Enigmatic people and the 1960s

click photo to enlarge
I've always had a liking for cinema, and being British that has meant that most of the films I've seen have been English-language movies originating in the UK or the USA. Perhaps that's why I've also had a fondness for the cinema of other countries - as an antidote to the way the Anglophone world constructs film, and for a glimpse of the wider possibilities that exist within the medium.

The other evening I watched "La Antena", a 2007 black and white film from Argentina about a dystopian city ruled by Mr TV. It was a kind of homage to German Expressionist cinema (think Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927)), and had a mixture of live actors, paper sets and cartoon-like action. Its themes were totalitarianism and media power through monopoly. There was little spoken dialogue (Mr TV had stolen everyone's voices!), but plenty of Spanish subtitles (with English translations below). It was a film quite unlike any I'd ever seen before, visually rivetting, and one that probably couldn't have been made in the UK or the USA. A few weeks earlier I'd watched a Lebanese film set in Beirut, "Caramel" (2007), originally titled "Sukkar banat". This romantic comedy set in a hairdressing salon was wonderful - touching, funny, finely acted and directed, an insight into another culture, and a film that, for me, demonstrated how the conventions of English-speaking cinema could be adopted and adapted.

My introduction to foreign films came about in the 1960s when BBC2 TV regularly broadcast such things. I recall seeing several Eisensteins, many French films, and some fascinating work by Italian directors. In particular I remember a selection by Michelangelo Antonioni featuring Monica Vitti: films such as "L'avventura" (1960) and "L'eclisse" (1962), that take alienation in modern society as their theme, and have scenes that are carefully composed in a painterly way, with figures standing enigmatically in sparse surroundings. This sort of cold, detached style has its appeal, though you wouldn't want a diet that consists solely of it. However, it was these films (and the British TV series, "The Avengers") that came to mind when I composed this shot in a brightly lit room in Southwell Workhouse. This 1824 building is open to the public and is the most complete remaining example of a type of building that was once found across England. The three figures, each listening to an audio commentary about the room in which they found themselves, have that enigmatic feel of those 1960s films, and I just had to convert the image to black and white to emphasise the effect.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Every picture includes two people

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Here's my third and final 1960s-themed image. I've wanted to do a photograph that included eggs for a while because I find them such beautiful objects. From the "eggshell" lustre of their outer surface to the elegant shape and unlikely method of "manufacture", they are a fascinating piece of nature's handiwork that has been appropriated by designers for thousands of years. The earliest such example that I know is the Ancient Greeks' use of "egg and dart" ornament in architecture. This moulding, found on entablatures, columns and elsewhere, symbolises life (the egg) and death (the dart i.e. spear).

No such elemental symbolism can be ascribed to the eggs in this photograph. I conceived it as a semi-abstract composition, and simply used them as an irregular pattern to break the symmetry of the black and white background. I liked the soft colour, the three-dimensional qualities, and the pale shadows that they brought to the starkness of the background.

Someone looking over my shoulder at this photograph said it was reminiscent of the buttons on a clown's or harlequin's suit. Which just goes to prove the truth of the observation by the American photographer, Anselm Adams, that "There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer". And, I suppose, that every viewer brings along something different when they engage with an image.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen


Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f16
Shutter Speed: 2 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Op, Pop and The Avengers

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Here's the second of my 1960s-inspired images. The other week I bought a couple of inexpensive decorative pots for plants. One is black with white circles, the other white with black circles. My intention was to fill them with the "right" plants and display them side by side. I haven't decided what the right plants are yet - any suggestions welcome - so they are sitting in a cupboard waiting for inspiration to strike. When I was wondering what I could put into my 1960s still life these pots immediately came to mind.

I used the same pieces of black and white vinyl as in yesterday's shot, butted edge to edge, and placed one pot the right way up and the other upside down next to it. I moved them around with reference to the line in the surface they were on, and tried to get a good, asymmetrical, angular, semi-abstract composition that used the light to model the objects.

This is the best of my efforts. I've tried to achieve interest and balance. Unlike yesterday's image this one is in full colour! The image reminds me a little of the set designs that featured in the 1960s TV series, "The Avengers", with Diana Rigg (Mrs Peel) and Patrick McNee (Steed), that ran from 1965-1968. That series was particularly innovative in the way it incorporated ideas from Op Art and Pop Art into its design. The best episodes were like nothing else on TV at the time. This shot might be like nothing else you've seen on a photoblog for a while.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f16
Shutter Speed: 0.8 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Thinking about the 1960s

click photo to enlarge
The other evening I came over all 1960s! I'd been listening to the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" album, after which I moved on to "Magical Mystery Tour". Then, with the echoes of "If I needed someone" and "The fool on the hill" still reverberating, I settled down to read a chapter of Reyner Banham's "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age" (published in 1960). Despite its rather forbidding title this is a very readable account of the rise of the International Style. I needed to look again at his review of the Expressionist architecture of Amsterdam and Berlin in the period between 1914 and 1923, a development that ran counter to the emergent and increasingly dominant work of the early modern masters. I wanted to place this style of architecture, and the motivation behind it, against the Post-Modern and so-called "iconic" styles of recent years. Well, it's something to do on a cold winter evening!

However, my mind wandered off at a tangent, and I began to think again about the reasons why, in the pre-WW2 and post-WW2 years the International Style was so successful in continental Europe and the United States, but barely registered in Britain. And from that I started to speculate on whether the revolution in society, architecture, style and music that erupted in England in the 1960s was, in part, a reaction to being so far behind in art, architecture and design. Perhaps the creative people of our country raised their collective gaze from parochial concerns, looked abroad, and the move into modernity that had been achieved elsewhere finally registered. Maybe, at some level, the sudden flowering of Carnaby Street, "Swinging London", the Beatles etc., that in turn gave rise to British art, architecture and design that is now acknowledged as amongst the best in the world, can be linked to the slowness with which the modern age was accepted here.

Which brings me to today's photograph. The thoughts outlined above gave me the idea of doing a few shots that harked back to the 1960s - to Mary Quant and all that. Given my photographic track record there's no chance that I'll be photographing people a la David Bailey, but I did think I'd try a few still life shots and compositions that use that decade as the jumping off point. Perhaps you'll indulge me! Here's the first, of a white mortar and pestle on black and white vinyl, converted to black and white. Mortars and pestles, in my mind, made a return to wider use in the late 1960s, perhaps because, as well as people looking forwards, there was a backwards glance and a plundering of the past going on at the same time - think the satin uniforms on the cover of Sgt Pepper's. Why the conversion given the colour of the items in the shot? Well, the shadows had an orange tinge that detracted from my intention for the image.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f16
Shutter Speed: 1.6
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off