I took these images on a journey from my home near Stroud to my workplace in Central London.  Clearly they are taken during the COVID pandemic and they are at a time when the country is trying to phase itself out of lockdown.

Life where I live has started to ease considerably, our area has a very low confirmed case count and as a result the controls are considerable less than they were at the peak.  But London on the other hand is in a very different position with most people not yet returning to their offices.

I found the entire journey surreal as it felt like I was rewinding a few months back to the time when the lockdown started in full.  London is pretty well deserted, distancing on public transport is hardly necessary as there is hardly anybody on it, and there are hand sanitiser stations everywhere.  As I left London at the end of the day, I felt like I was leaving a disaster zone.

All of these images are taken with my phone.  I wanted to take a lot of images and I wanted to capture everything I saw on the way, including in passing.  Stopping and framing every image would have meant that I had to take fewer images since it would have taken all day to make the journey. I also think that the obvious use of a phone makes the images feel much more like a story that you might see on social media, and therefore more personal, less formal.

The Images

Learning Points

• Almost every detail on the journey is of interest in the context of the journey itself.  Images that standalone would be meaningless convey more information when included in a series.  When taking a more formal series, this is an important point to remember, there is a risk that taking a more formal approach could lead to only taking images that seem more significant at the time, which would mean missing out on some of the details.
• Deliberately including information in the image can improve what it conveys.  For example, the scene taking in an underground station, I have deliberately included the announcement sign in order to show the time the image was taken.  Without this, its just an empty station which could probably be shot every day in the very early hours of the morning, but an empty station just ahead of rush hour is a very different concept.
• Framing, these shots are deliberately informal but there are some which I look at and wish I had paused and framed slightly differently.  The learning point is to always consider framing, I would certainly do that with a ‘proper’ camera, and there is no reason not to do the same with a phone camera, the difference is literally seconds. 
• A phone camera can be used to produce quite a reasonable set of images to tell a story.  Perhaps they would have been better if I had gone for a landscape orientation which I certainly would have done with a camera rather than a phone.  I don’t think the portrait orientation makes the content of these images any weaker, but the orientation / ratio creates the impression of a phone camera and therefore perhaps makes the images be taken a little less seriously.  (if this were a long term project rather than an exercise, I would consider cropping them to square images to reduce this effect.

Choose a viewpoint, perhaps looking out of your window or from a café in the central square, and write down everything you can see. No matter how boring it seems or how detailed, just write it down. Spend at least an hour on this exercise. 

What I saw

I am sitting in my attic (which is where my study is) and staring out at the valley outside my window.  It’s a time of social distancing and I can only reflect on how lucky I am that I have such a view, such a space.

Across the valley, which makes the space sound larger than it is, so across the hamlet, our neighbours are having the roof of their cottage replaced, tiles not thatch.  Today though, is a storm and so there is wind and rain that means no work can be done.  For me this is a welcome respite from the noise.  In truth, the noise is not that bad, but we live in a cottage carefully chosen to be in a place with no noise at all, not even a distant echo of road noise.  That is actually harder achieve than one might think in the countryside because most villages have roads through the middle of them, and in the absence of any other noise, the slightest things seems louder than it is.  Anyhow, today I see peace and tranquillity because work has stopped.

There is a low scraping noise at the window which is the Virginia Creeper trailing down our house blowing in the wind and occasionally tapping on the window.  This though is a pleasant sound as it causes me to glance up and see the creeper, which already, in mid-August, is starting to turn into its startling red.

The trees in our valley, or hamlet, are still green but I do see the makings of a yellow tinge to some of them and I reflect, is it really autumn already?  Mid-August seems to have come very quickly in what has been the strangest of years which is some combination of going quickly but at the same time, it seems an age since the COVID lockdown started in March.  

I see the leaves blowing in the wind of the storm and I see the large Ash tree above our house waving wildly and, as I always do, worry about it blowing down.  The Ash is indeed suffering from ash die-back but the tree surgeon tells us it won’t fall.  Just the same, we need to have it cut down before the winter storms arrive, this one has caught me by surprise.  

