Sunday 16 September 2018

Pale seaside


Sometimes when I go out with my camera I know exactly what it is that I want to shoot. And most of my best images probably result from careful planning and research, though there's often a little happy coincidence in the mix as well.


But sometimes it's nice just to go out and see what appeals to my eye. Yesterday was a day like that. It was a dry, dull September afternoon and I felt like walking on the beach to clear my head. I did my customary round-the-peninsula drive. The seas and skies weren't looking particularly photogenic except in the most minimalist of ways. What drew my eye instead were the fading, drying sea plants all round the coastal route, seedheads and skeletal stalks standing delicate against the bleached blue-grey sky.


You can't see the sea in most of my images, but I like to think I've captured a little of the mood of the afternoon and the way the understated light can calm and revive.






Sunday 2 September 2018

Following Frances 6: Churchill



I

It’s summer again, and I’m driving from Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, to Churchill, County Fermanagh. Even for me, this feels like coming home.

The trees arch further and greener across the road. I catch glimpses of the lough every now and then. The scents in the air have a western warmth about them.


And the manse at Churchill is only nine miles, as the crow flies, from Frances’s childhood home at Gortnagullion, where her parents and her brother Joe and his family still lived. If you stood on a hill and looked through a gap, you could almost see the turf smoke rising from the McCrea chimney.

You can’t help standing on a hill here. Churchill is exactly what its name implies – quite a steep hill, looping up from the lough shore road, with the church the central point of the village. It’s not actually the Methodist church that gave the village its name, but it seems as though it should have done.




II


It’s a lovely manse, right beside the church, but not physically joined to it like the one at Aughnacloy. It’s double-fronted and substantial, with plenty of rooms to be explored. Today, it looks almost exactly as it does in my postcard view of it from the 1920s. Nora remembers it as ivy-covered, however, so some judicious pruning must have taken place between William and Frances’s tenure and the postcard shot.


As I walk past it, I see somebody ironing in one of the front rooms. I pluck up my courage and walk up the garden path. The doorbell is answered by Charis, who takes a break from the ironing to chat with me about how nice it is to live in this calm, friendly village. I’m too shy today to ask to look round a bit, but my covert glances over her shoulder confirm that many of the house’s original features remain.




III

This pretty place is so pleasant that I have to take a moment to remind myself what actually happened in Frances’s life while she lived here. This is the chronology.

July 1905: the family, William and Frances (now 36 years old), with toddlers Fred, Donald and Nora, moves to Churchill.
6 November 1905: four-year-old Fred, their beloved first child, falls ill.
7 November 1905: Fred dies.
12 February 1906: baby Gertrude is born.
29 November 1906: Gertrude is baptised by Randall Phillips.
3 February 1907: baby Robina is born.
Later in 1907: Robina is baptised. In an unusually flustered and scrappy entry in the baptismal register, no date is given and there is neither a name for the baby nor the signature of a baptising minister.
July 1907: the family, William, Frances, Donald, Nora, Gertrude and Robina, packs their possessions and leaves to move to Donegal.


It’s difficult to imagine what these two years must have been like for Frances, already at a low ebb physically after her recent illness. As the minister’s wife and a very active participant in church and village life, she was on public display. Grief and joy, stresses and depressions, impatience and calm, all seen and shared, and perhaps judged.

I'm unsure exactly how little Fred died. It seems likely, though, that it was related to his scarlet fever, which was thought to leave children more vulnerable to a range of other serious conditions such as meningitis. Nora wrote that he was taken from them after only a few hours' illness. She knew him as a big brother for less than two years, but she remembered and talked about him until she herself was an elderly lady.




IV

Nora didn’t remember the inside of the manse. Perhaps it was easier for Frances to let the children play outside in the gardens around it and in the pretty hilltop road. Here, they visited their neighbours, remembering most fondly the lady in a house across the street, who kindly fed them treats of crystal sugar.

Before my visit, I tried to find out what ladies lived in Churchill at this point and might have been dispensing spoonfuls of sweetness to the manse children. I found some potential candidates.

On Christmas Day of 1905, William officiated at the marriage of Maggie Sanderson, a member of his own congregation, to Patrick McMenamim from Bolusty More, round the lough shore road towards Rosscor. Maggie had until now lived in the village with her brother Thomas and his wife Margaret, and their children Lavinia, in her twenties, and the younger William and James. Lavinia was a witness at the wedding. I wondered if this family, with strong church connections and three doting women, might have been the one.

It’s often hard to tell from census documents where exactly the properties listed were situated. But once I arrive in Churchill, it seems clear.

Across the road from the manse, a couple of houses down, is a charming white bungalow with a walled garden. A plaque beside the door identifies it as Lavinia’s Cottage. Perhaps Lavinia Sanderson inherited it from her parents and lived there until she was an elderly woman. I imagine her feeding the village children with sweets her whole life long, while their mothers look on from their bedroom windows, smiling and regaining strength in the temporary peace and quiet.




Sunday 19 August 2018

Botany Bay Beach


At the end of the Botany Bay road is the plantation. Through the plantation grounds and across a boardwalk is one of the most amazing beaches I've ever seen.


On a sunny day, the colours were a bleached palette of sky and bone. The beach is shallow, but strewn across it are the skeletons of ancient coastal trees, like a dinosaur graveyard. The storms of the last few years have shifted and destroyed some of these - I'd seen some amazing older images of branches reaching up from the water against the sunrise - but it's still very atmospheric.


