Self-expressionless, letting more light in, ripeness and rot

#10 | July 2024

Self-expressionless

My friend,

Andrew Eberlin

, in his recent and always fascinating Monthly Jotter newsletter, linked to a post by the documentary maker, Adam Curtis, about the ‘dangers of self-expression’. Like so much of Curtis’ work, it’s a piercing look at our society and the way it is structured and one which continues his decades-long interrogation of ideas about the self. There are many forms of self-expression. Curtis suggests that we, ‘may look back at self-expression as the terrible deadening conformity of our time… It’s not to say you can’t make art if you want to do it, but it’s not the radical outsider… It’s everything. It’s conformity.’ We live in a time where we are all self-expressing all of the time. I’m doing it now and Nobel-prize winners and your pre-teen nieces and nephews and nonagenarian grandparents are doing it, too. Watching the fountain of new newsletters appearing here on this platform alone, still an infant among social sites, one is surrounded by a copiousness of self-expression like never before. I’m increasingly mindful that we should instinctively be saying and sharing less, not more; that we should be carefully choosing to publish things only of value and avoiding volume at all costs. In our creative efforts, we should be thinking, looking and listening; we should be aiming to ask questions and consider what viable solutions there might be for our problems. The best writing, photography, films (and newsletters) are doing much more than merely following the herd. That ‘deadening conformity’ of which Curtis writes is something that is being driven in this algorithmic age like never before. Algorithms were always there in society, long before the advent of digital media – it’s just that computers see and corral those patterns in new ways. We are part of new groups with more obviously common and easily definable interests than at any other time in history. We are self-expressing in new and far more immediate – but technologically funnelled – ways. Curtis’ 2016 film Hypernormalisation goes back to the 1970s to chart the course of how most in the Western world gradually became disenfranchised, clinging on to what few vestiges of power and myopic comforts they could. That ‘power’ is now seriously under threat within many significant democracies today. Self-expression should be a last winnable reach for some sort of power and freedom – our chance to break away from dull compliance. But for many it sees us retreating even further into the bubbles and chambers of conformity, the fakeness of a world formed around us – ‘neutered’ as Curtis puts it. Though always provocative and playfully hyperbolic in his films and writing, Curtis always sets me to thinking. The questions of why we self-express, why we write and why we share, what value we give and what value we receive in return – especially if we do so as an artistic enterprise rather than a commercial one – should be ones we ask of ourselves each time we enter into a space such as Twitter, Instagram, Substack and into any ostensibly creative arena of conversation.

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Letting more light in

During recent client shoots, I’ve repeatedly found a few minutes to grab one or two captures at the largest aperture available, often from the lowest angles possible, almost to the point of obscuring or completely abstracting the dish in front of me. When I bought a first professional camera (not yet five years ago), the initial temptation was to shoot everything at an F-stop of 1.8 because it was easy to mistake new camera functionality as the point of difference between being an amateur and professional picture maker. At such low aperture, the way that the camera is able to render myriad out-of-focus points of light is mesmerising to the amateur eye. But for the eye that is becoming more professionally ‘trained’ – that is: more and more indoctrinated into the prescribed ways of the canon and your peers – one starts to focus more on the ‘accuracies’ of representation: the ‘proper’ way of showing a plate of food as a marketing tool for your client. Whilst photographers can debate the rights and wrongs, the efficacies and weaknesses of certain ways of shooting, of in-focus definition and out-of-focus blur, what’s indisputable is that we often carry out our craft based on what we know rather than on what we see. I’ve enjoyed seeing things afresh recently, and opening up some of those cracks in what still feels like a fairly primitive understanding of photography. Those cracks are, after all, where the light gets in. Forget your perfect offerings.

