I shot with a very high-speed film camera that could slow down an action that took seconds in real life into something that lasted minutes…
I made a few movies, the best of which is one of me jumping from a bridge. I am wearing a suit, it’s shot from a distance, and in the film it takes five minutes for me to hit the water. Meanwhile, a big Amstel beer truck passes in the background, like a perverse advertisement synchronised with an abortive suicide attempt.
”11 November 2016
I had a good visit with my Dad today. We hit the mark in so many respects, where usually I might not manage to fulfil as much as I feel I should in a visit, and he might seem almost unreachable. For the first time I rang ahead to the care home to ask them to ready him to go out - go to the loo, socks on under his shoes, coat on, geed up for the idea of going out. When I got there he was at the door smiling and ready to go, where usually he’d be asleep in the chair looking twice as old as he’s ever looked until recently.
I took his arm in mine and we walked to the beach, not afraid now to admit he needs that helping hand to drag him along. The weather was amazing, we were drenched in sun, barely a breath of wind upon the water, wavelets of some distantly created swell gently rolling in. I felt energised enough to remain upbeat for him most of the time, rather than swiftly being drained of motivating energy. He would say things and I could make out more than just the first few words of what he was saying, occasionally a whole sentence. He smiled, he didn’t seem too confused and the delusional things he would say weren’t founded in anxiety. I got him to throw pebbles in the water.
I remembered to
take something memorable of his I’d picked up from his house, the
rubber mould he used to use to make solid replica dinosaur fossils of
some sea creature in the 1970s that stayed around the house ever since.
He couldn’t really figure out what it was but it captivated his
attention.
I told him his favoured Leonard Cohen died yesterday, and
he appeared in every way to understand what I was saying, said he was
getting on a bit.
I spent too much time taking photographs of him but I was conscious of doing so and brought myself back into the moment to be with him again. I hugged him and told him I loved him, and he said “You’re a good lad. I think the world of you.” I felt he genuinely knew what he was saying. I’d done this last week; I hug, him but have only told him I love him a couple of times. Of all the things we do together this seemed to connect and vitalise him fleetingly like nothing else. He’s child-like now and I need to rise out of myself and care for him, to rescue him even if only momentarily.
We went to a café and shared a piece of cheesecake and a pot of tea. I told him Donald Trump won the presidency, but it meant nothing, he hasn’t been following along. It was only now that I needed to look at Twitter, take a breather from relating to the sadness of dementia. Usually I need to dip in and out of paying full attention to him, much more frequently. When I paid and went to leave, I turned back to see him flirting with the waitress, smiling again, but vacantly enough that after laughing at whatever he’d said she asked “Are you OK?”. We walked home and he wasn’t even delirious with tiredness after more than an hour out.
In his classic study of the short story “The Lonely Voice,” the Irish writer Frank O’Connor identified the primary difference between the novel and the short story as one of belonging. Novels, to put it simply, are about people trying to fit into society, while stories are about the loners, the outsiders, the kooks, those to whom society “offers no goals and no answers” and for whom the short story’s “intense awareness of human loneliness” is perfectly suited.
From practically the moment that the commercial photographer Diane Arbus set out to become an artist at the ripe age of 33 … she seemed to know that the story of the outsider was her intellectual inheritance. And she had the uncanny ability, in a city as crowded as New York, to isolate even those who thought they belonged, to find them almost alone on a sidewalk, their eyes searching hers — later ours — fiercely and uncertainly through the camera.
”Unphotographed
The photograph not taken, is perhaps more emotive, for the unphotographer, than the image taken, held, and kept. It remains alive in the imagination, evoking what it will, not endlessly, but still, as long as memory will allow, decaying. Perhaps more ‘real’, more alive, than any print.
Proletarian Portrait
This poem by William Carlos Williams is akin to street photography. And in a similar way to the fact photography is only able to reflect light on surface, Williams’s overarching principle for poetry was “no ideas but in things”:
“A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron
Her hair slicked back standing
on the street
One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk
Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it
She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail
That has been hurting her.”
- Proletarian Portrait, William Carlos Williams, 1935
Control, a photography exhibition by Pete Boyd
Different ways people control one another using their hands. Photographed in Brighton during summer 2014.On throughout October (for Brighton Photo Fringe) & November. Upstairs & downstairs at Spinelli Coffee, College Rd, Kemptown, Brighton, BN2 1EU.
Exhibition of my Night Life Photographs
I have 5 photographs featured in a group exhibition in the foyer of Jubilee Library in Brighton, England, from 18 August-31 August. This is my first exhibition with more than 1 photo and is of new work from photographing night life in Brighton this summer; 4 of the 5 photos are previously unseen.