Slip Slidin' Away #2
The Last of England.
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away— Paul Simon
This is the second in what may turn out to be a very small series of posts about some old slides from the 1990s I have excavated from the loft and scanned. The first dealt with pictures of a school trip to Vienna.
This one contains some images which, for reasons I can no longer remember, are titled The Last of England on the box in which they were stored. It might have been a reference to the Derek Jarman film bemoaning the effects of Thatcherism or indeed the famous painting by Ford Madox Brown.1 The original version is held at Birmingham Art Gallery so I would have seen it a fair bit in the flesh and studied it as part of my MA at Reading University in the late 80s. Who knows?
As I’ve described previously, I was in thrall to mostly American urban documentary photographers in the early days. A wide angle lens and Kodachrome 64 were my materials of choice. I have never had any formal training in photography. It’s always been about the amateurish passion of the autodidact. And before the Internet, YouTube gear reviews and online artist interviews, getting hold of information about serious photography was pretty difficult.
When we moved to London, from Bristol, in 1989, the best place to do this was The Photographers’ Gallery bookshop. Tate were still only collecting photographs by artists, documents of their sculptures or performances, that sort of thing. Since I hadn’t studied photography, I didn’t have access to university libraries and I never caught on to Creative Camera magazine. TPG was my sole source of information.
Lots of the books I bought in those early days have since been sadly lost. When we moved from our old school building to the new one, it seems that a consignment of things from my office never made it. That, and the odd book that I’d loaned to students who never returned it, means that I’m missing some of those canonical texts in my collection. The ones I miss the most are a small catalogue of Jem Southam’s The Raft of Carrots, and Peter Galassi’s The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort.
I also lost a copy of William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest (which I bought in Austin, Texas for $10 in 1995 and which I’ve since replaced) and Paul Graham’s brilliant pictures of Japan in Empty Heaven. C’est la vie!
Anyway, back to the slide scans. Due to restrictions on space and your patience (dear reader), here are a few of the pictures from The Last of England box, all taken in London. Make of them what you will.
Until next time.
These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.
By a strange coincidence, my current colleague Martin McCarrick, Head of Music at Thomas Tallis School, played on the soundtrack to the Jarman film when he was a pop star.
It is a tragic thing when photography books go a.w.o.l. I enjoyed this post. I am particularly fond of the statue with the little red car. It is super!