Steven Nestor – Camera Obscura

White Crane Spread Wings, by Gráinne Quinlan

Steven Nestor — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 09:40:27 +0000

Photos by Gráinne Quinlan, text by Steven Nestor.

In many ways the roots of Gráinne Quinlan’s White Crane Spread Wings are to be found in her earlier very successful Irish work, Strawboys. In that body of work her subjects were captured and conserved as though Gráinne Quinlan were recording the very last traces of a near extinct group of people for a museum of ethnography. Of course it would be a mistake to conclude that the Strawboys were on the edge of 21st century extinction, but the precise, methodical and still visual treatment is reminiscent of the works of photographers like Milton M. Miller or Imogen Cunningham, which came to be records of disappeared worlds.

As an extension and evolution of the latter work, in White Crane Spread Wings Tai Chi enthusiasts were chosen for observation, engagement and recording. Most striking in Gráinne Quinlan’s work is that while she is out of the controlled lab-like environment of the studio, the theatricality more closely associated with the indoor space is still very present. While there are few if any “props”, there is a continual sense of the alluring invisible presence of something essential via the stance of the Tai Chi practitioners. I see echoes of Howard Schatz’s work in Caught in the Act (2013). However, unlike the access to famous actors in Schatz’s work, the people of White Crane Spread Wings are anonymous, everyday elderly citizens of Hong Kong. Nor can we consider this work as an attention catching promotional performance. There are no famous faces here to distract and act as crutch to weak or confusing images. Thus, for me words like ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ might be more readily applied to Gráinne Quinlan’s work. I don’t see a reason for the tag of ‘western photographer’ in this work. While the tradition of the Strawboys may be in decline, the enthusiasts of Tai Chi are in the final walk of life, with an art that currently remains strong. Whether the current globalized youth would wish to practice or be associated with the ancient art is another question.

With their shades, visors and grimaces, the subjects are also given individual identities and character rather than being blended into some amorphous “oriental” mass or condescending reverence. Where so often so much of the formal photographic world leans towards profundity and earnestness, a strength in Gráinne Quinlan’s work is her hint at the surreal and humorous. A man seems to have trapped his head in a railing, another appears to have come up against an invisible wall, and a visor-wearing lady looks to be mixing Daft Punk with Beastie Boys. But none of the people look ridiculous or odd in their ritual performance of Tai Chi. Their clothing, hair styles and urban surroundings are, to an extent, imprecise. That is to say, we know that they are in in Hong Kong, but in some frames they might also be in New York or Sydney. There is something of a diaspora to these people. Is it something unique to the citizen’s of Hong Kong or a misreading?

They command their space and, to an extent, the viewer. Indeed, in such a densely populated city as Hong Kong the individual has been drawn out from the masses. These are uncompromised subjects, without the passivism so often found in those studied and photographed, especially by photographers from afar. In Gotthard Schuh’s Insel der Götter (1956) we are invited to marvel — and lust — for the orient ( Java, Sumatra, Bali). It is a brilliant, though classic and oft repeated approach to the ‘other’. Predictably “primitive”, the subjects seem distant, out of reach, unaware of the camera: a puzzling curiosity. I would argue that this – often unavoidable – approach and view is still quite prevalent today no matter how much the photographer or editor attempt to bridge the obvious gap. However, as an outsider (and westerner) Gráinne Quinlan, who has previously allowed herself to be distracted by the “otherness” of HK, has managed to narrow the divide both between herself and the subjects and between the potentially exotic viewer and subject. Perhaps aiding her is the increasingly universal practice of Tai Chi, though that is by no means a free pass to successfully engage with strangers.

Gráinne Quinlan deliberately sought to avoid the group activity nature of Tai Chi and instead concentrate on the individual. As she stated in our correspondence, “group shots tended to lack the visual bite of individual shots”. In fact the group shots she did take have more of an air of cityscape than the practice of Tai Chi. However, changing tack was not a simple decision in terms of execution and her approach to individuals was met with a mixture or flat out rejection and reserved acceptance. The key to making such a convincing work lay in the time spent with her subjects. One can always get lucky once, but the deliberate and consistent nature of Gráinne Quinlan’s work reflects the dedication to her subject and subjects through repeated visits and contact. Describing the practical side of her work to me reminded me of an interview I had heard with Mary Ellen Mark where she talked about how by continually walking the street she managed to become an attractive curiosity herself and was so gradually able to gain acceptance and so create intimate images of the prostitutes of Falkland Road (1981).

