One Life - Live It

AN ESSAY (of sorts) BY KEVIN MULLINS

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The inspiration for my “essay”, if you will, is the last image in Neale’s recent post.

I’ve been at pains to think of something for my turn in this cycle for a while.

We’ve all been locked at home, and, thankfully, here in the UK at least, we are starting to see the sun again.

However, I don’t have any considered stories.

So I have effectively taken a mashup of some recent images that define my world at the moment.

But the thing is, that world is beautiful, and of course, Gemma and I have had our crazy arguments and the kids have driven us mad at times, but generally, I’ve seen this period as one of reflection and certainly of one that makes me realise this is our only life.

We have one life. We can bitch about it, or we can live it and love it.

Images in this collection are from my X100V, a prototype X-E4 and even my phone.

Not content with two dogs, Guinea Pigs and her brother. She now has a MASSIVE horse.

Not content with two dogs, Guinea Pigs and her brother. She now has a MASSIVE horse.

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I actually don’t know whose feet these are. Not mine.

I actually don’t know whose feet these are. Not mine.

I feel like in this world of Zoom, this is what people think I look like now.

I feel like in this world of Zoom, this is what people think I look like now.

When your little brother uses the soap to wash his little brother bits in the shower.

When your little brother uses the soap to wash his little brother bits in the shower.

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The cuteness is disappearing. Now it’s all LED Lights and “Dad can I have a new graphics card”

The cuteness is disappearing. Now it’s all LED Lights and “Dad can I have a new graphics card”

But we taught him to ride a bike, finally.

But we taught him to ride a bike, finally.

Keep well, keep safe and remember that there is one life - live it.

LIFE AT 2MPH

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BY NEALE JAMES

I’m borrowing inspiration from Dominique’s nephew peering through a playground train window and I’ll admit to a late entry, a stretched chain if you will and a false start to this story as initially I followed a more obvious line of inquiry; a trip to a railway station. I even found the perfectly shaped porthole sunk into the side of a passenger train bound for London Paddington. The shape fitted, the story didn’t. It wasn’t and isn’t reflective of my current state of mind. And so I returned, as so often I have during lockdown to a river, a canal, close to my home; my refuge from March 2020 to date.

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There are four thousand, seven hundred miles of navigable canals in the UK. Eighty seven miles are immediately available to me geographically, if only I had a boat. When lockdown initially enforced a strict local corridor of exercise, I took to the tow paths of the Kennet and Avon Canal. It’s an ‘as the bird flies’ route that engages the cities of Bristol to the west, and London to the east (via The Thames) which, with modest periods of inactivity thanks to a Victorian growth period of the railways and latterly the arterial motorway system, has been otherwise alive for over two hundred years.

Boating types who frequent these waterways navigate their days at two miles per hour (more if the mood takes but only by a mile or two) and I find watching this, slows me immeasurably also.

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I watched a volunteer lock keeper dredging the blackened depths with a magnet on the end of a line, in between making pictures.

He asked me what I was doing. I asked him what he could see.

“Bricks,” he mused?

“Shadows,” I answered, “Deep as the black within which you’re fishing. Anyway, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to find a windlass, (form of winch handle), which I dropped in here yesterday afternoon,” he answered.

“Do you think you’ll find it?”

“Maybe, but I’ve got all day. So there’s a chance I will.”

Life at two miles per hour.

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One hundred and five locks - some say one less, there appears a discrepancy of design on one it seems. It’s the one period of activity. I walk the stretch between eighty two and ninety six and watch. The boats rise and fall with the water and though there is activity in the winding of a windlass and pushing of a gate, much of the time is spent watching water flow and listening to it stabilise until you can hear the birds once again. Life at two miles per hour.

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Park Life

Park Life

My biggest chance to shoot has been when my nephew (for whom we’re a support bubble) has come to stay for a few days. Eager for any opportunity to go out and shoot and with my newly purchased X-E4 to try out he has been my little muse for these government-enforced dry spells. And, whilst my ever-patient nephew has generally accepted my photographing pretty much his every movement with a winning-smile (or at worst, a disdained stare), there is just one caveat on which he insists … “PESE CAN WE GO TO THE PAAAARK DADA?”

Over The Rainbow

Over The Rainbow

A little while ago I found an essay online, written by my grandfather.

