A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

 Like many things, good photo opportunities can be mercurial at best and there can be periods when I find I am snapping happily away for days, only to find I am amid a sudden and wide ranging drought. As I am not a driver, it’s not easy for me to get myself out there and visit a spot guaranteed to offer inspiration, so I am frequently at a loss for good material. So what’s a fella to do when faced with a dry spell? One solution I discovered was rather than shoot photographs, I could make them. 

I watched the TV series, ‘The Terror’ recently, a fictionalised account of the search for the North West Passage, by the British Admirality Expedition led by the ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. The Franklin Expedition left England in 1845 and was last seen in the area of Baffin Bay. Both ships subsequently became icebound and the crews attempted to abandon ship and find a way back to civilisation. Little was known of the fate of either crew until the wrecks were discovered in 2014 and the terrible truth was uncovered. Dan Simmons wrote a novel based on known facts about the expedition, but added a fictionalised account of the crews accidental involvement with an Inuit shaman, in control of a huge demonic creature, which ultimately pursues and destroys both ships and almost all hands. 

The tv series was closely based on the novel and extremely well realised and presented. Around the same time, I became aware of artefacts uncovered in both Shackleton and Scott’s huts in Antarctica, including photographs and negatives taken on the voyages, which had been left at the two locations and preserved in ice.

Once more, the imagery contained in the photographs was desolate and yet beautiful and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to try and create something which spoke of these extremes of weather and tragedy.

During my forays at car boots, I had found a large number of glass magic lantern slides, large glass positives, about 3” square, which were used in early Victorian projectors for educational lectures and entertainment purposes. Most of the slides were uninteresting and random pictures or drawings, but now and again, some genuinely good photographs would appear, such as two slides which I bought, showing a park near where I lived as a child, but from 1889. Almost all had a kind of tape on the edges, to protect the fragile glass and avoid splintering as the slides were inserted into the carrier. This, and an occasional inner frame and label on the glass, made the actual slides an ideal basis for me to create my own, new slides.

Snow at Sefton Park, Liverpool

The Palm House, Sefton Park, Liverpool

I photographed the full slide, against a white base, in a high resolution and then, in Adobe Photoshop, neatly trimmed out the old image and removed any description on the labels, giving me a digital frame template. The next step was to find something to put in it.

All at sea

I had been a fan of monochrome photography, since my early days at college and my love of Tintypes and the distressed look of the plate grain, plus the historical feel I wanted to achieve, made the first decision very simple. Next I needed to find something to shoot, which would fit the look I was aiming for, but after experimenting with small model ships, I felt the results were very unsatisfactory and not nearly as authentic as I wanted.

I was using a large tray, filled with water and had placed a few rocks  in the water, with the intention of using a forced perspective to make them look like distant islands, with cotton wool clouds behind them, but despite my best efforts, the ships still looked like toys and the depth of field was still to narrow.

So looking round the garden, as I was shooting outside to take advantage of natural light and avoid potential mess, I saw a large chunk of greenish rockery stone, with a seam of white calcite decorating one plane. After moving things round on the tray, I situated the rock in the water and stepped back to get the view. With the sun high and reflecting off the water, the texture of the rock was thrown into sharp relief and a little fiddling with the aperture managed to throw the background out of focus and give a great impression of distance.

I took several shots, rotating the stone and varying the angle, then found some other similar rocks and shot them too. Then it was a question of popping the photo into either the Tintype app, or Adobe Photoshop, to blur or accentuate the edges and then adding it as a layer onto the frame template. Some further tonal adjustment and the addition of a new paper label with suitable text in a period font, completed the piece.

Using different frame templates from the old slides, I created a small series of images, which purportedly showed arctic mountains and icebergs.

As it was late Summer when I was working with the frame template idea and in researching the idea for a ‘lost sea voyage’ theme, I also looked at other expeditions to the South Seas, such as Charles Darwin's aboard the Beagle and his sample collections and natural history recording. The abundance of wild flowers and other natural phenomena around me, gave me the idea to create a sequence of fake botanical specimen slides, in a similar format. So I went onto the roof garden of the University library with a sheet of white card and using my phone, took simple shots of various cuttings and flowers.

Then, using the same process as the nautical themed slides, matted the flower images into more frames and added labels and suitable toning and distress to the image.

This gave me a small selection of images, which I hoped might look like the remains of a botanical survey carried out sometime in the 19th century.