to fit in his typewriter, and taped them into one unbroken roll of paper that measured around 37 metres in total. This allowed him to work in his continuous, stream-of-consciousness style of writing without having to stop and reload the typewriter at the end of a page. This first draft was completed within 20 days of solid writing; Jack kept himself behind closed doors, maintained only by bowls of soup and coffee brought to him by his wife Joan.

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” 

 - Jack Kerouac

So there's some of the people I'm looking at currently. Robert Frank's work moves me the most, however I find some of Kruger's work to be slightly cliche - I may work a bit more with text interventions and pick up where I left off last year, but I won't devote too much time to it.
I've also decided I want to develop my writing as well, and try a similar technique to Kerouac's stream of consciousness kind of prose.

Well, that certainly helped a little bit. My mind is somewhat more at ease now - Maybe I'll give these things a try.
I've also just had a random thought - Buy some cheap trinkets from a charity shop, beat the shit out of them, stick them back together and then do it again... Thinking of maybe CREATE, DESTROY, REMAKE, OBLITERATE as a title.
Wow, that idea literally just popped into my head out of nowhere. Huzzah! This is more like it!
Stay tuned for the results of these experiments.

Until then - stay curious.
- Padfoot

PAPERCUTS

Howdy y'all.

Here it is, as promised - the full version of my newest short story, PAPERCUTS. 

Enjoy!

PAPERCUTS

Alan was a photographer, first and foremost. He lived/existed in his mess of a London loft apartment, trying his best to make a masterpiece. Alan's talent lied in photography; none of that digital bollocks mind, no sir. Not enough heart in that branch of the art – the shots are mere ghosts of what the eye had seen, soulless reproductions, assembled pixel by pixel on a 4.5 inch square screen by a computer chip. No, analogue was the future.

They'd all laughed of course. No one seemed to appreciate the appeal of an image made by the reaction of chemicals and light; it was all about “my telezoom is longer than yours” and “Canon is cleeearly more superior to Nikon; the clarity of image is just to die for!” The whole business gave Alan a headache. But, with megapixel ratios climbing higher every year, and film prices following suit, Alan had a hard time making any profit from his work – that is, if he ever sold any. No one seemed to be interested in fuzzy, grainy shadows rendered in tones that were never quite the starkest black and white – they said he was sloppy, his images full of drunken horizons and meaningless subject matter. This is what truly made his blood boil sometimes. So what if it wasn't the latest technicolour digital masterpiece, tweaked and poked and prodded in an editing suite until any soul it had had died screaming in the margins? To Alan, true elegance lay in the mechanical clunk of a shutter release, contact of light on film to create negatives, that feeling of wonder as an image slowly fades into existence, willed into being by the chemical wizardry of the development process. That was true art.

Alan didn't look particularly healthy. Most of his time was spent under the red safety lights of his darkroom, so his skin was pale and translucent under his scrubby, greying beard and messy head of dark hair. A diet of mainly ramen noodles and whatever he could get his hands on at short notice at the corner shops had given him a thin, pinched look; his face was drawn and his eyes were often bloodshot and accompanied by impressive bags for someone of only 35 years of age.

It was a Tuesday. As far as Alan was concerned, Tuesday wasn't a brilliant day; it was the day after Monday and quite frankly was just too far from Friday to be worth much effort. More to the point, the bins were collected on a Tuesday – meaning that no matter how much Alan wanted to sleep in, he would always be awoken at 7am by the clunking and grinding of the compactor units sent around by Hackney council. The hiss and whine of hydraulic rams pulverising his refuse into a pulp was relentless and, in a way, terrifying. These compactors, behemoths of steel and iron, would grind and pound his waste into super-compacted blocks. These would then be burned to feed the national grid in the offshore energy recovery plants... Not that there was much energy in 2 weeks worth of ramen packets, thought Alan to himself.

Knowing he would definitely not be going back to sleep while the college dropouts rounded up everyone's waste outside, Alan rose from his squeaky army cot, fumbled for a moment to get his glasses, and went straight for the coffee machine, negotiating the matrix of strings criss-crossing the ceiling of his kitchen-diner-living room space. Multiple prints were pegged onto these strings – some of Alan's trademark fuzzy, grey images, hanging like a kind of macabre bunting... the fruits of his labour, the half-resolved figures and shapes constantly seeming to stare at him from their lofty positions.

Alan examined one such onlooker whilst the coffee machine warmed up – one of the better prints he had produced, simply a white corridor with one or two people with a grey shadow smudged across it, a suggestion of a tall, curly-haired man striding across the shot; head down, on a mission. He went to pull it down, then recoiled sharply as a tiny cut opened on the side of his finger. Alan cursed; he hated papercuts. It bothered him that something so small could cause so much discomfort... just another of the numerous hangups his creative mind was hampered with.

