One of the locations I noted for my Edgelands series last year came too late for my degree project work. We had taken a walk along the river at Orford and cut through a field of Oil Seed Rape in full bloom. At one time of day I would have reacted quite badly to the searing burning sensation of the pollen but as I get older, my body is reacting in different ways to the environments I frequent. Whereas Oil Seed Rrape pollen does not seem to affect me the way it did, sodding midges and mosquitoes are still the bane of my life. For this reason but not that alone, I tend to make most of my landscape observation work in the winter months.
That said, last week at Melton there was a cloud of midges swarming all around my kit as I was bagging it up at the end of the shoot. The type of midge cloud that my old man kept away from him as he cast his wet or dry fly in a trout stream by the use of Player’s untipped. I loathe the smell of tobacco smoke and how it clings to my hair(what’s left of it) and my clothes but I loathe midge bites even more so.
I digress.
The site at Orford as with most locations can be seen on Google Earth but it bears no relation to the site as it currently stands. It is the type of site that can only occur in a rural-urban to rural hinterland. There is a micro climate in this part of Suffolk that ensures several crops per year from the same fields. The farms are in a constant state of flux yet it only takes one recalcitrant inhabitant to foster a dumping ground for the detritus of a Suffolk odd-job to create such an Aladdin’s cave for photography. This is literally a country folk’s shed but it has burst its seams and spread like a miasma over the surrounding plot.
A fellow student who is now struggling with his dissertation writing and bemoaning the fact hat he is indoors and not out making his degree project work is making images with redundant caravans and the like. This van was not the object of my draw to this location but more a sense of the layered litter that defines, almost in archaeological terms what this inhabitant has dabbled in over the years. I’m sure he would want to shoot this.
Who knows where this van has been towed and trials and tribulations occurred in bank Holiday traffic jams to get a post war, and it would be that era, family to a weekend or short break away from the humdrum of everyday life. Now it lies forlorn and broken. What of the owner?
