*Jethro Tull, Living in
the past, 1969, Island records [also included on Living in the
past (LP), 1972]
In the enforced rest during this recent period of illness and recuperation, I've been trying to do things which don't take a lot of movement or brain power. One of the things I have been doing in lucid spells is going through old negatives.
In the enforced rest during this recent period of illness and recuperation, I've been trying to do things which don't take a lot of movement or brain power. One of the things I have been doing in lucid spells is going through old negatives.
Scanning old negatives to
disk is one of those tasks which gets endlessly put off ... it ties
up equipment and time which can always be used for something more
urgent and/or interesting. This last few weeks, though, I've rigged
up a redundant spare laptop to a scanner and tottered through to it
when I felt able.
It's been an ideal task for
the circumstances. There's about two minutes concentration needed,
threading a strip of six negatives into the scanner, then clicking
the necessary things in PaintshopPro (or whatever vehicle you happen
to use for scanner import). After that, computer and scanner are left
alone to do their stuff ... about 25 mins for the high resolution
scans I'm doing ... and if I happen to be curled up in a fœtal ball
when it finishes, well, it'll just wait until I next surface. After
that it's another minute or so of clicking to save the results. Then
start again with the next strip.
Seven strips to a sheet ...
so if I'm feeling really focused, I can get on with something else in
the 25 minute gaps and do a whole sheet in a day ... if I'm
completely zonked, then a single strip or nothing at all.
Then there is the periodic
business of moving the resulting files off the spare laptop onto my
main machine, numbering them, adding them to the archive, tagging
them ... all of which can also be done in bits and pieces of time,
when I feel up to it.
At no time is there any need
for real thinking, or scope for tragic errors ... if I make mistakes,
the negatives are still there and I can always do it again.
To be honest, most of them
are boring – either to me, who took them, or I realise that they
would be to anyone else. The younger me was, I am discovering, very
internal – or, perhaps I should say, even more internal than I am
now. I look at some pictures and I remember the passion that made me,
in pursuit of an idea, photograph this pale grey blur against that
even paler grey texture ... but in the resulting photograph there is
nothing intrinsically of any visual interest to me or to anyone else.
Roll
after roll of film from a walking trip with my brother in France,
forty years ago (see “What
is lost and gained”,
26 Feb this year) record (with a very few exceptions) not the
experience, or the land, or the people, or even my brother, but my
obsession at the time with the use of poured concrete in architecture
and civil engineering design.
Nevertheless,
as my wise friend Luís said to me only this morning, “Even
if they contain material you are not necessarily keen on now, all
photographs carry some history in them and may be useful to someone”
...
so I scan them, file them, and shall keep them.
The point of all this,
however, is that every now and then I'm coming across pictures that
amuse me, or awaken moments of memory, or just strike me as good and
worth resurrecting. Some excite me. Some I look at and wonder why I
didn't pursue their line further than I did.
Luís also said to me quite
recently, again about these old negatives: “As you look at them,
they will start to tell you stories”. He's quite right. As I work
through the largely random order of these sheets, I am finding
stories ... and, in particular, stories (usually, though not always,
heartening ones) which I hadn't heard before about myself. I am
hearing new, revelatory stories about my relationships with my
brothers, with my ex wife, with a small piece of woodland, with
photography as a medium.
No comments:
Post a Comment