End of the module notes

People and Place module notes:

On Assignments:

The first assignment I found the easiest. Mark was willing and well versed – he has sat many times before. The idea of a continuing portrait is an intriguing idea, though whether a close member of the family is a good idea I’m not sure. There are pro’s and cons and the discussion of which is not for the here and now.

The biggest issue that I have had is the choice of a mono treatment for the original set. This rather stymied further updates if it needed to be consistent, though not from a capability to reproduce the mono treatment; rather the mono work held back the possibility of introducing colour and when my tutor suggested additional shots I felt that the need for colour rather jarred. There is a colour shot that I have included for assessment - I'm dubious about how this will be received.

Assignment two, was a journey that I wouldn’t want to make again! I started with a very clear understanding of what I wanted to do, what I wanted to portray, how I was going to do it, what and how the narrative was going to be delivered. I spent hours and hours of work collecting the material, working on the images – ensuring consistency of as much of the aesthetic as possible. The report from my tutor wasn’t damning, but it is clear to me that I hadn’t managed to get the message over in the way that I had envisaged it to have been communicated. This notion of communication, was the underpinning structure that I wanted to overlay, by using conversation as a core motif. But as my tutor noted that not only was my notion of conversation not delivered with any consistency, but also that some of the images were overly complex. I can still see what it was that I tried to deliver with each of the images, but I can see that just because I knew it, it doesn’t mean that anyone can/could read it. To that end I have included for assessment, the original set and some replacement images that better express the notion of conversation.

My abiding feeling about how this assignment went, other than the conversation narrative that seemed to elude me, was about how the photographer needs to actively construct the image. I can still see the construction of narrative that I implied into some of the shots I used in the assignment, but I can see that I didn’t make it obvious to the viewer. The construction that I conceived in my mind – at the time I took the images - needed to be able to be physically made as well. The point that my tutor made about simplifying the image was well made and to do that I would have needed to cross the boundary from “taking” to “making”; to interfere with the elements in front of the lens to make the job of reading the image more straightforward.

I had decided to increase the pressure on myself by limiting the time to capture the images to two performances – I had decided to research and plan all the shots through the rehearsal period of a number of weeks. This process mitigated against what I had intended, I knew the play extremely well and I had a various number of themes in my head that, I as assembled the assignment, I assumed my viewer would be able to read them as I had “written” them. This, of course, meant that not only did I not have the opportunity to retake the images, but that I had to mine a set of images that had an overlay of one kind of end result, when I now needed to provide a set which had a slightly different, and probably more coherent, narrative. Overall I was quite disturbed by this process and wondered about my ability to create the kind of work I would be required to deliver as I move forward in the course. I also questioned my use of monochrome, an aesthetic that I feel very comfortable in, and decided that I would revert to colour until such time as either the course determines that it is required or I feel compelled by the work to work in that medium. I have included for assessment the original images and the replacement images suggested in part by my tutor.

Assignment three: I decided to link the “buildings in use” to performance and spent some time researching a number of key buildings in Oxford. I was surprised to be allowed access to these public buildings and I spent a good deal of time at these buildings – I had already been a regular visitor to most of them previously. I was relatively pleased with how this work progressed, I had tried to weave in the presence of people with the buildings. In some cases these people were physically present, at other times they were there in spirit. The final set of images I am reasonably happy with. It is interesting that my tutor was happier with the latter of the images – I suspect this may be to do with my becoming at ease with the assignment as much as understanding what I was trying to achieve. Again, for assessment, I have included the original images and the suggestions from my tutor.

Assignment four: The subject of the funeral directors was an idea that came to me as an apposite subject within a course entitled “People and Place”. The negotiation with the owner and the subsequent field trips to the premises all went without many issues and the end result produced some images that I am quite proud of. I had ideas before I went in, about how I remembered the time when I went through the process when my father died and I am wondering whether this “coloured” my view of the assignment – but I thought that it would have been unlikely that whatever the assignment I would most likely have a predetermined perspective. My tutor suggested a couple of changes to the set of images from the full set that I provided. This assignment went very well for me.