As any serious practitioner of photography knows, getting access to strangers, even for the most innocuous subject, can be exceedingly diﬃcult both in terms of overcoming one’s own shyness and getting your potential subject to trust you. “Who are you?” and “what do you want?” are probably the first defensive, self-preserving and reflexive questions asked by those approached in the public space. The public is also far more aware now of the power of photography and potential exploitation and cynicism of the photographer. Clearly Gráinne Quinlan’s dedication and honesty has paid oﬀ. The seemingly eﬀortlessness of the images belies the great eﬀort that was needed to successfully execute this work. What we as consumers of her work are left with is a series of photographer-free portraits of interesting people who don’t stare out at us blankly and enigmatically. That would have been cheap and formulaic. Looking at these images and reflecting on the individuals can lead you to quietly conclude that you just might expect to informally meet these people some day and say “I saw you …”

For more photos and stories, please visit Gráinne Quinlan and Steven Nestor websites.

Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor

Steven Nestor — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 07:24:56 +0000

Text and photos by Steven Nestor.

In the summer of 1996 I was lying in a Parisian park listening to an article being read aloud on the events surrounding the disaster that had befallen climbers on Everest the previous May. Although I’d never been overly fascinated with mountains or mountain life, the story left quite an impression on me. Despite the most modern of communications, equipment and planning, nature had intervened at a time of her choosing to take eight climbers. Further increasing my new found interest in mountains, and in particular the cold, I later read Jon Krakauer’s (controversial) Into Thin Air. There followed readings of other stories like Touching the Void or the epic tale of Toni Kurz’s last climb. In my mind’s eye I began to better envisage our insignificance and fragility when pitted against a collusion of mountains and nature aiming to eradicate our daring incursions.

I’m not sure whether it’s because of these extreme stories, but whenever I was skiing I preferred overcast or snowy days that hinted at something greater beyond the order of colour-coded slopes under a serene blue sky. Despite a hyper rationalized world, there must still be some residual memory of eons ago when life was dictated to by unkind winters, dragons and God. Although today you can get back into your house or car, the elements pushing against you are the same that wore Ötzi down once-upon-a-time ago. And the snow in the picturesque skiing village that you brush against on a sub-zero night when your breath is turned to crystals is the same that numbs the life out of the lost climber. It’s the same that stopped Napoleon and Hitler.

* * *

Lying on the valley floor at 1,800m the small French alpine town of Bonneval-sur-Arc is effectively the end of the road as the next hamlet is cut off and abandoned over the winter months. In late December of 2011 I was back for a week’s stay. For much of the time we were there heavy snowfalls and wind dominated, closing slopes and leaving us unsure as to whether we would be able to leave the valley on time. The locals said it was some of the worst weather they had experienced in 20 years. In Europe’s east dozens succumbed as a deep arctic chill expanded westward.

In a time with claims that the earth is warming at such a pace that entire mountain ranges will be snow free within our lifetime, I for one found being enveloped in a snowstorm to be comforting. Somehow all seemed well again in this incomprehensible and perpetually lost world. The winter before, Ireland and Britain had been gripped by uncharacteristically cold weather and, care of the “end is nigh” media, I had heard for the first time talk about the Maunder Minimum of prolonged freezing winters in Europe. Most notable was the so-called Great Frost of 1683–84 when the river Thames froze for weeks with ice recorded as being nearly 30cm thick. Now with the unexpected presence of an unusually and unexpectedly cold winter some experts were speculating as to the possibilities of its return.

In the midst of a harsh alpine winter, I had time to reflect on representations of winter in art and in particular, two painters. There was the acute memory of Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, so much easier to recall in the white cold than googling it online or standing before it in a climate-controlled museum. I was beginning to understand this painting as a “report” or message beyond a superficial admiration of the painter’s technique: this is winter, this is what it does to our world.

