I am making work for the East Anglian Contemporary Group of the RPS. The project is on the Wet Dock and environs in Ipswich.
Over the last month or so I have been looking out for aspects of the dock that would make for a contemporary series of images and I discovered this old lady of the sea tucked up behind a shed amongst a bed of soft green moss and other plants plus growing a fine head of verdant varietals upon her decks. The very state of her tells me she has seen a thing or two and what those might be can be anyone’s guess. A bit of tender care and effort and this old lady will positively glow with pride but I rather like a lived in look.

The same goes for portraiture. I’d rather see honest and lived in faces that are not artificially enhanced by ‘beauty making software’. Of course photo enhancement has been around since almost after it was possible to create a negative and all sorts of skullduggery has been applied in the 150 years that we have had photography available to us. To lose sense of reality in portraiture is not my cup of tea. Give me an old person to photograph over some glamour model any day of the week. They have so much to tell by the very look of their faces and indeed their eyes.
Recently there has been a debate running on photo retouching or indeed plain old dark room techniques used to create some iconic silver prints. Nostalgia has crept in to the discussion and this image that I have made if viewed many years hence might be termed nostalgic but it is very much of the moment. A sparkly new gin palace would not look the same in this environment but just the other side of this shed there are many millions of pounds worth of such gin palaces and sailing yachts. For the most part not many will be able to age as gracefully as this old lady but there might be a DNA issue here. Craft such as this one were crafted by craftsmen with an eye and and an understanding of the sea keeping qualities required for vessels they built. Compare her to a new deep V hard chine motor cruiser and tell me which one would fair better without power in a heavy sea?
Crafting photographs is very much the same process. In an age where there has never been so many ‘photos’ made per day, how many can be said to have been crafted by an ardent amateur or professional? It is my belief that if more people making images on their cell phones actually took time to learn analogue processes then there would be a step improvement in the quality of their composed images and a massive reduction in images being made.