Every garden path I ever followed..

I was 17 years old when I first desired and then acquired a photographic print. My photo life had not long begun and I had only developed a handful of films on my own and I had only printed about a dozen or so pictures in the school darkroom, where availability and instruction didn't always go hand in hand. I was coming to the end of the first GCSE course in photography available at our school and it was a lot of fun. 

This photograph was pinned up on my friend's bedroom wall in 1987. He told me his friend Eddie took it and it was a new one. He said it was a picture of Eddie himself as a baby, then he pointed at the face in the photo and laughed at it for a long time. They were childhood friends. The photograph was a 12” x 16” black and white print made on multi grade fiber paper and the tones were soft like a pencil drawing and it was pinned to the wall at a wonky angle above a record player. I was immediately enchanted by its strange otherworldliness. At the same time, the prints' seemingly improbable subject matter stood absolutely sentient in the world of the photograph, demanding to be believed by my teenage self. It seemed to claim weight and poise in a familiar, almost benign bucolic space, standing at the end of every garden path I ever followed. I had still yet to discover psychedelic drugs, but when I thought about them, this photograph was assigned their embodiment, then later when I did discover them, my opinion did not change and it remains to this day a trippy picture. The photograph for me is an encounter between our dubious and constructed self image and the invisible photographer looking back at it. It is a secret meeting in a secret place with only us as witness.

I have forgotten how this print came to be in my possession exactly, but I suspect that I badgered my friend until he just gave it to me. I am writing about it now, 34 years later, because I recently found it tucked inside a box of old paperwork I had brought with me to the US from the UK and had been in storage for 6 years. The emulsion on the surface of the print is now cracked and it’s edges are dog eared and torn and it feels more like cloth than paper. It is a fragile and beautiful thing.

The photographer was Eddie Miles, another 17 year old. He attended a different school. At this time we had not yet met, but it did not take us long to do so. We were friends for several years afterwards until our lives swept us up and carried us off in different directions. Eddie and I have not spoken in 25 years, but I did recently scroll into him on Instagram. He looks to be a successful commercial photographer these days and has photographed many celebrities along the way. Maybe this photo was the first of them.. Best wishes to you, Ed and thank you.