The other painter to occupy my thoughts was the far lesser known – though equally impressive – Tino Aime with his depictions of northern Piedmont in deep overcast winters in a waning light and void of colour, except for the odd bright berry. While he has painted in modern times his work perfectly illustrates that still emptiness of the outwardly lifeless mountain village in the dead of winter. Nowadays, however, many of those villages have been abandoned and, steadily roofless, blend into the mountains’ rocks, forests and snow. Life had been too tough. Others are only for the fair weather visitors or have been transformed for the skiing season.

Returning to Bonneval-sur-Arc for a second time meant being surer of what photographic treatment and approach the valley could be given. I didn’t want to try to work on or extract what little colour was in evidence or focus on the postcard village. Rather, I wanted to shoot on black and white transparency to best record the subtleties of tone in what is largely a monochromatic landscape mostly devoid of human presence. I was determined to immerse myself for as extended a time as was possible in this alien landscape, from the morning to after sundown when few, if anyone, was still out beyond the village, and surely no one else with a camera.

Even though modern transportation and infrastructure desensitizes the traveller, time spend in the Alps in winter cannot fail to impress. Beyond the roads, paths and slopes lies an inhospitable and impassable beauty evident to even the most uninterested traveller. Snow changes everything. Walking is laboured and subtler features obscured. Sounds are muffled and the flat light wipes away all texture, compressing surfaces to the flatness of a clean page. I pass the Risques d’avalanches sign on a snowshoe track no wider than my shoulders. Leave it and you’re knee or thigh deep in snow. There may be no more dragons or desire for a god in many, but I strangely feel that I somehow shouldn’t be there recreationally. It’s unnatural and what is understood as beauty by me and the multitudes of other urbanites has been termed ‘White Death’ by others. Hannibal’s sure dreams of taking Rome vanished along with 18,000 of his men in these mountains. I should never have been able to reach this valley with such ease. At most I ought to be cloistered in one of Aime’s dormant villages longing for the spring and the opening of meadows and passes. I’m riding some freak spike in world history that allows people go wherever they choose. I’m on the top of Babel. And I have equally become aware of nature’s ambivalence towards the sole walker. ‘And Petit-Jean said to me — “You see that [snow]? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”’

Of course I cannot claim that I took these photographs solely because of painters and talk of cold cycles. But, in this altered environment I felt I could come closer to the vision transmitted by these artists and the possibility of a new Great Frost. It was in this frame of mind that I sought to engage with the same essential physical elements presented to and by the likes of Bruegel and Aime, and to capture the malign muteness and vastness of a pronounced winter in the mountains in an epoch of severance from that which thwarted our ancestors.

* * *

When walking alone in the snow towards the valley’s end it becomes clearer how the immediacy of all things Internet and a fully mapped world can lead us in our predominantly urban lives to forget what our scale once meant and the utter indifference of nature. Once upon a time the snows isolated communities for months on end. Ötzi was held for three millennia before being given up, but now it’s only a three hour drive from Turin, or 45mm away on a 1:1 200 000 map. And I can’t pretend that I’m blind to the diverting beauty of this place, or that I don’t enjoy it on the same level as those I’m with.

Then I remembered the booms during the snowstorm at night. High up the mountains they were detonating bombs to curb the risk of avalanche. So even at the most inaccessible heights we can exercise control remotely. I’m forced to reconsider my work and my dwelling on the old significance of winter in the mountains. It’s January 1st 2012 and I’ve photographed the descente aux flambeaux. They’re serving free hot chocolate and vin brulé. Editing my work I reassess the merits of an earlier colour image from the valley: the framing reminiscent of Aime’s landscapes. It’s pretty. I like it. And although I had been very pleased with the black and white approach, now I’m not so sure there’s much truth in my images beyond a pure analogue recording. They’re half the story, if. They’re what I wanted and got – few surprises – but I am increasingly aware that my careful, deliberate framing has conjured up a false reading of this place. Despite Godard’s seemingly infallible declaration in Le Petit Soldat that “la photographie c’est la vérité. Et le cinéma c’est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde” – photography is the truth and cinema, 24 times the truth per second – as a practitioner it’s so obviously not. In my view finding in Bonneval-sur-Arc I conjured up a deceit. The snow and mountains are still the same that took the lost wanderer, but that’s all but irrelevant today.

