eightball

a photo-shoot at the the black country living museum, in dudley... if you don't know what they do there - basically it's a theme park run by volunteers to recreate a little slice of the midlands, harking back to the pre-1960's... so anything goes really - 18th century mines rub shoulders with post-war experimental housing and mid-century trams run past old schoolhouses... it's surreal to say the least, and very, very intriguing.

i went on what started off as a grey old afternoon, and which quickly developed into a full-blown english summer afternoon... and spent the afternoon wandering country lanes of my childhood days

for equipment i used the kodak brownie reflex viewed through my olympus digital camera... taking photos of old things with my 1956 camera, basically.

the summers i can remember in the countryside before hitting the grand old age of ten, looked a lot like this... idylic afternoons breathing in fresh air and roaming free amongst a period that was coming to it's end(the last few years of the industrial revolution, as far as i was corncerned...) in the early to mid-70's... just me and my grandad wandering the farms(he had some sort of connection with them, long since lost in time... although he had been a farmer, so was probably just touring his old haunts), witnessing the first signs of all the old machinery still be used but falling into disrepair... huge combines and gritty old tractors, ready to stand idle for years before ending up in places like this.

they've even managed to re-create old roadsigns and grass verges, it's all too much like being a child again and coming across a country cottage that wasn't foreboding, but welcomed you in as you were old family.

 

i started-off by the tram-stop, where the huge electric trolley bus was parked, sadly it wasn't running today, as i'd been on it before - and it was a blast... but they've got the entire terminus quite accurate - even down to the benches in the middle of the roundabout... traffic was much prevalent and slower in those days, so you could cross into the middle without taking your life in your hands... great place to start the walk back into time.

the image on the right, is the inside of the iron-clad house, an experiment in using iron sheeting to build with, after the war - as supplies of housing materials were scarce(little bit of politics here - 99% of buildings during the war were relieved of their iron railings for the war effort - but most of it was too poor to use... which explains why someone came up with the idea of using such ab extreme material)... but the project was cancelled after only one house(re-built here), as the iron was too expensive to use, and got too warm in the summer and freezing in the winter, unlike bricks which is why they have been used for centuries, but i digress... interesting to see the decor inside though, as you can walk into the house and look round the downstairs living areas...

 

there are several mines in the museum too... i waited around to go into one on tour, but several people were already there and nothing was happening(this is living in the past alright... endless queuing!), but on ground level there was enough to see and photograph, to keep me from missing out on going into a cramped potentially hazardous underground vault. i visited various old mines on the west coast as a young boy(on the aforementioned travels with grandparent), and most of them were falling into the same state of disprepair as here... the last ever coalmone in scotland was near where i used to live, and i can remember it closing in the mid-80's... just as a rejoinder, my old housing estate was built on NCB property, which was given to moments of subsiding thanks to the mines which stretched all the way to the coast.

the tram was just great, it passed me a few times, up and down the hill, trundling along... i took a ride on it, and shot some footage on the camera... the driver looked a lot like my mate howie though, and part of his "act" was to call everybody Sir, when you got on and off the tram... not something you see a lot on WMT these days, but that's probably the point they are making.

a hot day to be working the heavy controls of this old bus, up and down the hills, but i suspect it's something he probably dreamt of doing once.

the whole place has a very dreamlike quality to it, days gone past when you could walk around without peole looking at you like you were up to more than just merely walking around... the country we live in now has a very paranoid edge to it these days, thankfully missing here in the prefectly created lanes.

at one point i was shooting some derelict trams, and was aware that somebody was sneaking up on me - only an engineer wanting to warn me about the oncoming tram itself... but as soon as he clocked the bakelite camera i was using, his attitude was very friendly, sometimes being a bit retro doesn't need explaining.

the country fairground... hilarious, staffed by teenage curmudgeons in period costume, who looked like they'd rather be out crashing cars and getting lovebites outside a chip-shop, than stood by a garish set of clanking fun-machines, with swing music blasting-out across these hallowed green fields.