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Ripeness and rot

This time of year brings blackberries, and memories of childhood, in particular the thicket of bramble that ran alongside and through the stakes of silvered paling between my grandparent’s back garden and ours. Little did I know then that picking them would be my first introduction to the world of foraging, years before food became the hinge on which my creative career would come to swing. That childhood garden also yielded cherries, gooseberries briefly, and apples that were far too sharp for eating, but which were occasionally expended as single-use cricket balls, bowled with theatrical venom towards my twin brother, who would smash them back to their parent tree at the top of the garden, hopefully without breaking another cheap cricket bat bought from the Post Office where we cashed Mum’s benefit books. Opposite the blackberries grew a patch of horseradish where often we’d crouch to poke a head through the gap in the fence and stare into the lounge window of the neighbouring house, looking out for the forbidding Mr Martin, before rushing across his immaculate garden to retrieve the rubber ball lost that morning as Pete and I failed to replicate the cover drives of Gooch and Gower, more often than not skewing to point or gully. We watched the fruits grow through the summer – ‘back when summers were sunny’! Those hard green buds in July, next blushing and then glowing jewel-like red, then purple, and then bloom into petrol-black and be soft enough to burst between the fingers from the beginning of August. They were the sweetest fruits when ripe – barely a hint of tartness to them, superior to everything I’ve tasted as an adult since, such is the palate made partisan by the rose tints of youth. Some days, Pete and I would pick and fill a colander for Mum who would turn them into crumbles, over which she’d sprinkle sugar and pour custard or evaporated milk. As the summer came to an end, so too would the fruit, only a few shrivelled berries hanging on here and there, plus a stubborn few greens that had failed to progress. We played cricket down that garden path well into September, but as the colder months arrived, we switched to football and to the cheap Post Office ‘wind-carriers’ that flew off the boot when either volleyed or half-volleyed and land, inevitably, onto the precision-clipped lawn of Mr Martin; the remaining withered fruits all now turned to rot.

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Recommended other fragments…

Just read: Clean, Garth Greenwell
A really moving memoir covering a range of meticulously detailed stories from Greenwell’s life, focused mainly on his time in Bulgaria’s capital city. Sofia is a place where being a homosexual man carries danger and excitement. He writes of lustful intercourse during a fierce weather storm that has blown open the window and is crashing objects around him, searching for ‘rootedness’ as the whirling wind outside was showing it to be ‘a sham’. A really talented and original writer.

Now reading: Motherwell, Deborah Orr
From one memoir to another, this has long been on my to-read list and the early signs are that it will live up to all of its hype. The book was published a couple of years after the former Guardian and Independent columnist died from cancer. The play-on-words title relates to both the birthplace of the author and a look at her upbringing and complex relationship with her mother. She was often described as a ‘fearless’ writer and this retelling of her life reads in that same strong and uncompromising style of her journalism.

Podcast/Broadcast: Imagine: Kazuo Ishiguro, BBC iPlayer
‘Stories are about one person saying to another: this is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’ This so perfectly distills what so many of us are doing when we create. I was late – very late – to this Imagine episode, but it’s a great look at the work of Ishiguro, filmed around the time of the release of his last book, Klara and the Sun, which I loved. A really interesting portrait of memory, history, love and predicting the future. (Apologies: the BBC link above will only work for people viewing in the UK.)

Music: Dust Awakened By Dawn, Iris Hond
I discovered Iris Hond’s music just this week, and so in a month where I also properly explored the work of Ethel Cain, who my daughter adores, and listened non-stop to the unhurried beauty of the new Cigarettes After Sex album, Hond’s music is the one that feels quietly, for now, just mine. This latest album is full of her beautifully spare arrangements for piano. If you love Einaudi you’ll find much to love here too.

People: Bill Viola
In an age where it’s becoming common for people to consume short-form video (even whole films) on a x2 speed setting, it’s sad to lose Bill Viola, who used video to slow things down to near non-motion, and then used the art gallery to challenge the hegemony of the still image. His death three weeks ago leaves behind a body of beautifully elegiac work. Re-watching the film from his installation piece, Ascension, almost a quarter of a century on from seeing it for the first time in the flesh, is still an incredibly moving experience. You should do so, too.

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Forthcoming events…

My next Zoom-based phone photography workshop date will be 16th September 2024. Being a subscriber to this newsletter – paid or free – entitles you to 20% off the cost of any of my workshops. Just be sure to let me know you’re reading when you get in touch. Find out all you need to know and book your place here. Ten per cent of all my workshop receipts are donated to The Trussell Trust and I set aside no-payment (and no-questions-asked) spaces each workshop for those who cannot afford to pay. Let me know if that is you.

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