And now it’s late December 2012 and I’m in Gressoney-La-Trinité: one day’s skiing in the falling snow. I can’t see a thing because my visor and glasses keep fogging. I don’t like skiing anymore, and the mountains in winter a little less. The next day the slopes are mercifully closed due to high winds.

Snow tyres and chains. In 30 minutes or so we’ll be clear of all the pretty suggestive snow and onto the dry drab plane below. Home in an hour and a half.

We always complain about the motorway tolls.

It is the end of winter.

For more stories and photos, please visit Steven Nestor website.

First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor

Steven Nestor — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:52:52 +0000

Detail from Photogram, 2012 c/o Eastman Kodak & Dwayne's Photo.
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Text and photos by Steven Nestor.

We are now universally used to and expectant of the perfect, pristine world that digital affords. For most consumers it is the only tool for photographing. If even considered, film is largely seen as being cumbersome, limiting and firmly consigned to the past. It was what most people’s early life was recorded on and certainly not part of today’s world of PS, delete or upload. When I asked 16-year-old summer students of mine if they had ever shot film, their faces frowned in puzzlement.

Shot in Trins, Austria, 1993 on Pentax K1000.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

“You mean that thing like a little tube you used to put in the camera?”

“Yes.”

“No.” A firm answer, but still confused by the oddity of the question. It was as though I had asked them if they still drew their water from a well.

Shot in Regensburg (Koeigswiesen) in May of 1994.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Digital is the now, without beginning or end. There is no ‘first’ or ‘last’ image. The file numbers can go unnoticed behind concerns about pixels and megabytes. Moreover, the numbers 0, 12, 24 or 36 are utterly meaningless to most who now photograph.

When starting out in photography I avoided winding the film on to the camera dial’s first setting of frame ‘1’ so as to maximize the number of images I could take on this “little tube”. It was satisfying to squeeze as many as 39 frames out of a single roll of 36 exposures. A small victory for the dilettante. The minor risk of course was that the first frame might not “come out”. At the time, however, I don’t recall checking my negatives to see why. With an envelope of prints in the hand, that first image was either there or not. Sometimes though an overlooked sliver of an image had made it onto the negatives. Even if I did notice something was there, my eye would have skipped over it to the first complete frame.

Unknown Sky, 1994.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

In the early years of my photography good labs were hard to come by and the results very mixed. Scratches and fingerprints on negatives were more often than not the norm. Similarly, green, red or cyanic prints were easily explained away with the magical words, “It must be the film”. What did they care?

But what happened to those first frames? Sometimes in cocking the shutter I must have wound the film just enough and missed losing the frame. On other occasions the lab may have decided to cut it off from the strip as it was “ruined” anyway. What customer would want a half burned print? The larger commercial labs would even sometimes put a small removable sticker with helpful hints onto prints showing signs of motion blur etc. Then I bought a new Nikon and ditched my old Pentax. No more manual winding. No more half frames. It automatically wound on to ‘1’ and ended at ‘36’. The shot that might not come out was eliminated. A sort of semi pace towards digital was being made in the late analogue age and the reward of getting more frames out of a roll was forgotten. I had moved up a ranking in the amateur world where equipment takes precedence over vision.

Shot in Teramo, Italy, 1999 at friend's wedding.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

It was not until a few years ago that I was trawling through old negatives looking for images from the early 1990’s that I noticed one particular image that I had never seen before. Half of the subject – a friend in Germany – is lost in unintended exposure of the film to daylight so that the frame would have been automatically discarded in the printing process. The result is a sort of double exposure where daylight has insulted on the negative and burned off half of the frame and subject, never to be retrieved. Unmediated by lens, aperture or speed, light has triumphed destructively and a kind of ‘pyrography’ has emerged.

