On Projects...

Grange Orchard, Carse of Gowrie.
Zeiss Super Ikonta, Tmax 400, printed on Ilford MG IV FB

"Project" is proving to be a right four-letter word for me at the moment. As we all know, projects are a brilliant way of providing some direction for our photography, of keeping the senses keen and - at the very least - giving us something to point the camera at when inspiration is in short supply.

I'm great at starting projects. In fact, I could be the best there's ever been. Sadly, I'm the worst at finishing them. I've never finished anything I've started really. They're not failures as such as they're open-ended and I can go back to them at any time. Who knows, I might pick one or two of them up in future. However, the fact that I haven't so far shouldn't be ignored when assessing my ability to start something and see it through to the end.

And yet, here I am again kicking around some ideas for projects. Will I be able to complete the deal this time? Is there any point to a half-finished project? I've been thinking about embarking on a big (for me) project but I've been keeping quiet about it because I didn't know if I was up to the task. It was James Ravilious that got me thinking about it. Or rather, his book, A Corner of England.

Photography largely performs two functions, as decorative art and social documentary. It's the art side of things that I've always been more interested in but the book planted a documentary seed in my brain that has since germinated and flowered. It either needs to be harvested now or zapped with weedkiller.

This project idea is quite simple. I want to document The Carse of Gowrie over the next two years with the idea of, hopefully, putting on a wee exhibition somewhere at the end of it. I should say that part of me wants to document it. The other part says, "It's too big a job and you don't like photographing people." Brutally honest, that other part.

Foostie

For whatever reason, I've always had a fear of failure. It's what spurred me on at school and in sport. I used to be fiercely competitive as a lad but have mellowed like a fine wine as I've grown older. Some would say I've just grown foostie*. I suppose I'm worried that I might "fail" if I took on the project.

So I sought to define failure in this context. What would it look like in social documentary terms? Well, I can handle the technical side of things so I'm not worried about that. But what if, heaven forbid, I spent two years producing lots of boring, mundane photographs? Yes, I'd classify that as failure. How real is that possibility?

The Carse has an amazing variety of things happening within a quite restricted geographical area so, on the face of it, there shouldn't be too much difficulty finding stuff to point a lens at. However, I know from past experience that there's not a lot in terms of countryside or environment that has the "wow factor" so we're not talking Ansel Adams country here. Or even Gomez Addams.

But, and, as they say, it's a big but, does that really matter? The aim must be to show the Carse as it is now, boring bits, warts and all. The idea is that people will hopefully look at my pictures in years to come and say so that's what life was like then. Not, "Wow, look at the bokeh on that shot".  Or, "Yes, that 300mm lens really has compressed the perspective nicely." And, if worst came to the worst and I failed according to my own criteria, what would it matter? Who'd give a toss beyond me? There's no piper to pay if you're playing your own tune, is there?

Photographic Gold

Another obstacle to overcome is my penchant for trying to photograph things as they were and not as they are. Ravilious was mining photographic gold in his quiet corner of England both in terms of the landscape and the people, a way of life that hadn't changed too significantly for much of the 20th century. A comprehensive account of the Carse would look quite 21st century as you might expect and just couldn't possess the same charm as 1970s/80s rural England. And people? Yes, I'd have to photograph lots of them in covering the area's varied commercial and industrial aspects and one thing this blog is not over-endowed with is pics of people.

Unusually for a journalist, I just never found people as interesting as buildings and things. I know that must sound terrible to many folk but "human interest" stories never did much for me - and I wrote more than my fair share of them, tear-jerkers and all. It's pretty much the same when it comes to photographing people: if they're not family or friends then they don't hold my attention as much (although Ravilious's people shots are making me re-think that somewhat). I photographed people almost every working day during my first year as a reporter in a district office (and learned a lot from the local Fife freelance, David Ireland) and I suppose I could get used to it again - if I had to.

Here's another "but". The prospect of having to photograph people changed the whole exercise for me. It went from being something I was really beginning to look forward to with some excitement to a job of work. I always knew it would be difficult building enough enthusiasm for the people shots. I just get no creative buzz from that type of photography. And the creative buzz is the only reason I pick up a camera.

I even, sort of, made a start to the Carse project. It happened a few weeks ago. It was a day filled with drizzle and showers - perfect photography weather for me. I hadn't been out to the Carse for a couple of months so decided to visit the biggest village, Errol. In the bag were a Nikon F90 and 35mm and 85mm Nikkors - an almost perfect little outfit. A roll of Tmax 400 was standing by for duty.