great stuff... i wonder what they were being punished for?

this i suppose is justification for the notion that "nostalgia robs the young of hope for a better future"...

the image of the slide and vacant swings puts across quite well - that there was once an air of fun and innocence, that we have swapped for edginess and cool(i prefer the latter however), to our playtime.

i wonder if anyone there saw "passport to pimilico" or "the titchfield thunderbolt", or indeed any film similar to them, based around 1937 and thought - great idea for a theme park!

still... enough hankering after "simpler times"... life was rough then, no central heating, no internet to spread ideas throughout the world, no talking to people from everywhere on the globe - and breaking down barriers of culture and distance.

someone did actually come up and ask me what i was doing with an old camera... and why would i use one... it's not hard to explain why, digital cameras are too perfect and they are primarily concerned with getting the image "right"... i don't want that, i can see perfection with my own eyes... i'm not going to knock the realist movement, it's just not for me, i love the grungey dirty lenses and blurring of old cameras, it just makes the image more like something you would imagine... but it is unsettling to take a photo that looks like the one opposite - as it should belong to a different age, but was taken with an up-to-date camera, but how un-emotive would it be... i think that's the crux of the matter, a vintage looking image like this is "emotive", not only does it contain an image that we can see with our eyes, it contains a lot of subconcious memories of looking at old photos from the past and connecting with those people who took them.

this is the landscape of stanley spencer and his vorticist movement, that very british take on suprematism and abstraction.

where he saw a certain "dynamic" in the industrial imagery... i think perhaps he was tapping into the power of the steam engines and petrol driven equipment of that era...  

it's a buzz... head off to tyseley to take photos in a railyard, with the birmingham flickr meetup group.

the meetup is my chance to take photos with other people around, to compare and contrast how they achieve their images, see how others do it and to see how other photographers interpret a location.

i usually work alone, so it's good to interact a little(even though i do tend to focus on the project a little too much.).

working alone is ok - i can get into situations/places on my own without having to account for having other people hanging around waiting or getting in the way...but it's good to just see other flickrites at work - and to get my ass kicked visually by a better photographer(of which there are quite a few in the group).

situation one is that i can't even find the place - i have to get to the south of birmingham by train, from moor street - which i have used maybe once in 14 years of living here. doesn't help that it's been renovated and they've connected the old station with the new station at ground level and not bothered to signpost any of it, so i'm wandering about wondering if i'm going to miss my train and the 2 pm arrival time... i spy another flickr bod on the way to the meetup on the opposite platform, but hop on the wrong(umarked) train... and end-up going straight past tyseley to solihull station... a nice diversion, i may do it again - but today i need to be somewhere else... and i just know i'm going to get busted for being on the wrong train with the wrong ticket.

so back into town again...

 

several more unmarked trains pass through the station, and finally i'm there on the platform of tyseley. i used to work round here(can't remember the job...) so i'm glad that the station i saw then hasn't been modernised, but is even better looking than it used to be.

 

now to find the museum.. which is unmarked from the main road(i see a theme here...), i walk up the hill, and down the hill... i can see the trains - i just can't get at them(to loosely paraphrase the jazz butcher). there's one entrance that takes me past a dodgy social-club, with smokers standing outside, so i brave that and eventually find a signpost directing me across a huge empty car-park, down a narrow twisting "saturday night sunday morning" style pathway(no disabled access here!).. to the unassuming entrance.

i pay the measely entrance fee and i'm in.

what a place... someone there remarked about it being an elephant's graveyard, and that's not far wrong... line after line of rusting old trains all centred round the amazing turntable(see picture - left), where they can bring a train into the yard and "park it up"... i'd like to see that!

i get straight to work, there's a few faces i recognise, some that i don't... all heads down as i'm late and the shoot has started, so i say my hello's through the afternoon.