Assignment five: This assignment went very well from the time I had the idea to document the nuclear bunker, which came to me after both seeing it just prior to the study weekend at Leeds and also hearing/seeing Jesse Alexander’s presentation of his work on a nuclear bunker. I decided that I would also record the voices of previous volunteers about how they had manned the bunker during it’s operational time. This audio in used in a video that I included as part of my on-line blog, and the accompanying posts where I wrote about the bunker contained a polemic regarding my feelings on the bunker and the volunteers. I think it is clear the point that I wanted to make and it is another assignment that I enjoyed completing. My tutor didn’t feel any need to question the set of photographs I produced for this assignment – for which I feel very happy and satisfied.

On photographers and photography.

I knew a lot of photographers before I started this course, but the photographers I have found through this course, from independent research, from my tutor, from the study visits and from fellow students have been a revelation. I have written about many in my blog – I have invested in too many books – and discussed with various people the work of these photographers. I have not always liked, nor maybe understood, some of these photographers. It is this last statement that troubles me most at the moment – a need for comprehension of work that still eludes me; especially of photographers who have been elevated to the rank of “high status”; of those that I have struggled with are the likes of Struth and Gursky whose clarity of line is generally very clear whereas the work of Fransesca Woodman and Duane Michels impels me into the frame. I have an inkling that my genre will be documentary which on the one hand I find strange considering those attractions, but I suppose on the other hand these types of artist have a very strong sense of narrative in their work – despite, or because of, the “obscurance” of clarity of line.

On photography – it is clear that I need to simplify my imagery, to engage with my viewer more easily – and to do that I need to carefully decide how the construction of my images needs to be carefully considered. The frame that I make is something that should be under my control as much as the decision on shutter speed etc. the contents and juxtaposition of the elements within that frame are mine to arrange according to how I want to write the image. I suspect that is the greatest distance I have made on this module.

Feedback on Assignment five

I'm not sure I could be more pleased. My tutor seems very happy with the work, no suggestions about how it might be improved, the video seemed to work and more importantly for me, the message that I wanted to convey seems to have been delivered and understood. I am being encouraged to get the work ready for assessment and I want to do so.

Whilst the feedback is very positive I am wondering about what to do about one thing. The P&P project was very worthwhile to me, I got to work with people, in more ways than I imagined that I would. It challenged a lot of preconceptions I had and, as I hoped that the course overall would do so, I am therefore glad I was challenged in that way. However it has formed an idea about how I could cope with an issue I have had hanging around my neck for about a decade. It has now given birth to a formed project in my mind. I'm not sure I can hold it off much longer, I could try and harness it until "Documentary" or let it rest as a personal project and work with it in the background. I know that I will only have one chance to complete this project and starting it now, whilst I have a limited tool set scares me as I might not do justice to it. Or should I, like so many other things in my past, jump in and see where the current takes me?

Learnings from the video work

I had a clear idea and political view regarding the nuclear bunker – in reality a nuclear event monitoring post, albeit in a bunker style – about the futility of it, the manic response to political and jingoistic posturing, from all sides of the spectrum. How these volunteers - 10500 of them - had offered themselves as hostages to fortune and how I wanted their voices to describe both what the work was and how they felt, looking back, about how they felt let down by the establishment.

I set out the video to be firstly a description of the function (ality) of the bunker, it’s role in the defence of the realm, how the role of the bunker, on a practical day to day basis, fitted into a wider and wider panorama of information that, in it’s small but vital way, played in the global Cold War politics. In the second section I wanted to use imagery and words to provide a subversion of their role, how the state had been prepared to sacrifice these volunteers for their own ends, almost as a last vestige of the all powerful state/establishments paternal and patronizing approach to it’s citizens. In an era not yet released from the tyranny of “iron-curtain” diplomacy, the state could and did wield indiscriminate power; but in their own words as volunteers. In a post “wall” world where power at first shifted to the people, only to be replaced by corporate power, the state can no longer hide from these awful truths. Another pertinent reminder of state control of truth has been brought to the surface again with the revelations of the Hillsborough tragedy being finally revealed.

