As I haven’t fed this blog for about half a year, here’s a mishmash post of recent words and images from the first two months of 2024, half cobbled and extrapolated from my latest Instagram posts.
Photographs and memory have an inextricably connected relationship, as discussed on these pages before. Photos can serve to cement memory, but they can also mislead it. Are you remembering the childhood memory, or are you remembering the image of that day, which you have seen countless times since? It’s not always easy to know. The marriage of memory and image will be with us forever, an artistic source of many ideas in books, stories, movies, poems, and songs.
But there are extra dimensions to the marriage when we consider multiple exposures, violent messy clashes, how images can be put upon images upon images. How they can jar and skew and blur and glitch. How they are almost always imperfect. They don’t quite work unless calculated with a well practised precision that some do brilliantly. And yet there can still be a truth in their chaos, a thread of something coherent and trackable. Is this not mirrored by how the brain stores memories? Although it may order and position them better, at least initially.
I toyed with some multiple exposures on a train ride back from a February half-term daytrip to Swansea. While getting poked with a stick by my child, I snapped at the passing landscapes between Swansea and Cardiff, sometimes literally at random. Almost all of the images looked a terrible mess, but there was an element of something retainable about a tiny minority.
It made me wonder about what happens to the brain as it ages, the parallels between how we might experience the increased breakneck pace of time rushing past, just as we experience the ever-changing views from a train window. The overlapping of multiple exposure images like the overlapping of memory upon memory upon memory as the brain ages, degrades, and dies. System failure, white-out. There was lovely light that day.
On the trip out there, I enjoyed playing with an overhead reflection, capturing this frame of a fellow passenger a few seats away. It could have given the impression that I was crawling along an overhead luggage wrack, if such a thing existed. But I wasn’t. That would have been silly.
Thousands of farmers converged on Cardiff Bay on February 28th, 2024, rallying against the Welsh Government’s environmental subsidy plans. Attendees included the television presented and former rugby referee Nigel Owens. Similar recent demonstrations have taken place in France, Belgium, and Germany.
As many days lately, the weather was grey and sad and rainy. It wasn’t a day or an event that popped with colour, hence a decision to edit these in black and white. It also struck me that the issue at question is perhaps not so black and white. I am not at all on top of the complexities of environmental subsidy when it comes to agriculture. But my sense is that it is far from simple, or easy to pithily reduce within a placard slogan.
I hadn’t photographed a protest for around a year, and saw news online of this around an hour before it began. My currently regular, desk-based AI work has been fairly dull of late. The protest was an excuse to get out of the house and do something different for a short time. I was only there, milling around for about half an hour. I entirely missed the best photo opportunity of parading tractors that clogged up an artery of the city, against the warnings of police. And I left before the formal speaking began on the steps of the Senedd.