I never met him, he died in 1960, almost a decade before I was born; but through an accident of timing, he spent WWI in a German prison camp. Instead of becoming a concert pianist, which is what he was studying there at the time, he became a psychologist and professor, and wrote a book about the society that sprang up in the camp in the years he was held.

Later, while working for the Canadian government during WWII, he wrote for Maclean’s magazine about how difficult it was going to be for the soldiers and prisoners returning from the war, the trouble they would inevitably have returning from that experience to “polite society”, and how their imaginations of life back at home after all that time away would inevitably lead to disappointment with the real thing.

I think that’s what the return to relative normalcy will be like for all of us, as the pandemic starts to get under control around the world…

Anything but the Highway

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND BERT STEPHANI

I chose this picture by Derek Clark from his essay Death by 74 cuts to use as my theme. I love the graphic nature of that image although I’m usually trying to stay away from highways. I had a busy week and very little spare time to get on my bike AND shoot a story, so I tried to combine both.

Anything but the Highway

I get the idea: the fastest way to go from A to B. It’s useful but the fastest way is usually not the most interesting one. Whenever I can, I take the backroads. And ever since I saved up enough money to buy my first mountainbike when I was 16, I’ve been attracted to the even smaller unpaved roads. For decades one after the other was asphalted for the sake of progress. But in the last few years, it seems like there’s a renewed appreciation of unpaved roads and paths. Even some new slow roads are built without concrete or asphalt.

It was only when I was brainstorming about this story that I came to understand that the unpaved roads serve as a metaphor for the ways I choose to travel in my life and career as well.

Death By 74 Cuts

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

I chose this picture by Patrick La Roque from his essay Puddles Are Windows and Fissures are Roads to use as my theme. I almost chose dogs, as I can see two dogs in the top left corner, but in the end I chose differently. The converging lines in that same corner reminded me of roads, and the top of the picture feels like decay. Possibly converging lines cutting through the underdogs?

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The city of Glasgow, like a lot of highly populated places, is going through constant change. The always present cranes across the city skyscrape erect building after building, rubbing out the old and redrawing the new. But this only makes the places that are being left behind stand out; a slow painful demise. Tradeston is one such place, an industrial area that has been neglected for years. Decades of decay joined with decades of graffiti and vandalism.

In 2011, the M74 motorway was completed. Although construction started in 1966, the M74 didn’t reach its intended destination until 2011. This monster of a road rises up on stilts as it cuts a path straight through Tradeston, barely revealing what lies beneath to the unsuspecting drivers. But still, I’m drawn to this place, and I will probably return to document it more before it gets torn-down in favour of luxury flats or offices.

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The Chain: An Introduction

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By Patrick La Roque

One year of the pandemic. I’m sick of it, you’re sick of it…we’re all tired of hearing or reading about it. But I write this on March 11, 2021—the official, international commemorative day; it’s hard not to acknowledge. The flags here are at half-mast and the church bells rang as we observed one minute of silence. What some people have lost is beyond words.

It was clear from a recent meeting that all of us in the collective (like most of you, I’m sure) have also been deeply affected creatively. But it was obvious we all needed to get our act together and carry on. Feeling inspired may be hard, opportunities may still be few, but settling into apathy is the worst thing any of us could do. Eventually, it only leads to a mild dissolution of our soul.

Besides: life appears to finally be changing for the better. Jonas—our resident physician on the front lines—was vaccinated. We all should be in the coming months. We’ll step out of our closed circles again, tentatively at first, I imagine, but with increasing confidence.

We’re a stubborn bunch, us humans.

…

The Chain isn’t a theme, but a mechanism. We’ve decided to steer clear of an overarching subject this time, and instead use each story as a springboard for the next one. If you’re familiar with the surrealists’ exquisite cadaver (or corpse) technique, the concept is similar (1). The idea is that each of our individual essays will be inspired by an image from the one that came before. We’ll then have six days to find and prepare the following week’s content.

Of course, as the first one in line I get to cheat, don’t I? Well, sort of. Last week I read about a re-edition of Robert Adams’ Summer Nights, Walking, from Steidl. Leading me to New Topographics. I love the work behind this movement, but I’ve also always been envious of the name they chose. Downright jealous, really, of how powerful those words look on a page, the images they conjure, and how well they fit their subject: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Damn.

Long story short, I used this as my springboard, to force myself into a somewhat similar framework to the one we’re adopting. The pictures have nothing to do with the movement or its approach, but they do illustrate a makeshift topography which wouldn’t exist without man’s imprint. And they connect to our still inescapable reality—where imagination remains our only means of travel, however abstract.