Leaving the politics aside I am not sure I want to make a shorter edit, nor would I want to “sex” it up and make a snappier version. I am sure I could make it shorter, but I feel that the words are important. I had a couple of hours of recording and edited it down to about 9 mins. I was relatively pleased with the editing – though the juxtaposition from the first speaker to the second speaker might have been more imaginative – perhaps a text image introducing each speaker before they started? Not sure, but it doesn’t matter as I probably won’t revisit the project. I think that the images needed to of better quality – this a definitely a workflow issue! I used jpegs sized at 8cm on it’s longest side as a standard output from Lr and I will definitely will use higher resolution and/or Tiffs or better file formats in the future – I will experiment with that. The sound quality I was quite impressed with given that the recorder was placed in various parts of the bunker and Sound booth (Sb) allowed me to balance the audio intuitively, the processing of the audio seemed fairly straightforward as did the editing in Premiere Pro – though I’m still waiting the “How-to” book to arrive.

Outputting the video was also “relatively” straightforward, though quite lengthy into a format that would be acceptable for a “Vimeo” upload. There are issues with the Vimeo upload in that the image “crossovers” have aberrations that have probably come from the using a (relatively) small jpeg. I will experiment with using higher quality images before I get to my next, much more important project, of which I will post some thoughts soon.

I would like to able to get to a workshop to understand some of the boundaries, techniques and opportunities of using video as part of my communication output. I see this an extra mechanism and not as a replacement for photography, which philosophically, at any rate for me, still holds the key to how I want to express myself.

I am really glad I have been through this process, my tutor appears to be comfortable with the finished product (even in it's Vimeo form) and has encouraged me to submit the video with the images and so I will do so. I have also had some very helpful thoughts from some other students and will look to bring them to the next project. Now I suppose I will have to submit the last assignment to P&P - the time for procrastination is over...

p.s. response from the "Tower"

Dear John,

many thanks for the link to your pictures. They are excellent. I hope you enjoyed the day too.

Would you be able to let me have the pictures on high resolution files so we can use them please. They should be shown on our website etc.

Many thanks for your help.

Best wishes,

Annette Gorton

 

Managing Director

Assignment 5 pre-amble

Curious weather conditions, I thought might be a visual analogy for the text

Mono version might offer an extra level of menace

It always appears curious to me when things start to come together almost as a set of random circumstances. I don’t really believe in coincidences in the normal run of things, but I do believe that we can all make connections to apparently random things and then start to make sense from them. The following is how I came upon deciding the brief for Assignment five – People and Place.

I brought Mark into my team around a decade ago, he’s a naturalized Australian having been born and raised in New Zealand, his wife Jen has a similar heritage. We became friends, that friendship was behind the visit to us albeit they were in the UK visiting their daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters. Randomly we decided to take them to a few places one of which was “Broadway Tower – the highest little castle in the Cotswolds”, which while interesting in itself was not what held my interest. The Tower property also came with it’s own “Nuclear bunker”! During the 1950’s some 1500 and more bunkers were created, usually at sites operated by the Royal Observer Corps, to monitor occurrences in the event of a nuclear episode. These sites were only bunkers in the sense that they were underground – about 20 feet or so – and had radiation protection, support systems for a couple of weeks and (potentially) communication systems to a "cluster" of other “bunkers” in the network feeding vital information to the Ministry of Defence.

The initial visit, purely by chance, held my interest for a lot longer than normal tourist opportunities – Broughton Castle, where Lord Saye personally invited us to have a squint at the upper rooms where a “squint” was incorporated in one of the rooms, the pottery where we saw how they hand painted china, these left me very quickly, but the human story inside these “bunkers” started to grow in me. I found the email address of the Tower and requested permission to take some photographs for my final assignment in the module I was working on; I would of course offer them any images I took at Hi Res’ and they could do what they wanted with them. They seemed delighted with the request and I had a few email exchanges and we agreed that I would turn up, relatively early on Saturday 8^th September where they were planning an “Open-Day”.