As a result of this find I starting using a fully manual camera more prolifically again and so automatically reverted back to trying to maximize the number of frames I could get out from a single roll. The first frame, happily compromised again, could now in many ways be the most flawless of the roll. It is also the perfect expression of analogue, of photography, of light and of destruction. And I have continued on and off with this deliberate hit and miss procedure. Either the frame is perfectly compromised or skipped. About a year or so ago I decided to examine all of the “lost”, half burnt frames I had and to see what, if anything, they might collectively say despite the diversity of time and subject matter.

Shot in Fano, Itlay, 2006.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Putting together this body of work I wanted to go a step beyond my fascination with old found photographs with their nostalgic and portal qualities. When working with the archieved image there are the usual questions surrounding it’s provenance, production and the issue of to what degree one restores the image. Here, however, the damage occurred at inception when I unconsciously – later deliberately – created seemingly meaningless partial frames to be later discarded. What attracts me beyond the age and personal connection to these images is the pronounced and profound element of light, which is normally and deliberately shut out for all but the briefest of moments. Whether a glow on the edge of the frame or near total erasure, these scorched images – these brilliant half-worlds – represent a moment that has been taken, that has been recorded: a singed fragment snatched from the destruction of a pyretic light.

Producers of film have always pointed out just how stable the medium is and how pigments will last for well over a century. However, the message on the box reads, ‘load in subdued light’. There is that risk of accidental exposure, of ruining the film. Light – the very basis of photography – is dangerous to the recording material. If uncontrolled, it wipes the film clean in one scorching instant, thus also obliterating what might have been a perfect frame, memory aid etc.

San Marino, 2006.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

When initially squeezing in those extra frames I was not trying to make any sort of statement. It was when I examined that image of my friend in Germany that I saw a value and new reading of these first (and last) images. Many of these images, such as my first ever one from Austria in 1992, were only given life (or another dimension) through their partial destruction. Later, I could be deliberate with my film loading and imagine a possible reading, should the frame burn as I wanted it to. The first deliberately seared frame to work the way I hoped was that of the main railway station in Turin, taken on Kodachrome 64. I can read it – enjoy it – on a purely superficial level, or, given that it is the last year of Kodachrome, see it as a comment on the end of a specific era as well as reflecting on the fragility of the present.

Unknown Light.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

This semi-erasure also captures the essence of how memory selects and sorts. What did I remember of a day trip to San Marino in 2006? Shafts of light through a non-descript church window. A man with a placard protesting his innocence in front of the palace. This almost completely erased frame of the San Marino landscape perfectly illustrates to me that vague, faded memory of a view I had stopped to photograph, to snap. It is confirmation that memory, in unison with time, is forever falling from our grasp and from what our eyes are projecting inwards. Although by depressing the shutter release we may be pausing time continuum, by also including the moment of destruction these images challenge the delusion of the alleged power of photography to halt time, to preserve memory.

While seemingly bland, even completely pointless, the most recent ‘first frame’ was particularly pleasing to produce and offered far more than I had imagined when standing in front of the subject. Firstly, there was the intrigue of encountering the Safe Surrender Site in the small mountain community of Groveland, California. Here an unwanted baby may be surrendered within three days of being born without fear of prosecution. Obviously there is an official sign indicating the presence of a surrender site, but what did I actually see and remember? What might the mother recall of the site when abandoning her baby? The sign? Or maybe the neatly coiled umbilical like hose at the side of the fire station? This resulting half burned image testifies that I was at the site, framed and recorded it. However, I only remember that hose. That’s what struck in my mind. And that’s what was left in the recording process. That neatly coiled hose descends from a permanent erasure.

Shot on Kodachrome in Turin, Italy, 2009.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Going through my 30+ images I was reminded of another facet to this work. As many writers on photography have pointed out, the specter of death is something we experience when reviewing photographs and catching a glimpse of where we are going by seeing were we no longer are. Here, however, that flicker of the end has been at once augmented and usurped. Not only is there that eternally snatched moment from the past, but there is now a new dimension: the eternal moment of destruction of the film and partial erasure of that which has been framed. Although there certainly exists a link between the specter of death and photography, these first (and “last”) images also contain in equal measure both destruction and a curious chanced beauty. The coincidental burning of the frame and the moment tempers life’s moribund condition and animates that spared fragment.