We’re excited about this new project and hope you’ll enjoy where it takes us. In the immortal words of Fleetwood Mac: chain, keep us together.

…………………….

  1. With the exception of only seeing part of the previous contribution. That would be hard to do in this case. 

Puddles are Windows and Fissures are Roads

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By Patrick La Roque

Imaginary shorelines and mythical roadmaps.
I drown in the depths of my mind’s eye, waters remixed
into new materials.

NUCLEAR PHOTOWALK

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BY NEALE JAMES

Sixty three years ago, just after 4pm, on the 28th February, a B-47E Stratojet belonging to the United States Airforce, a strategic bomber designed to strike targets from very high altitude in the Soviet Union lifted from an airbase called Greenham Common in leafy Berkshire, England, sixty miles west of London, a further 1,800 miles west of Moscow. It was loaded with 103,000 lbs of aviation fuel. One minute into the flight, technical problems forced the crew to shut down engines two and three of the six available to this aircraft. The crew requested an immediate go around and emergency landing.

Because of the large amount of fuel aboard the aircraft, air traffic control gave the order to drop their 1,700 gallon external fuel tanks in a specially designated ‘drop zone’ first.

At 4.23pm, the ‘drop tanks’ procedure was initiated, but one tank struck a hanger, and the other a hard stand area, close to a parked B-47E. There are conflicting reports of a pilot being on board the aircraft on the ground and the possibility of a weapon loading operation being in progress. The parked plane is reported to have been carrying a 1.1 megaton nuclear bomb. The aircraft and bomb were engulfed in flames.

I live close to Greenham Common on the ‘right side’ of the now abandoned airfield, not an indication of direction, but a suggestion that the ‘wrong side’ for years had suffered from a cluster of unexplained cancer cases, possibly the result of a nuclear accident nobody wants to talk about. Or was it? Did it even happen?

Last Sunday, I set out to attempt to find the place the tanks landed, the drop zone, Stand 32. I’ll tell more of the story in audio format. Join me on my Nuclear Photowalk.

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I’m not one to subscribe to conspiracy, I do think we have a predisposed ability to embellish a story. Our forefathers and those for all their generations before them could and I am sure did the very same. But I’ve always been fascinated by this huge former airbase, once the home to the longest runway in Europe, a most infamous women’s peace camp, enough nuclear warheads to unleash nuclear winter and a story that nobody can quite agree on.

Today you can run, cycle and enjoy rambling across miles of paths across land that would once have been privy to Britain and America’s closest secrets behind razor wire, guarded by elite special forces. The land gives clues to what was once here. Some buildings and landmarks have slowly started to be devoured by bushes, shrubs, trees even. Some will never leave, such as the massive silos used to house the vehicles destined to deploy deadly intercontinental cruise missiles.

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White cattle roam freely on this now common ground. This one is walking in roughly the same area as aircraft will have taxied and stood on ‘standby’ in view of the old control tower, very recently refurbished to become a visitor centre, café and pop up wall space for art. Sadly closed whilst we await the end of pandemic restrictions.

Disused fire and emergency buildings with the large central command centre in the background which still houses a special launch bunker. The mock-up aircraft remains as a historical remnant, designed to resemble a C-130 aircraft. It would be doused in aviation fuel and set alight so that firefighters could train to retrieve people and ‘items’ in a worse case scenario.

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Close to the end of what would have been the main runway, from my research possibly the intended ‘drop zone.’

Definition 047 | Wild, Wild Life

Definition 047 | Wild, Wild Life

If you’ve been reading my essays for a while now, you might know a bit about my family in Canada—the birders of Southern Ontario, that’s them.

One of my sisters sent me a photo of the decorations going on their tree this year over there, which naturally enough included a lot of bird-related ornaments, gathered over many years. My dad and my uncle used to have a boxing day tradition of shopping for new ornaments, so the collection was pretty expansive by the time we were kids—and we had to be a bit careful around all that Czechoslovakian blown glass, I can tell you. But I think we did okay; most of it survives and is still being used by them & their own (careful!) kids today.

Not having kids, a tree, or ornaments here in Sydney myself, I decided to do pretty much the opposite of what I usually do for one of these essays: I took my longest lens, and my largest camera, and went looking for actual birds I could capture, and send to my mum over in a wintry lockdown in Toronto, to give her a bit of colour and summer light to enjoy for a while…