The Sanctuary

[See this picture in the On Land section of the gallery.]

Well, things are slowly moving in the right direction on my new project, but for the meantime here's another golden(ish) oldie(ish). Or, at least, a random pic that I happen to have a few things to say about.

I didn't print this shot for a really long time because it reminded me of that day - mostly spent sitting in my car on Dungeness hoping that the torrential rain would stop. It didn't. The clouds just descended further until they were scudding along at treetop height - ah, the British summer!

This is a shot that I wanted to get though - thinking as I was at the time about Power and what that meant - the tiny chapel and huge lumbering nuclear power plant in the distance. I grabbed one shot, dried my camera off and decided to sod it and go for fish and chips at the Pilot Inn. You can't even tell it's raining in the final print.

But, anyway, there's another sort of power here that I wasn't even aware of at the time. It turns out that the church is a fake - built during WW2 to conceal a pumping station for Operation Pluto, secretly transporting fuel under the channel to France. After the war the station was abandoned, and the handful of people who live out on the Ness renamed it The Sanctuary, and started using it as a sort of social hall, and even for the purpose it had been pretending to have.

Of course, none of this is apparent from looking at the photograph - and that's really the only thing you're supposed to do with it.

(Less aimless jibber jabber and more new pictures soon, hopefully.)

Mornington Crescent No More

Incredibly sad to hear about the death of Humphrey Lyttelton. Perhaps best known in recent years for somehow getting away with transmitting the most incredible double entrendres into homes across the UK as host on ISIHAC, he was also once described by Louis Armstrong as, "that cat in England who swings his ass off." Few of us can aspire to such an astonishing appraisal.

"As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication."

Humphrey Lyttelton, 1921-2008.

If I did the same thing 500 times...

[See this picture in the On Land and The Zone sections of the gallery]

Usual ten points for anyone identifying the post title!

Well, I came to the realisation in the past week that the way I've been approaching my new project isn't going to work out. Given the amount of time and effort I've been putting into it, this was a distressing revelation ... but, after starting the week in despair I've managed to rebound to a position of excitement about a new way of approaching it.

Hopefully it will all come good eventually, but this set-back does mean that it's likely to be a while before I have anything new to put up here. So, I thought I might sporadically post an odd old photo or two - maybe ones that have come to mind recently, or I have have something to say about.

This one is from Chernobyl last September ... and one that gets picked out by a lot of people I show the portfolio to. Honestly, my trip to Ukraine still seems a bit unreal to me - going to Chernobyl and Pripyat would have been a surreal enough experience anyway, but I was so horribly unwell and sleep-deprived the entire time (and, later, zonked out of my skull on military-grade Russian antibiotics) that I wandered through the entire time with my brain lagging a few paces behind. How I managed to work out a half-decent composition for this picture when I was having trouble even staying upright I do not know.

I think it's more obvious from the print than on the screen - but the gas mask in the photo is really tiny: this was in a kindergarten, where there were dozens of them strewn around, mostly covered in thick dust. I have to say though that I can't look at this one anymore without being drawn to the tree outside - I always thought it looked interesting, but now I can't help but see a sinister figure moving off to the left. It inhabits the photograph now.

(Last chance: the Rodchenko exhibition at the Hayward. I was down in London last week, so got to see it - a must for anyone interested in the birth of modern photography and design.)