I had thought a lot about what the original visit had meant to me, listening to the ex-ROC volunteer (they only use ex ROC volunteer’s, probably because they have a habit of volunteering and therefore don’t cost a lot), what he had to say about the facility, the conditions they worked under and more specifically, the sub-text I discerned about their expectations in the event there was an event. I reflected on what I thought about their sacrifices, the duty of service these men offered – “free-of-charge”, how dispensable they appeared to be in the great game of war, how futile their efforts would have been at the end of the world as we knew it then. I wanted to somehow weave that narrative into my set of pictures. Essentially I wanted the brief to be about how this bunker appeared to the general public today – the owner wants to have a display board of my pictures to entice the public to pay for a visit to the site a hundred yards or more from the Tower – but I wanted it to also be able to portray the futility of their contribution to the “war-effort”. How that their sole purpose was to detect, record and inform on the detonation of a nuclear explosion in order that our government could ensure a retaliatory action designed to obliterate as many Russians as possible – WW1 trench warfare mindset to it’s limit – whilst the politicians, safe in one or more of their subterranean domiciles could live in sublime isolation for the duration of the half life of Strontium 90 before reappearing to breakfast in a Nuclear wasteland some 30 years or more in a post apocalyptic future.

I was met by the owner on the morning of the 8^th September, he wanted to ask what I had planned, I said that I wanted to try and capture the place as best I could, he seemed less interested in my motives and suggested that what he wanted was a set of pictures that enticed people into the bunker i.e. pay for the privilege. He was concerned that I didn’t provide too much detail, so that the potential visitors couldn’t say “well I’ve seen that now, no need to bother”. I found myself thinking at the time he was talking how that resonated with how I felt these ROC volunteers were treated in the past. How the Government never provided training above and beyond the use of the three instruments vital to the role of the bunker. The Government saw fit to provide enough rations for up to two weeks, whereupon they were informed that the radiation levels would be 1/1000^th of what it was when the bomb was detonated, but they still had to go outside to fuel the generators, charge the batteries and for other duties. A one thousandth was still ample enough to ensure a slow lingering death or genetic problems should they ever have the chance for reproduction again (with whom would be a more pertinent question). They knew that they were doomed, the speakers on the day had that awareness and it was talked about during their talks when I visited. And anyway, it might have been 1/1000^th of one explosion, but the nature of the military mind at the time was to annihilate the enemy and there would have been multiple explosions, 1/1000^th of what level?

So the analogy of what the Government had provided these volunteers and the way in which the owner today wanted to provide less than the whole picture played on my mind as I went about the project of collecting images. It was a special day, some original journals had come to light that were written by one of the volunteers and they were being returned. Hand written in MoD log books, these entries showed the banality of everyday life for these ROC volunteers, about maintenance of the equipment, about meetings to decide rosters, about fund raising activities, about social events. This "special day" made it possible to view more than would normally be on view, at least above ground but it also made it much busier than I had hoped for. The owner though was concerned that there weren’t enough people coming through the gate – and rightly so from his perspective.

I listened to the various hosts on the day, how they not only told their stories, but how they had reflected both contemporaneously and now, after all those years after the MoD told them, usually by a telephone call to the cluster leader that their services were no longer required – which is how those journals came to be thrown away in disgust at their treatment – and that the bunkers are now either derelict or buried, as is "Cold War" theory today. We now have another international body corporate enemy to deal with - and we understand them even less that we did the Russians.

The bunker in Broadway isn’t as it was, the owner has turned it into a museum of contemporary paraphernalia loosely associated with the function and era of these bunkers. The instruments are real, the uniforms are real and the volunteers, what remain of them, are very real reminders of a past where the sense of duty outweighed their more parochial responsibilities. The bunker is a fine example of what they were like, it has stood the test of time due to a lack of moisture ingression and the local farmer herding his long-horn cattle in the field adjacent to the site, keeping would be interested parties at bay. I hope it doesn’t become a trivial memento of these volunteers past, as I feel it will mock the trivial value that our Government at the time vested in their efforts.

Storm across the Vale of Evesham, with sheep.