Clotted Cream

There was an interesting-looking building on the main street running through the village that I wanted to photograph whilst standing up a pend on the opposite side of the road. It was all old brick with mortar highlights the colour of clotted cream, some of which were reflected in the puddles on the road. It was nice but it lacked something - a human figure. There weren't too many people about - understandable given the weather - and those that were seemed to be running from car to shop and back again. Then I saw a young woman, hood up, pushing a pram and towing a West Highland Terrier. She was on the same side of the road as the building and walking towards it. Superb!

So, I'm standing under the roof of the pend, looking through the viewfinder with trigger finger cocked and the safety off and waiting for her to appear in front of the building - when she suddenly loomed directly in front of me! She'd crossed the road to enter the same pend! I started laughing and said, "You've just spoiled my photograph." I explained about my idea of a figure in front of the building and she volunteered to cross the road and walk past - in the rain.** What a lass.

Back in the pend, she asked me why I was photographing Errol and I heard myself saying, "Well, I've got this idea for a photographic project about the Carse with maybe a wee exhibition at the end of it..." I thought that might have been my "crossing the Rubicon" moment but no. Since then I've hummed and hawed, weighed the pros and cons and sought out countless other hackneyed expressions useful to the arch-procrastinator until I was almost catatonic. Then I did it all over again.

You're probably sitting there wondering why I'm over-thinking this instead of just going and doing it. The truth is I over-think a lot of things in life. You know how a big dog needs a lot of exercise? Well, a big brain is the same. Haha. So that's Project One - parked in neutral while I try to summon up enough revs to get started.

Smallholdings

Project Two is a little easier but I'm still nowhere near committed to it either. During the 19th and 20th centuries, governments bought up privately-owned land, divided it into bite-sized chunks and rented it to various categories of people, including war veterans, so that they could earn a subsistence living working their plot in some way. These "smallholdings" became quite popular. Scotland has around 20,000 of them at the last count. There's a sub-division of these called, if I remember correctly, small landholdings. Smallholdings can be rented or privately-owned but small landholdings are always tenanted.

In Scotland, there are fewer than 100 small landholdings left and it's anyone's guess how long they'll be around although the Scottish Government has been taking an interest in them recently. They would seem like a good subject for a project especially since I think we have a handful here on the northern outskirts of Dundee which might make a good start.

So what's the problem with this project? I think I'm about 30 years too late. Had I started in the 1980s I think I would have found some of the older practices and customs extant. Now? Well, I've skirted around the edges of what I believe are the small landholdings with a camera whilst photographing a nearby beech wood and the plots didn't look all that different from ordinary countryside gardens, only bigger. There are one or two small tractors, a couple of big sheds, some signs of livestock and a general air of untidiness but nothing too bad - or too good from a photographic point of view, if you know what I mean. Would I be able to get anything vaguely coherent in project terms from these plots? I'm going to have a closer look over the next few days. I wouldn't describe Project Two as "parked": it's more like I'm just driving by very slowly with the window down taking it all in.

Mid-life Crisis

Project Three is dead easy but isn't likely to be very fulfilling from an artistic point of view. I want to photograph my youth. I've had this idea kicking around for ages, made a tentative start a few years ago but didn't take it any further (sounds familiar?). The idea, in a nutshell, is that I'd make a list of memorable places from my youth into my teenage years and photograph them. Prints would be made and pasted in a project journal with a write-up for each one explaining the photograph's significance.

I thought my off-spring might find something like this interesting. I'd certainly have loved it had my own father been able to do something similar but we're all different and computers have fried the minds of most young people in my experience so my best effort could end up at the local dump at some indeterminate point in the future. Despite that, I think I'll go ahead with this project partly because it's so accessible: I can walk to a lot of the significant places I'm talking about and many of them are still standing. Official status? I've just chucked the keys to the valet parking attendant and I'm headed to the bar for some refreshment before getting started.

So that's where I'm standing with regard to possible projects. One should go ahead but the other two will need yet more thought - unless I adopt the "Screw it - let's do it!" attitude of Richard Branson.


* Urban Dictionary: Scottish. "disgusting, putrid, over-ripe, mouldy, etc."

** Despite writing above that I was confident I could handle the technical side, I failed miserably with this photograph. For some reason that still escapes me, I'd loaded Tmax 100 into the Nikon but had over-ridden the DX coding and set the ISO dial to 400 ISO. I tried to recover the situation a little by extending development in Rollei RHS DC and got a very under-developed set of negs. A bit of research showed that a two-stop push is a big no-no for Tmax 100 in this brew. I think the shot was just never meant to be.