Home. Shot in Dublin, Ireland, 2012.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Because, like us, film is physical, delicate and subject to aging (rather than corruption in digital), and because life has only one conclusion, I feel that these compromised moments are the more beautiful for it. The message cannot be said to be exclusively one of demise; rather it is the curiosity of the partially singed frame, the partial recall. The destructive and unregulated element of light animates this otherwise ‘flat death’, sending a spike into the two-dimensional plane. While the chance or deliberate ‘yellow and/or red edging’ can be read as a manifestation of a loss of memory and time, it is also death’s competitor through a beautiful distraction: thus, distraction via destruction. It is now (and for the lifetime of the eternal moment) a new first message, obscuring what is usually reserved for primacy of place.

Shot in Piemonte, Italy, 2011.
© Steven Nestor
Please visit First/Last Images, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

When digital first arrived I offhandedly rejected it. For me it was cheap and nasty and I became immediately despondent for the seemingly immanent demise of analogue. However, digital’s near complete dominance of the photographic world has conversely injected more life into analogue than analogue itself could ever have done alone. Analogue’s great “nemesis” has pushed the user closer to their preferred medium, prompting a fuller exploration of film as seen for example in the work of Miroslav Tichý or Tacita Dean. Those still choosing film over digital are free to embrace and exploit its physical limits and flaws, whereas in the past such compromised frames as these First/Last Images would more likely than not have been rejected out-of-hand or cropped to exclude the unwanted “damage”.

Please visit Steven Nestor website for more photos and stories.

The Accidental Photographer, by Steven Nestor

Steven Nestor — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 06:01:27 +0000

Text by Steven Nestor, photos by Michael and Steven Nestor.

Whether it is an issue of the significant passing of time, the exotic locations or the aesthetic, these 43 year old images taken by my father have become an alluring testament to one person’s considered view of a part of the world he was briefly journeying across. It is in today’s increasingly defused photographic world via the likes of Flickr, as well as the manufactured nostalgia of Hipstamatic etc, that images from a private individual shooting long before the digital age and the Internet become increasingly significant. These analogue images were shot for the self and the home and were free from manipulation. They were shot when the opportunity presented itself and the idea that they may one day be available for global viewing was simply beyond the realms of the imagination.

To begin with, it is necessary to be aware that my father was not a ‘photographer’ in the broader understanding of the word. In practical terms, the very publication of these images immediately elevates and redefines the man behind the camera as ‘photographer’; albeit for one short eight-month period of his life. As far as I am aware these are the only images of his in existence: there being nothing to hand from before or after this period under consideration.

Measuring 90 x 90mm, the original prints were kept in two different photo albums with hand written dates and commentary on the reverse side or a numbered key on a separate page. Separately, the negatives had been stored in an attic inside a box and still in their original lab sleeves. The aim of my work with this personal archive is to unify these images into a single body or testament and in so doing re-present them and so offer a re-reading and re-contextualization. Clearly this is not of the caliber of the found work of someone like Vivian Maier who was so diligently aware of the role of photography and the photographer. This small (re)presentation from circa 130 frames is far different in aim, ability, subject matter and aesthetic. The prime goal of this photographer was to record his itinerary laden tours across foreign lands open to only a few. Furthermore, the intended audience for the resulting images was immediate family and friends under a vocabulary of “look at that”, “it was”, “they said” etc.

In common to both albums is the guided nature of many of the photographs within the confines of the ‘tour’. First there is the photographer as a tourist in Soviet Europe, and then as a young Lieutenant in Northern Cyprus on a tour of duty with the United Nations where photographic documentation was guided by the dictates of military duties and planned excursions. Both tours involved crossing and observing frontiers formed as a result of recent turbulent history and where history had yet to decide on frontiers.