Storm across the Vale of Evesham, with sheep.
Image taken from above the nuclear bunker at Broadway in Worcestershire. Photograph taken on August 30th 2012, purposely drained of colour.

The following is the list I made in Leeds of the various aspects of the nuclear bunker that I could include in assignment five:

Outside,

Cover,

Recessed land,

Spotting point,

Entrance,

Steps up/down,

Radio,

Camera,

Bunk beds,

Toilet,

Spotter’s charts,

Darts board,

Doseometer(?),

ROC coordinates,

Board games,

Written records,

Some thoughts on each:

Outside: Immediately outside the entrance to the bunker itself is a self contained area, probably still under the regulations of the Official Secrets Act and this area contains other bits and pieces: the cover for the ladder, the recessed land where the spotters used to have their equipment that looked for enemy aircraft – the “Spotting Point”. A prefabricated hut that was also used by the ROC as they upgraded from laying on the sod. A camera, an aerial mast assembly, a hand cranked siren, similar to an air raid warning siren. A fence; a track that leads from the public land through a lockable gate and a beautiful view across the Cotswold and Vale of Evesham.

Inside: the vertical ladder with minimal room, the toilet at the bottom of the ladder, the entrance to the main room. The ephemera of solitude and boredom – board (bored) games, darts board (already I am thinking of the randomness of the potential of a nuclear strike, much as my darts expertise), a chart will all the localities of the other nuclear bunkers and their associated clusters. The bunkers were arranged into clusters of about 4 or 5 with a “Main” bunker to operationally supervise – all the “main” bunkers linked up to a central control point – I think this was Royal Air Force control – and then to Whitehall. The operational linkage was provided by the then GPO, though they say BT now – I am wondering now about how that linkage on a national scale could be undertaken as we have “hived-off” vast sections of the infrastructure to any investor capable of filling the national coffers with the right amount of money. Bunk beds, three men normally, though as this is kitted out as a “Main” it would be intended for up to 4 men, so I suspect they slept in shifts. A Doseometer(?) which measures the amount of personal radiation.

I do not want to subvert the efforts of these men. It might be said that they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for their country, and I believe that to be true. However I can’t drag myself away from the thought that it was part of the conspiracy of hypocrisy that stemmed from the War Office (or in their Orwellian styled newspeak name – The Ministry of Defence) that we were “doing all we could to protect our country from the Soviet threat”. The Americans needed an Eastern front and were quite happy for their national threat to be in Europe; Minute-men could fly over Europe if needed and post their special message to the Kremlin. The Soviets probably felt no real threat from the British, nor from any individual European nation west of the Urals, but it made bombastic imperialist posturing sense for the UK Government to make political play of being a Super Power – especially after the humiliations of both world wars, when the UK and it’s Empire was seen for what it was, a spent force. The MoD must surely have known that if the balloon went up, especially with the nuclear technology of the time i.e. very dirty and very big; that vast swathes of the UK would be uninhabitable for hundreds if not thousands of years. The Vale of Evesham would be, in all likelihood, a softly glowing green ember. I remember how radioactive the hill sheep of North Wales were after Chernobyl went into melt down, and how the UK Government at the time jumped onto the moral high ground to distance themselves from any fall-out that might have been engendered with their constituents.

So, back to the Assignment and a brief that makes sense to the notes in the course literature and, above all, that makes sense to me. I want see if the sense of futility comes across again, especially as I will have plenty of time to talk with the volunteers. I want to express the utilitarian nature of the objects that are situated in the bunker, the sense of space that exists in the 800 cubic feet or so of encumbered air. But I suspect that there wouldn’t be much call for that as a narrative. There is, as one might expect, a lot of stuff on the web regarding nuclear bunkers, from the anoraks who list them to the serious historian trying to place them in the latter half of the twentieth century, a lot of trivia as well as more rounded research. My brief will not be to subvert the efforts of the volunteers, but to record – as neutrally as I can, the space these people worked in, the trivial banality of the functional demands, but also to try and imbue a sense of the dread circumstance they were there to detect, record and alarm us about.

I will write a brief in the coming two days. I will be in the hole on Saturday morning.