it's a very dreamlike and still around these old machines, there's diesel locomotives and steam trains with wagon wheels...i know nothing about trains so most of the finer points(no pun intended) go over my head... but the atmosphere is very "end-of-days", a lack of movement for something designed to push and pull... to MOVE, doesn't feel right.

i'm starting to find my feet with the location though, taking a few random shoots of rust and cogs, just walking around getting a feel for the situation - and i get out the brownie camera.. and it all falls into place.

the brownie is of course very old, and in the UK dates from 1940-52(although in the US was carried on until 1960), and

 it just feels right for the sites i'm seeing... if i was in a moderm setting it would feel out of place with too many clean straight lines... but here it all falls into place with the vintage air of the place.

lots of dirt on the lense, and plenty of distortion on the edges, it's like looking into the past as it's happening(a bit of an odd feeling, i have to admit).

gotta love lense grime though!

somewhere in the background, one of the railway enthusiasts is working away on a train, listening to cheesy dance music... which sounds a lot like a steam train chuffing away... ironic as that's where blues music first got it's rhythms from... the music of the travelling musican, they utilised the sound of trains rolling as a precursor to music-concrete, i suppose... so there you have it from rolling stock to stockhausen.

digress, digress...

i wander about some more, my head lost in the images, wandering about glad i chose to wear my steel-toed dr martin dealer boots, i climb up a few ricketty ladders, stick my nose into the shadows of paint-sheds, get down on my knees to shoot some grass that's growing up around railway tracks... one of my favourite blue-note album covers (midnight special/jimmy smith) features the musician standing on a rolling stock foot post, staring into the equidistance... he can see something we can't see and he's heading somewhere else.

there's still plenty to do and see here though, some else wanders into a new area, and people following through in a quiet meandering fashion, trying to keep out of each other's shot... the dichotomy of shooting within a group is that you will often spend the day trying to avoid each other, but it's good to bump into people as the day progresses. i squeeze through a few gates here and there... such is the grip that British Rail has on the national psyche, everyone is on tender-hooks like we don't really belong here.

i'm sure there is a creative tension within the group, same as any other gathering of artistic individuals... different ways of doing basically the same thing will result in some form of conflict. i use a very neat digital camera, which i then stick into the "contraption", a bug lense inside a cardboard tube, mounted onto the brownie... yeah it looks crap, cardboard and parcel-tape... it doesn't matter what it looks like, it does the job... there's the conflict between having something very modern and concise and coupling it with equipment that has been made obsolete.

i get to do the "every small boy's dream" scenario, and stand on the footplate of a steam train(albeit one that has long since run-out of puff), forgetting that i left my "valspar railyard coatings" baseball cap hanging up at home...

would that have helped me bond with the restorers and gained entry into some inner sanctum, possibly not.

but i admire their art none the less.

pretty soon, it was all over much too soon... i'm kind-of drained by it all, one eye is tired as i've been using the viewfinder all afternoon(owing to the sunlight), and i'm coming-down from the adrenaline rush of being creative for the first time in a few weeks.

a decline the offer of meeting in the pub(i know this area, and i'm not that keen on the local hosteleries)... plus there's more to be done at home with these images, which i'll be working on till about nine in the evening.

 

william burroughs once correctly stated that if you don't enjoy sitting in a room on your own, with just a typewriter for company, then writing is not the profession for you - same goes for any creative medium, sometimes even photography.

great location for a shoot though, i had a real blast.

 

 

 

 

you've finally found my blog... well done, more to come, soon as.

what's happened recently then.... yesterday was my 42 annual celebration of having been issued forth from the ether.

i celebrated by going to see spiderman3, just as i did when i was 12 or 13... and i went to see the then current spiderman film that kicked-off the tv-series... by rights i should have complained that spiderman3 is actually spiderman5... as there was the original film, plus probably another follow-up.

but that would be pedantic.

sunday was spent in a muddy field, taking photos of classic cars in west bromwich... the things we do for art, but that's just how i live - i'd much rather be stuck in a mudbath taking photos of old cars anyday!