Jackie Norman on Photography . . .
Counting Elephants
If a drawing is simply a line going for a walk (Paul Klee), then photographing should be simply pointing and shooting. But it isn’t. The first question is always how. How do I get my photos (stories, paintings, poems…) to have more impact, or to convey what I am seeing. ‘If only I knew how’. After some years I find that it isn’t the technique that matters, but that you need to have acquired enough skills to be able to use them first. That is the catch.
I started going to classes when I had a little more time and the feeling of ‘I want to take better pictures’ wouldn’t go away. The more I learnt, the more I became hooked. The course, naturally, was miles away and meant returning late at night carrying boxes of prints and equipment. We worked in a cold darkroom with a single very dim red light bulb, peering at shadowy images under the enlarger. We counted in elephants. Any old-school photographer can count seconds pretty accurately: one elephant, two elephants, three elephants, it was easier than fiddling with a timer. We knew what 20 degrees Centigrade/68 Fahrenheit felt like as our hands were spending hours gently rocking prints in the chemicals, and a consistent temperature is required.
We learnt tricks of ‘burning in’ (making an area darker by increasing the time/intensity of light under the enlarger) or ‘dodging’ (reducing the light), or if you had forgotten you could wing it by pouring hot water on a specific part of the photo, or by pulling a corner out of the developer. Print Solarisation? Rediscovered by Lee Miller in modern times but often attributed to her colleague Man Ray – just flash a normal light on and off. The joy of random results. I’m talking about the 1990’s here, of course.
This still wasn’t enough for me however. Going back to uni in your fifties is sooo painful, but exhilarating. We learnt how to deconstruct images before we made them. We learnt about art history, film studies, semiotics, conceptual art, sociology, psychoanalysis, representation, critical theory. We were criticised. We were not taught how to use cameras or how to work on images digitally, so we taught ourselves and each other. By the time we had finished four years later only 8 of us out of 32 had completed the course and got the degree. We never wanted to make another picture again.
But of course we did. It won’t go away. I take my camera for a walk often. At the moment I enjoy street photography, but strangely I find it very difficult in my own country: it’s probably the matter of seeing, it can be difficult to depict the familiar. I am just a jobbing photographer and don’t claim to any vision, but I enjoy seeing what’s going to happen next. Just as you ask yourself the last question which is why, as in ‘Why am I doing this?’ as you are lugging equipment around, you suddenly see something that surprises, intrigues or delights, and it is uniquely yours.
The photo is of a Festival in Chalon-sur-Soane, France, where Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce (7 March 1765 to 5 July 1833) discovered how to make photographic prints in 1825, before the Englishman Henry Fox Talbot did (around 1835). HFT wasn’t even the first to publish a book including photographs. Anna Atkins published the first book to use photographs as illustrations, in England in 1853 of Cyanotypes of ferns. (Cyanotypes are blue prints, using ferric salts. This method was later used by Architects because very large sheets of their drawings could be reproduced. That is why they are called ‘blueprints’). So much for the mythology of photography.
Jackie
Note from Admin: As Jackie says above, she went back to university in her fifties to read photography. What she does not say is that she got a first.