I see another cottage in our hamlet has lit their fire as I watch the smoke come out of their chimney and blow almost horizontally across the valley.  Looking at the weather forecast on my computer as I write, I see that the wind is going to get stronger as the day goes on, I turn my attention back to watching the ash tree wave in the wind.

Closer now I see a wasp crawling on my window trying to get out.  I have no idea how they get into our attic or where their nest is but I see about 10 a day.  They are strangely placid wasps, they don’t fly around with an angry buzz, they just crawl about on the window or the window ledge and gratefully crawl onto a piece of paper so that I can help them outside; placid they may be but that doesn’t mean I can relax when one is around.  

The postman has arrived, our hamlet is at the end of a long track down the valley and our house is above the road. This gives us a vantage point to watch, or is it spy, on the cars as they arrive.  Our hamlet only has five houses and so when I say watch the cars, I mean the four or five arrivals we get each day, as I said, it’s a peaceful place.  I’m now watching where the postman goes, he is certainly getting blown about and very wet but I wonder if he is coming to our house.  

The sky is starting to brighten so it is looking like the rain has passed, but the wind continues to get stronger.  I can see a buzzard circling above the valley riding the winds and not seeming to care that he, or she, is getting blown all over the place.  

Looking inside, I see our attic.  We live is a cottage that is 350 years old and so the main thing I see is are the beautiful wooden beams that hold the roof up.  They have been here for all that time and it shows.  I can see the tiny holes where once, they were infested with wood worm, not any more!  And I can see the chunks taken out of the wood where it was too ravaged to save.  I marvel at the longevity of the beams and once again make a silent wish that the wood worm really is gone.  

Elsewhere in the attic I can see the other bits of my life, my hobbies at least, I can see the chest which contains all of my camera equipment stored nice and safe away from the ravages of bug and spiders etc (which you get a lot of in cottages) and I can see my guitar and amplifier, as always I wish to myself that I could spend more time playing it.  

I am looking at the two Amazon Alexa on my desk, I use them mainly to play music as a pair, but today I have decided not to play the music, I am enjoying this exercise as much about the sounds as what I can see and of course, if I play music it will drown out the sounds.  That’s a strange reflection that I had never really had before, can we see sound.  I feel that I would not have seen all the things above if I had been playing music as it was their sounds that triggered my attention.  That’s something to remember for the future – perhaps my wife, who has banned all communications technology from our garden room is right – there we have no wi-fi, no phone signal, nothing but nature.  Maybe that is something I will do more often sitting here in my attic. 

Across the hamlet I can see the chickens that our neighbour keeps running up and down their drive, they are not supposed to be as I know that they are away today, the house owners not the chickens. I wonder how they got out and if our neighbours who are supposed to be looking after them have inadvertently left the gate open, a bad move because of the foxes round here. But hopefully, none will be around in the day and they will go home.

Looking down I can see the roof of our neighbour’s garage which is slowly rotting away and is patched up.  We often think it needs rebuilding but at the same time, it all adds to the character of where we live.  This is the Cotswolds, but the not the chocolate box perfection of the north, this is the more rustic south which we think has a lot more life to it.  Next to the garages is the small patch of land that is in fact right in front of our hour and that we would love to buy, our neighbours are not up for it.  It seems destined to be an overground patch of wasted land rather than the nice orchard that we would turn it into – again this is not as ground as I am making it sound, this is just a small strip of land that fronts on to our two houses.  

A DPD van has arrives, a sign of the times and especially during lockdown.  It seems as though he is lost though, which is the normal state of affairs for anybody coming to our hamlet.  Now I am watching the driver wander around our hamlet looking confused.   I hear my wife calling out to him so I guess that we are waiting for a parcel, yes he is now coming our way but cannot find the steps that lead up to our house.  Ah, he has find them, I winder what the parcel is.

That’s the end of my hour so time for coffee!

Learning Points

When reading this exercise, I wondered if there would be much to write about sitting in my attic but actually the act of just sitting and looking reveals a lot of information.  That is the learning point – if you want to tell a story about something, sit and look, for quite a while.  Without sitting, if I were to try and tell the above story in photographs, I would probably have just shot an image looking out of the window and then wandered what else I could take.  Using the technique above, there are a huge number of images I could shoot.

