Diptychs Triptychs Multiples
From almost the very start of my interest in photography, I have been making diptych, triptych and multiple-frame images. They are often not planned beforehand, but suggest themselves to me in situ when I am making pictures or present themselves to me later on the light box or the contact sheet – previously on film or paper but nowadays as digital files.
The idea is used to tell a short story, to show action or movement in the way of a mini film-strip, to re-order and re-present location and time. In some cases, the idea utilises aspects of photography’s own intrinsic double language, the negative and the positive, and the mirror image.
Excepting the latter cases, all the composite images are made from separate pictures on individually exposed sheets or frames of film or digital files.
Cuba
I lived in Cuba in 2007 and 2008 and travelled extensively throughout the country photographing, in meeting places, places of work and leisure, public spaces, domestic surroundings, in country fields and city streets and squares, formally and informally, some of the people, both as individuals and as members of groups and organisations, who make up Cuban society in the 21st century.
Cuba is a contradiction which, for over half a century, has divided opinion and attracted, in almost equal measure, vehement support and strident opposition; an island of over 11 million people, run, until 2008, by the same man for nearly the whole of this 50 years; a single party state which, at the same time in 2008, held its five yearly democratic elections to the National Assembly, which in turn unanimously elected the new President, Raul Castro, to succeed his older brother; an implacable enemy of one Super Power, an ally of another and a firm friend of an emerging one; a small country which brought the World to the brink of nuclear war in the 1960’s, but whose leaders have, since the earliest days of their Government, actively followed an internationalist line; a Third World economy with a literacy standing of over 98% and a health service which is envied, and provides valuable expertise for, many in the developed nations; in 1866, one of the last of the Americas to abolish legal slavery and today possibly the most racially integrated society in the World.
When Fidel Castro fell ill in the summer of 2006, many people predicted, and the United States Government hoped, that the Cuban State would finally collapse – it didn’t.
The project covered the national elections held in early 2008, Fidel Castro’s final stepping down from the Presidency on the 19th February that year and, his younger brother and close confidant, Raul Castro’s election as President a week later.
3 Days in December
These images were made on the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex during a particularly cold spell of weather in early December 2010. With average temperatures at -1˚C, five degrees below the normal, it was the coldest December in England since records began a century ago.
Whilst 2010 was Britain’s 12th coldest year in records dating back to 1910 at the UK’s Met Office, newly released scientific data from NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) shows that 2010 equalled 2005 as the Earth’s warmest year over the last 131 years. The combined global land and ocean surface temperatures were 0.62˚C above the 20th century average, 14.52˚C compared to 13.9˚C. 2010 was also the wettest year on record.
‘Forest’ is a medieval term for a hunting ground, customarily owned by the monarch, in part wooded and setting its own laws. Ashdown Forest was originally a deer hunting forest in Norman times, but over many centuries its trees have also been a source for the fuel needed in the local smelting and iron workings and for the production of timber.
Its 6500 acres is now the largest free public access space in the southeast of England. The Ashdown Forest has national and international protection as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Tinos
In 2019, I relocated to a Greek island in The Aegean.
Tinos is characterised, amongst many other things, by two not unassociated factors.
The island is famous for the Church of Panagia Evangelistria, Our Lady of Tinos, the most important Marian shrine in Greece dedicated to the annunciation of the Virgin Mary and considered one of the most holy and sacred places in the country. The church therefore holds great sway in the life and affairs of Tinos and on any future direction the island decides to follow.
Additionally, the island has no airport to accommodate the type of international flights and overseas holidaymakers that have marked, many feel highly negatively, other islands in the Cyclades chain, most notably perhaps, Mykonos, its near neighbour. The idea was considered a few years ago, but rejected, and any possible future initiatives for any sort of airport seem similarly doomed, as much by the unsuitable geography of Tinos as by the strength and influence of the church.
The Church of Panagia Evangelistria, consecrated in 1830, is centred around an icon which it is believed was found after a nun, Pelagia, was told by the Virgin Mary in a dream or vision where the icon was buried on the island and believers consider the icon to be miraculous. It is nearly entirely enclosed in precious metal and various jewels and devotees make offerings of large amounts of gold and silver to fulfil their vows to the 'Megalochare' or She of Great Grace,' another name for the church, and thought to be a guardian of those who travel on the sea and a healer of the sick and frail.
Each year on the 15th August, the Dormition (peaceful death) of the Mother of God, is celebrated by the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches and Tinos becomes the centre of a pilgrimage with many attendees expressing their devotion by crawling on their hands and knees the 800 meters from the ferry port to the church, similar in this regard to Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal.
Tinos is also known for its windmills, dovecotes and 60 or so inhabited villages scattered across the island, its blue water beaches, wild landscapes and the Etesian (Meltemi) northerly winds that blow strongly across The Aegean Sea during the late Spring and Summer months. It has been famous for centuries for its marble and marble carving.
Over the years the island has been ruled by the Persians, the Venetians and the Ottoman Empire and became part of Greece following the Greek War of Independence in 1821.
Dungeness
‘The only desert’ in the United Kingdom, Dungeness, an exposed headland jutting out into the English Channel on the far south east coast of the county of Kent, is one of the largest areas of shingle in Europe and a flat low-lying promontory of international conservation importance.
Arriving at Dungeness, the nuclear power station, built in 1983, dominates a unique landscape described variously as post-apocalyptic and somewhere like the Wild West. The sense of space and emptiness is immediately noticeable and felt.
Dotted around the headland are traditional cottages set amongst contemporary residential conversions, the decaying remains of yesterday’s fishing industry and the huts and containers used by today’s fleet of fishermen. Curious buildings and structures betray the area’s location as a guardian and outlook for shipping travelling through this busy and crowded stretch of sea between England and France.
Dungeness has featured on the cover of a Pink Floyd album and in a Lighthouse Family video, was the home of the art house film-maker Derek Jarman in the 1990’s and plays host to a third of all the plant species found in the British Isles.
Dreamland
A series made during the winter months in British seaside resorts which along with the beach holiday played a central part in the development of international tourism that, for good and ill, we (the Brits) gave to the world.
The first resorts were in Whitby and Scarborough in North Yorkshire, around 1720, but the south east soon followed, notably in Margate and Brighton. Railways gave greater coastal access and resorts soon sprung up in Blackpool in the north west and Weymouth in the south west.
From the 1960’s, with competition from overseas holidays and the growth of the package tour, the British resort has found it increasingly difficult to survive and has fallen into some decline.