Half an hour later, Alan was still worrying this papercut when his phone rang; a strident bipping that cut through the apocalyptic hissing and crashing of the compactors outside. He checked the caller ID to find it was Barry, his agent. Strange, he thought. Barry hadn't called in months.

Tentatively, Alan answered, a croaky and half-hearted voice he did not quite recognise as his own.

“Hello?”

An overly cheerful, tinny, cockney accent rattled through the phone's speaker.

“Alan! It's Barry, mate! Fuck me, you sound rough. How long has it been since you left that dirty ol' loft of yours?”

“Too long, I guess.” whispered Alan, trying to remember the last time he had actually gone out with something other than creative block or getting more filter coffee on his mind.

“Well Alan, I know its been a while, but I've found some silly twat who might actually be interested in your work. He wants to get you a job!”

Alan almost spat out his coffee. A job? A way out of this hellish half existence?

Surely not. It was too good to be true.

Barry registered the disbelief in Alan's silence.

“Oi! Earth to Alan! Do you want the job or not?”

“Yes! Jesus god, yes!” cried Alan, almost weeping with joy.

“Goody gumdrops. Now get your shit together; he wants to meet tomorrow. Don't be late now, or you'll be in a whole heap o' barney.”

The line went dead. Alan's elation evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Tomorrow? That wasn't enough time. No way was that enough time. Alan could feel himself slumping back into misery.

But then one crystal clear thought sliced through the quagmire of self pity that threatened to overwhelm him; roundhouse kicked his panic in the face and told it to bugger off.

You can do this, the thought said.

How odd, Alan thought. This wasn't like him. Maybe it was the promise of finally making it which had caused this out-of-character thinking. But the thought was right. He could do this. He drank the rest of his coffee, now lukewarm, cracked his knuckles, and went for his chemical cupboard.

Since proper photo chemicals had gotten so expensive, Alan had started to make his own with his limited knowledge of chemistry. Alan entered a Zen-like state of calm, weighing out the ingredients he needed for his chemical wizardry: borax, sodium sulphite, hydroquinone, and countless other reagents with equally weird names. This was what he was born to do. Mixing the chemicals made him feel peculiar – after a minute he recognised it as the thrill of creation, an unusual singing which resonated through his body and made his nerves tingle. This was something he hadn't felt for a while. Once the chemicals were prepared, he checked all his equipment in the corner of the flat dedicated to printing, and closed the blackout blinds in his windows. The apartment was plunged into complete darkness, and a muffled silence descended, interrupted by the flick of a light switch. Red safety lights pinged and sputtered into life, and Alan exhaled. He was ready.

After hours of exposing, printing, and heaps of failed test strips Alan stood back from his work, and allowed himself a moment of brief reflection. For the first time in a long while, he was pleased with what he had achieved. This feeling of pride in his work filled him up and threatened to spill over into a smile, but this was halted by an unusual sick feeling in his stomach. In fact, Alan realised he really wasn't feeling quite right; he felt distinctly light headed, his eyes were sore and his hands were shaking. He figured he must be dehydrated and overdue a meal, but, desperate to finish the job, he carried on working. And working. It felt like he could print forever; despite a pain that translated as a low hum in the base of his skull, and that nausea growing stronger. But he ignored it. Must keep working, he thought. Soon he began to feel a little delirious, and almost fancied that the blurry figures in his prints were talking to him. The paper took on a life of its own, dipping itself in the chemicals and shaking itself off like a dog between each tray. Having observed all of this, Alan was not particularly surprised when the floor, normally reasonably pre-occupied with being under his feet, decided to rush up and smack him in the face for what felt like no reason at all. Alan briefly felt a bit miffed at the floor for being so needlessly confrontational, before blacking out.

Alan awoke in a cold sweat, lying spread eagle in the middle of the apartment floor. The red safety lights still hummed and flickered, making him wonder at first if he had gone blind. He struggled to the light switch, and turned on the white strip lights, cursing as the harsh white bulbs scored flaming afterimages into his retinas. Once he had recovered, a quick look around revealed damning evidence to back up what he already knew. He was surrounded by broken glass, prints of nothing, and – strangest of all - tiny origami sculptures, immaculately folded. He tried to remember the name of the form; his head felt like it was full of knives. The crane... that was it. He remembered his grandma teaching him all those years ago. He was the only member of the family that had inherited her creative flair – that same drive to create that had inspired him to take up a career in photography in the first place.

Things had seemed much simpler then.

