Look at someone’s home space as opposed to a designed environment like a chain store, and everything will just feel a lot more natural in the former, because the space has grown naturally. Sometimes I feel this is also true of charity shops like this one, which is why they make more interesting subjects. The dog is just a temporary visitor, but does his/her bit too.
With this determination I have not to repeat myself on this blog, and living in a home town that isn’t really that big — there are only so many corners of it to photograph. But I’m pretty sure I haven’t done this one before.
The hair of the woman on the left, lit by the weak sun behind, was what caught my eye on this one, but I like the face of the other stallholder too.
It cleared up considerably after about 1.30pm, but until then was pretty awful, vindicating my decision not to go on a Lake District walk today. These swings only seem to get pictured in bad weather.
And yet more construction, this time in Hebden Bridge and pictured from the bathroom window of our house. These road works have been protracted — the picture of the happy drill was taken around their starting point. This has been a very Hebden-bound period of the blog.
This was also a photowhack — the one and only photo taken on a particular day.
Why Stevie Wonder? No idea. Why not? More of a wonder was finding a cash machine in Hebden Bridge with cash still in it, at the fag-end of a three-day Bank Holiday weekend.
Second day in a row spent almost entirely at home, partly because I’m unwell and also because we were having a new central heating boiler installed. The old one is visible on the front steps, with its red back. Why the scaffolding? I am not sure, ask the engineer. Perhaps just for the variety.
We’re still not moving a great distance from home. Taken down the side of the cinema in Hebden Bridge. Why do I like it? The arrow, the lines, the capturing of Joe’s shuffling gait.
Estate agents would describe this as ‘in a highly desirable location with a world-class view, but in need of renovation and lacking certain amenities’. In other words it isn’t on a road and doesn’t have mains anything, which is probably why it’s been abandoned for many years. This is Clough Head Farm, off the Widdop road above Hardcastle Crags near Hebden Bridge. I’m still in training for the walk I will begin a week from today.
I have been re-reading Gerry Badger’s superb book, The Genius of Photography, a fascinating history of the medium. Last time I did this I went all social realist on this blog and decided I was taking away these commentaries and letting the images speak for themselves. This lasted about a week after I received a surprising number of complaints both directly and indirectly. So don’t worry, I’m not going to do that again.
But Badger’s book does always make me ask, just why am I doing this? What is it I’m trying to create? Is it art? Am I making a statement about the world? I think the answer has to be no, I’m not an artist. But what I am is a blogger, a diarist: I’ve kept a journal for over thirty years now (yes, every day), and this blog has become an extension of it into the visual medium, and also a public medium. I hope I create pictures that are aesthetically pleasing along the way — a body of photographic work if you like, after all, I take so many that some of them are going to be half decent. But just as important is the accumulated narrative. This blog depicts the world as I see it each day, no more, no less. No photos are posed or staged, and all light is what I have to work with on the spot. And that’s what I do.
I doubt it’ll make much impact on the history of photography or be noticed by Gerry Badger should he ever write a second edition of his book, but it gives me a sense of my own place in the world, and that’s what gives it value.
Being 42 