Amazingly Ordinary

Martin Newth's latest show at Focal Point Gallery in Southsea is another example of how the photographer can reveal something to us that is always there, but never really seen. In what the artist describes as a very ordinary bedroom, he sets his camera up facing the windows with the curtains closed. Opening the camera's shutter at a time when most people are closing their eyes, Martin records the curtains in fine detail over the course of a night, opening them in the morning, allowing the film to record the outside view for just a minute. This gives the final result of the outside being transposed onto the interior of the curtains. With the same dream like quality of a polaroid transfer, it is unclear what really occupies what time and which space. As with most curtains we see the ouside daylight cutting through the center with a blinding white streak interupting any romtantic notion and reminding us of the bland and very British room we are in. There is a painterly feel to these photographs that comes from the shutter being opened for an extended amount of time, slowly capturing everything in beautiful detail. Also the window itself makes the connection to numerous painters who used the light to fall on their subject and even Fox Talbot used a window in the first fixed negative. These photographs make something beautiful and mystical out of something that is very oridinary and plain.


My favorite from the show.

Digital vs Analogue

I have arrived in what most people would see as smelly and disgusting trashville, but what I consider heaven. On the outskirts of every great metropolis is all the evidence that civilisation exists close by. Everything that we have unwrapped, used up and discarded...rubbish. I am discovering with each little journt and short walk that I am within the eye of a gabbage mecca. I took a 40 minute train ride down the coast yesterday, to spend the entire jouney noting every station with an accompanying sketch of what eye sore of seagull feeding ground lay close by and a mental calculation of how I could reach it.



So with all this stimulation, why am I not crazy with the shutter release? It has come to my attention that even though I am perfectly content to take off hand, even candid snapshots and other peoples memories with a digital camera, my personal work I cannot.

The instant preview digital technology has brought to photography has it's benefits, but also it's downside. Yes, you can preview a shot with a polaroid back or for those with deeper more lavish pockets Live Capture. But I can guarntee that shot took more time, consideration and forethought to bring you to that moment then (almost) any digital equivalent.

Possibly I'm just an old romantic. But I know that when I have a camera loaded with film, not MB's, that I approach the subject with a different mindset. The moment is there waiting for me to find it. I look, search, compose, focus, adjust and refocus and with patience and possibly a little luck (we are talking about capturing light) the moment reveals itself...or do I?