His head was pounding and everything hurt; it was like the worst hangover he'd ever had had come back to haunt him. His hands were covered in tiny papercuts, and he winced in pain as he attempted to flex his fingers. All the pieces of photo paper surrounding him bore no image, simply a square of deepest black. Closer inspection of the origami cranes revealed that they had been made using his own photographs – a glance to the ceiling proved what Alan had already guessed; all of the prints that had once hung there were gone. With a growing feeling of horror, Alan realised that his entire portfolio had been ruined. But how? Could it have been him? It must have been – how else could he have sliced up his hands so badly?

Suddenly a more urgent, panicked question came to mind: how long had he been out? Shit! The meet! Alan pulled out his phone, noticing all the missed calls and messages – and the date. Alan had managed to lose two full days... not to mention the job, he thought miserably to himself. There was no point calling Barry – That ship had sailed. Even if he could be bothered to bring himself to call his agent, what would he have to show? Blank squares of blackness and some ridiculous origami that a 7 year old could make... No, this is the sort of crap that only the most eccentric rich twats would be interested in. Definitely not the sort of company that Barry kept.

It was now Thursday. Another of Alan's least favourite days – purely because it was the day before Friday, an ambivalent, unnecessary day that quite frankly could fuck off. Alan felt sick, and hot... he strode to his window and threw it open. A cool breeze played across his face, the sounds of evening London traffic infiltrated the loft, and the yellow glow of the arc sodium lamps in the street below reflected briefly in his glasses. 

Suddenly, in a fit of rage and self pity, he gathered up the origami cranes and all the prints he did not remember making – over fifty separate sheets, with nothing but a blank, abyssal square of black burned into them by the light of the enlarger lamp – and tossed them all out of the open window. As the blank prints floated slowly to the ground, for a moment the tiny paper birds appeared to take flight, only to be knocked awry and scattered by the winds that howled through the dim streets of Hackney.

- fin.

And that's it. I've been working on this for a little while now, not entirely sure where the idea came from except maybe a papercut I had whilst working in the darkroom myself a few weeks ago. Some of those chemicals sting like fuck when they get into small open wounds like that.

I've also been making a foray into photographing gigs recently, if you're interested don't forget to check out my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/this.is.patography

That's all you're getting for now. Check back again soon for your regular fix of visual madness.

Beware of this and that, yeah?

- Padfoot

LEVEL 5 - THE RETURN OF PADFOOT

That's right... I'm back, baby. 

My second year of university is in pretty much full swing, and it's been pretty kick-ass so far. 

There's some new faces in the studio this year, as well as the old ones. Michael Wright is still as amazing and bat-shit insane as ever, and I've nicely slipped back into my regular work ethic of sort of just mucking about. As you do.

I've managed to chunk out a surprising amount of work - I was actually kind of worried at first. Me? Doing work? Don't be ridiculous. But no, the ideas are coming thick and fast, so that's one problem solved.

The subject of duality was something I was looking at over the summer, polar opposites that can't exist without each other. For example, light and dark, a lock and key, happiness and sadness; you get the idea.

Hoping to make a short film out of this, but so far it's on the back burner.

Also, to get the creative juices flowing again, I decided to throw together every single photo I took last year into a kind of stop-motion animation. In a way, its like a journey - you get to see snatches of places I've been, work that I've done, and people that I've seen. In another, its a completely bonkers audio/visual assault on the senses.

So here it is. Unfortunately YouTube compressed the living shit out of it, so its very low quality. Also it would have taken a whole day to render it properly if I'd done it in HD, and I'm just a tad too impatient.

I should probably give it a better name too.

Photos (c) me 2012. You thieving bastards.

Music - Juular by Devin Townsend Project

I wrote a short story as well, provisionally entitled Papercuts, about a middle-aged analogue photographer who just can't seem to make it in the digital future of the art world. This was based on some of my own vague anxieties about the future, and whether my particular practice would still be relevant in 20 years time.

Here's a short excerpt...

Since proper photo chemicals had gotten so expensive, Alan had started to make his own with his limited knowledge of chemistry. Alan entered a Zen-like state of calm, weighing out the ingredients he needed for his chemical wizardry... Mixing the chemicals made him feel peculiar – after a minute he recognised it as the thrill of creation, an unusual singing which resonated through his body and made his nerves tingle. This was something he hadn't felt for a while. Once the chemicals were prepared, he checked all his equipment in the corner of the flat dedicated to printing, and closed the blackout blinds in his windows. The apartment was plunged into complete darkness, and a muffled silence descended, interrupted by the flick of a light switch. Red safety lights pinged and sputtered into life, and Alan exhaled. He was ready.

Has that tickled your fancy? It better have.
I'd publish the whole thing but its like, three pages long. Will probably chuck it on a seperate blog post when i've finished all the final tweakings.

Until then - ciao for now.

- Padfoot