It is also important to know that the images presented here are now for the most part considerably larger than the originals and uncropped (the edges of the lab images being cropped under a white border). They are also “richer” than the original sloppy lab prints, even if restoration was kept to a minimum (a few B&W and colour analogue prints have been made). More importantly, this work – a sample of which is being shown here – is an editing of a larger body of images, although the titling and original order remain faithful.

Of note too in these images is the creeping presence of colour photography in the first tour. Based on the results there followed a clearly deliberate decision to abandon black and white photography entirely for the second tour. Why? Were the results in colour viewed as “better” in much the same way as the when the arrival of digital offered some sort of “advance”? I also noted that while the period in Cyprus is supported by documentation and letters, the order of the images in their album was not chronological, and months suffice for the precise dates of the European tour. Perhaps monochromatic photographs are more inviting of the written word.

The years in question and the locations are also interesting in what is present and what is absent. The Cold War was running hot in Vietnam, Israel had recently beaten her neighbours in the first of many confrontations and Northern Ireland was slipping into a prolonged civil conflict. Where, for example, in these images are the traces of the Prague Spring of 1968? Where is that acrid atmosphere so keenly captured by Koudelka? Only a year had passed. Who had been in that trophy Jordanian tank when it was knocked out? Only a couple of years had passed. But for the found negatives, this photographer would have remained as anonymous as that tank crew.

On a human level I am also interested in knowing who the few people in the frames are. Who are the women on the bridge in Prague? Were they locals or fellow travellers? I am curious too about that heavy arm present in the Brandenburg Gate frame and the woman accidentally crossing the frame in Minsk. And those men walking down the street in Beirut; what did the Lebanese Civil War do to them? Were they pitted against each other? Are they dead or alive? As a last curiosity, I would be interested to know how many images exist of this accidental photographer. Whose frames did he traverse, accidentally or not?

As a partial extension and conclusion of this work, in April of 2008 I went to Berlin with a contact sheet I made of the black and white negatives from that city 39 years prior. I was curious to know whether I would be able to find any of the streets photographed. The most obvious starting point was the Brandenburg gate. I positioned myself in the approximate place where the original shot had been taken, though as expected the site had been significantly altered since the fall of the Wall; no longer isolated ground between two utterly opposed ideological spheres. However, in “reshooting” the Gate I knew I was not being “faithful” to the original. Instead of a hot August day it was cold, raining, built-up, crowded and full of cars.

Nevertheless, when I got to Karl-Marx Allee the following day I was astonished at the way it was so instantly recognizable from the original frame. The pedestrian crossing was there, as was the streetlight. Even the flagstones and vitrines outside the cinema were unaltered. Crowd and rain free, I was standing in the same spot looking at a barely altered environment, and through a similar waist level medium format camera. I was confronting a “lost world” I had expected to be wholly inaccessible and absent. It’s difficult to express the profound sensation of that visual connection, standing on a non-descript flagstone, which had suddenly become a sort of node or ingress point. The only significant alteration was the maturing trees. Later, a line from Camera Lucida came to mind in considering this unexpected confrontation when Barthes wrote of the impression made on him in looking at a photograph of Napoleon’s younger brother Jerome: “I am looking at the eyes that looked at the emperor” (Barthes, 1981: 3).

Some twelve years after these images were taken, not far outside of Beirut, it was the photographer who was taken in one of Lebanon’s seemingly eternal maelstroms. And while the title, The Accidental Photographer, may seem like an exaggeration – even ironic – decisions about the use of colour and composition do in the end bring the man closer to the title of ‘photographer’, however brief the period.

Please visit Steven Nestor website for more photos and stories.

The Park, by Steven Nestor

Steven Nestor — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:45:50 +0000

Text and photos by Steven Nestor.

Larger than New York’s Central Park, though smaller than Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, at 1,697 acres Dublin’s Phoenix Park is one of the largest enclosed public parks in the world. For 350 years since being established by King Charles II in 1662 as a royal deer park the park has miraculously survived largely intact. All the more impressive given the Irish Republic’s occasionally cavalier attitude towards places of beauty and historical sites (especially from the days of the British Empire). Deserving or not, now a request has been made to declare the Phoenix Park a UNESCO world heritage site.