I'd planned this as a location for my good friend Silas Fretwell, and the noble J obliged in his modelling duties, as pelicans wheeled overhead, fluffy white clouds floated southwards and the sun beat down with beautiful cruelty.






Sunday 12 August 2018

The road to Botany Bay


This was one of the most atmospheric places we visited in South Carolina.

If you live in Northern Ireland or you're a Game of Thrones fan, you might be put in mind of the Dark Hedges, near Armoy in County Antrim. This is the road to Botany Bay Plantation, near Edisto Beach, 3798 miles away.

It's the same idea - an avenue of trees lending grandeur to the approach to a stately house. But these are southern live oaks rather than beeches. And the road is surfaced with sand. And only two other people passed by in the half hour that we spent there.

The quiet, the quality of the late afternoon southern light, and the sense of history all around made travelling the road a special, almost spiritual experience. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have imagined stories and films rising from every bend in the road.


In a place like this, stories start romantic, but it doesn't take long before painful historical facts intrude and you see the reality of the lovingly tended plantation grounds. It's a landscape built up to grandeur on slavery, fading into decline ever since, but still beautiful.

When you come from Ireland, you're used to finding that your history has a traumatic flip side and beauty is troubled. Maybe that's always the way.


(Looking backwards from the more elegant angle of the shoot...)

Friday 3 August 2018

Low Country squares


A holiday within a holiday - at the end of July, we spent a few days staying in a lovely house belonging to generous friends in Green Pond, South Carolina.


Relaxation-wise, it was fabulous: a morning spent strolling round Beaufort; buying shrimp directly from Elijah at his trawler at Bennett's Point (turned out a pound of shrimp apiece was really quite a lot, but we ate it all no problem); driving the sandy roads overhung with live oak and Spanish moss; walking in the grounds of the derelict Old Sheldon Church at Yemassee; visiting the beautiful Wildlife Management Areas nearby; getting very sandy in the lively waves at Edisto Beach and, best of all, spending a day amongst the skeleton trees of Botany Bay Beach. 


Photography-wise, it was a gift too. The colours of the landscapes, distinctly southern, and the quality of the light, especially after a rainstorm, were inspiring. And since Silas Fretwell was driving me about in his Jeep, he made an appearance in a couple of shoots - more from those later, perhaps.


Really, we only scratched the surface of what this beautiful Low Country area has to offer. I left full of ideas for future work and so thankful for the kindness of the friends who enabled us to visit so easily and happily.




Sunday 15 July 2018

Shadows


This week I visited one of my favourite photo locations, Old Car City in White, Georgia. It's always a harsh day out, with high temperatures and mean biting insects, but I was really looking forward to adding to my portfolio of fabulous paint and chrome textures on abandoned vintage cars.



I spent most of the morning focusing on one particular car, a 1940s Buick Special sitting in perfect leaf-dappled light, hoping for a nice set or even a panel of images.

In fact, it's always a challenge to shoot in this light - very bright in the sun, quite dark everywhere else. I was working with a tripod and a shutter release, using live view to save bending over to peer through the viewfinder for every single shot. It took a while to make this combination work, but after a while I thought I had it sorted.



We went for a well deserved lunch break in the diner across the road, and I checked my images more carefully. They were all slightly out of focus. I had totally not handled things in live view.




I was really frustrated to have spent so much time and effort on some well framed shots which were completely useless.

The afternoon light wasn't working on my Special. But I did, sort of, get my tripod/shutter release/live view/focus combination to work. It was a useful reminder of how much I don't know, to try to be positive.


I wasn't loving my tripod much, though, by this point, so I switched to hand-held and concentrated instead on some darker shots, with shadows and suggestions, a little bit Gothic. A slight salvage of a painful day.







Saturday 23 June 2018

Belfast noir


Belfast suits black and white, I think. That might be partly because I can't shake off the belief that the late nineteenth century, when Belfast was at its most bustling, actually happened in black and white. I know, that's ridiculous, but the more photographs I look at, the more it feels as though it's the case.



More logically, the architectural shapes, the stone carvings, the steeples, the statues, the cloudy grey skies can be seen at their graphic best in mono. It's a moody city, and taking out the colour enhances this.



I've spent the last couple of months working on black and white images of Belfast for my Instagram account. It's been a great challenge and discipline. I'm including some of my favourites here, with location details at the end of the post.



PS: I just read an article on the Belfast Telegraph website that said that 611 households in Northern Ireland are still watching television on black and white sets. I love this.

















Locations: ceiling, St George's Church, High Street; best roof in Belfast, Bradbury Place; wounded angel, City Cemetery; lady, Crown Entry; ironwork, Clifton House; mural and fencers, Hill Street; motto for life, Dundela Avenue; accidental angel, Donegall Road; artist's model, Carlisle Memorial Church; City Hall from Donegall Place; Bank of Ireland, Royal Avenue; Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, near Eliza Street; greenhouse, Botanic Gardens; marble hand, Harbour Commissioner's Office; Titanic Memorial, City Hall; St Malachy's Church, Alfred Street; Jaffe Fountain, Victoria Street; St Anne's Cathedral, Donegall Street; Queen Victoria monument, City Hall.