Writing down what I saw has made a big impact.  The act of having to write about the detail in order to adequately describe it means one has to focus on the objects, what is happening quite strongly.  A similar focus when capturing images will reveal quite different results to simply ambling around without much thought.  Mot that I am saying I would do that but the point is about comparisons and I would not necessarily visually look in the same way I did for this exercise if I were only capturing images.  The learning point is to make sure that I do look.

I wrote a lot about sounds, and about thoughts, in addition to what I could actually see.  When capturing images, I think it would be worth thinking about how to capture those too, taking the image beyond the straightforward visual could have a dramatic effect to my images.

Reflection

Could I turn this into a photography project?  Yes I think I could but I have chosen not to for this particular exercise because I feel that it might detract from my writing – much like a film typically does not quite live up to ones imagination of reading the book of the same story.  That is of course an assumption on my part and maybe that is the challenge, to create a project that does live up to the writing, that could certainly be a technique for a project that is always destined to become a photography one – start with writing in an expressive manner and use that to prompt a photography exercise.  

Create a set of still-life pictures showing traces of life without using people.

Approach

Where I live, in a Stroud valley, there is virtually no man made element and as we walk in the valley, which is nearly every day, we often reflect on how beautiful if is because of the fact that it is untouched.  But is it really.  I decided to do one of my usual walks, which is about a 2 mile circuit up and down the valley, ignore the obvious exceptions such as a cottage or two and pay very close attention to what else I could capture that showed a trace of people.  I also made a conscious choice not to include anything to do with the public footpath as this is obviously people-related and not what I perceived the exercise to be – an exercise in attention to details and how they are seen.

Results

These are the images I captured.  It is worth saying that I took these on quite a dull day, and most of them are under tree canopy.  I had thought that maybe they would need to be retaken.  If this were an assignment I would try on a brighter day in order to compare the results which would be different but not necessarily better, I quite like the muted effect that the light has created because I feel it fits with the slightly desolate / abandoned feel that the images have.

What I learned

As I was carrying out this exercise my intent changed.  I started out looking for the smallest details that were man-made but out of place in the, largely untouched, valley.   As I was capturing the images I came to realise that in many of them, the reason the man made element is a trace is because nature is slowly reclaiming its space, the man made items either rotting away or becoming overpower by the plant growth.  This is not necessarily the point of the exercise but this effect is something I found very interesting and may be a topic to pursue further in my next course which I currently think will be Landscape orientated.  The theme of man versus nature has interested me in past assignments and there is an element of that in my Keith Arnatt research with his Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 

Building on this, I think there is a learning point on staying open to changes of intent as an exercise or project progresses.  

I learnt that there are a lot more traces of life than I had appreciated before starting the exercise. The learning is not so much about the detail of my valley, but more about how important it is to study detail when following a particular theme.

Fact versus fiction is not quite the same as open versus closed but I see it as similar.  Given fiction, by definition is not real, then it would be hard to create fictional images without leaving at least some space given that the real is not there to be photographed.

Perhaps I could blend my approaches using an artist’s statement to accompany images – using a short passage to describe my aims, what I am looking to achieve, but then letting go of control in the images themselves, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks however they choose.  I read about this technique when reading Short’s book on Context and Narrative (Short,2011:142) and found the idea compelling.

To create a response to the question “where is your departure from wanting / needing to depict reality?”, I had to think for longer than I had expected.  The word ‘need’ struck a significant chord with me as I think this is a deep emotion for me and is what sometimes holds me back.  I speculate to an extent that if I spent more time on the artist statement and thinking about the emotions I wanted to portray rather than the physical instantiation of the idea then maybe my imagination would move away from reality.  During Context and Narrative one of the assignments was related to ‘Photographing the Unseen’.  I chose to photograph a phobia that I have and to date, I think it is my most successful assignment since studying.  This can be seen here.

I did reflect on this at the time, but I feel that I have perhaps lost or forgotten that technique as I strive to get every assignment ‘right’.  The emotion of wanting it to be right seems to draw me back to reality and, paradoxically, away from the fiction or openness that would undoubtably make my images more compelling.

Bibliography

Short, M. (2011). Context and Narrative (Basics Creative Photography). Lausanne: AVA Publishing.