For most of my life, however, the park was only ever entered by car either because it was a space that needed to be crossed, or to visit the zoo near the main entrance. It was only in 2007 that I really began to go to the park and explore it. This late coming to the park was probably on account of my being part of that Irish generation whose mind-set was always looking abroad, having dismissed most of what was on offer at home (at times not without good reason). Five years on from my initial visits and the park’s scale and features still impress. Though it is expansive and “wild” in places, it can also be experienced and viewed simply as an open green space, a divided place, a place for leisurely pursuits and (for the city’s fringe) a place of exchange. For the wanderer it offers peace and escape in its immensity from a hectic city held off by its perimeter walls. While Dublin is largely visually obscured, from most parts of the park two imposing structures of religion and empire – the Papal Cross and Wellington’s monument – dominate. Although I have deliberately not properly or fully engaged with other structures in the park, these two could not be ignored, nor do they allow themselves to be ignored.

In 2008 I began to examine the Wellington Monument. At an impressive 62 meters in height the obelisk commemorates the Waterloo and Indian victories of the Irish-born 1st Duke of Wellington. It is the largest obelisk in Europe and would have been even higher had public funding not run out. With its surrounding open expanse it naturally semaphores to become a focal point for day-trippers, loners, soccer matches and picnics. For those interested in history and architecture it is a draw, but it seems to me that the majority come to it just because it is such a huge structure whose steps can be sat on and whose base can be climbed. As I was so used to seeing the obelisk, photographing it was quite a challenge and it required considerable concentration to defamiliarize myself with it and be re-impressed. This defamiliarization was then extended to the rest of the park, though that was somewhat easier in the earlier stages as I was largely only familiar with it as a place name.

When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979 he said mass in the Phoenix Park to a third of the country’s overwhelmingly Catholic population, including my very young self. For me its significance is remembering getting up before dawn with my father to get the train to Dublin and the scouts ushering the endless waves of the faithful arriving at the park. And I remember somebody fainting and the radios tuned in to get news of the Pope’s arrival. And I recall being shocked at the size of a giant excrement filled trench below the temporary toilets. Nonetheless, for a poor nation with broken roads and hand-me-down shoes the park and Ireland were on the world map and today a huge white cross stands dominating on a knoll marking the spot where the altar was. Today also, Ireland no longer has a Vatican ambassador and the Catholic Church seems to be inexorably and agonizingly imploding. Nonetheless, there is often a bouquet tied to the base of the cross, care of Dublin’s grateful Polish population.

Beyond these two imposing structures, about one third of the park is covered by trees, such as oak, beech and horse chestnut as well as a wide variety of wildlife habitats. As so little of Ireland is under forest (especially broad leaf) for me this variety, both gnarled in isolation and sheltered in copses, has a particular draw and fascination. Being surrounded by a city of over a million inhabitants there is something almost unexpected in their presence, along with the many roaming deer. There is also something unfamiliar in the character of the park’s trees: something you expect to find far beyond a city’s limits. In my exploration of the park I initially expected that I would shoot one place after another to come up with something representing a uniform topographical map. Instead and despite (or because of) the park’s scale I often returned to the same spots, re-photographing the same tree/s.

The Park has been about immersing myself into the vastness of its space and trying to make sense of the volume behind the statistics and history. Rather than use the very latest in digital photography I very deliberately decided to use a variety of analogue formats and films. For the most part square medium format was used to hold this work together, but I also used well out of date film, obsolete 126 film and a lens-less Vrede box camera. I felt that in concert their use helped me to better anchor my vision and work into this 350-year-old park. Using these antiquated photographic technologies brings me to the very edge of a crumbling inverse frontier, resulting in a truer representation of this enormous historical space. I also did not attempt to hide the shadow of my presence in some images so as to leave a small personal trace of my presence within this body of work. In addition to that I also chose on occasion to photograph out of focus to reflect my own myopia as well as for aesthetical interpretations.

My work is about recording this parkland and all that is encountered in the process. It is about fully entering the terrain and being completely absorbed by place and moment, even though the Phoenix Park itself is always going to be bigger than the Park.

For more information and photos please visit Steven Nestor website.