More akin to astral codes of conduct..

Traveling and photography are both steeped in superstition. They are surrounded by talismans, curses, amulets, spells and sacrifice. They are submerged in the occult and their knowledge is esoteric and they only give up their secrets with time and to the devoted. Traveling and photography inhabit an elemental world not subject to the same physical laws of the cosmos and these forces are more akin to astral codes of conduct than anything else; They can influence the natural laws around us, but they do not ultimately have control; They are fickle and mutable and driven by invisible wills and once upon a time they would have been described as the ancestors and the secret spirits inside of all things. 

These subtle energies manifest themselves in our material world as the unexpected and the anomaly and they are present in every photograph that we have ever loved and they have helped bring all of them into being.

I suppose we could simply call this luck, or our photographic instinct. That thing we feel in our gut, that we trust, which sharpens with our experience. But, when we find ourselves standing out on a busy city street corner with camera in hand, we will all be secretly praying we have generated the necessary conditions for these super-natural forces to ignite then intervene; A pool of holy light illuminating the lone pensive girl at the cross walk, or a sudden gust of wind which lifts hats, skirts and hands together. Their presence is the name of the hope we all hold close. 

These forces are chaotic/neutral and they are to be respected and regarded in the same way as weather. Although they can be bargained with to a certain extent, they cannot be owned or claimed wholly for ourselves as ourselves. Such assumptions of control and possession run the risk of us being completely abandoned by them altogether, leaving us with nothing but our technical ability and our precious gear. 

Each morning before a day of driving I have already gone through a quiet pantomime of prayers and rituals before I have turned the key in the ignition. I don’t always make a song and dance about it, but instead my workings aspire to be more methodical, like a photoshop workflow of quiet focused attention. Like the Catholics or a Scorpio. Layered mindful steps deliberately taken, one after the other with intention. This is how I can be seen, standing outside my room at The Twin Pines Motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, at dawn, patting myself down, pretending to look for my car keys, but subtly crossing myself with a Rosary and whispering a secret order of words under my bandanna into the amethyst that is tucked into my left hand. 

Happy New Year.

The painting above the bed..

Psychic Coordinate Points (PCP#01)

Sometimes I have woken up in my motel room and had no idea where I was in America. The thrift store landscape painting hanging over the bed and reflected in the mirror can be a clue, but not one that can be relied upon. Once in southern California, I woke up from a motel nap with the air conditioner on full and the room had gotten chilly while I slept. When I awoke I thought I was in Grand Junction, Colorado in the wintertime. The painting above the bed was of a snow capped mountain range with a wide river running through it and I assumed it was the Rockies. I wasn’t completely sure where I was until I finally opened the motel room door and was met with that high key full spectrum California sunshine dazzling down through the palm trees into my blinking bloodshot eyes below. It was winter here too. Christmas Eve..

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.