Writing in the Guardian Review this weekend, Richard Mabey uses a phrase that struck me as quite apt. Recollecting how he learnt to see the signs of his natural surroundings, Mabey talks about the “grammar of landscape.” Myself an amateur photographer, my girlfriend a geologist, both of us have been taught through our disciplines more closely to understand the underlying constructions of the environment. Taking Mabey's analogy further, we have learnt to see how hills rhyme in valleys and peaks, how changes in the quality of light punctuate the day, why limestone dashes in white scars across valleys, to know the snaking bends of a river as a past tense indicator of the period of its existence. It is revealing the “grammar of landscape” that is the art and practice of both photography and the environmental sciences. But if grammar is the construction, it is not the writing itself. What I particularly like about the phrase is that understanding does not exclude the aesthetics of landscape, which are intuitively felt in the air on your face, in the unlimited frames of the eye, in the sounds of water and wildlife. Like literary criticism at its best, the skill of being a close reader is to show how that art takes the unique forms it does, without losing the quality of its spontaneous and uncritical experience.

Labels: Photography and Art

I usually go into any workshop labelled “Networking” or “Transferable Skills” or similar with a great deal of cynicism. In numerous negative experiences, I have found such events often involve a person nominated (against his or her wishes) as a “Professional Development Co-Ordinator” standing in front of some powerpoint presentation and reading, parrot fashion, slides developed by a consultant with little connection to academia. And so when I was told that I had to attend a UK Local Grad School whose title was “Communication Skills + More” I was a little resentful, particularly as it was a residential school taking a chunky four days out of my research.

From the start, it didn't look good. The course was structured so that we stayed in specific teams throughout the week, each team being led by a tutor. Looking at the biographical profiles of these was like browsing a graduate careers fair: senior managers of Barclay's Bank, IT professionals at Proctor & Gamble, the Wildlife Officer representing the voluntary sector. The whiff of a recruitment drive was heavy in the air. I was one of those who graduated determined to avoid being whipped into what we labelled (not unaptly) "corporate whoreage." One reason for this is that the language that circulates in the business arena terrifies me with its moral meanings carefully occluded by technical terms: goal-centric development (i.e. putting profit over ethics), streamlining (i.e. job cuts), networking (i.e. never socialising without a martini in one hand and a C.V. in the other).

The Grad School initiative came about because of the Joint Skills Statement made by the UK funding councils, which noted that PhDs and their associated project management experiences are not promoted enough to industry and commerce. So it is that a business approach has crept its way even into the ivory towers of the universities. Happily on my way to becoming a dishevelled arts professor, however, all too often I sit in the sessions supposed to develop my "transferable skills" with the streams of jargon and new initiatives brushing past my ears, hot from the board rooms of corporate America. It was refreshing, then, that for the first time at the Grad School, the people delivering such concepts admitted that the ideas theorised here had no direct applicability to myself or to my studies; it was only through self-reflexively thinking about how they might point towards better ways of working that they might have an impact.

For example, introducing the Belbin test (which evaluates what role you most often play in a team), the presenter first showed a slide of four multicoloured shapes, and asked us to choose intuitively which we preferred. Those who chose the lighting bolt were apparently dynamic and creative, the triangles career driven at all costs, the circles (myself included) were hedonists. But then it was revealed that all these were rubbish; though presented in the same way as many personality tests, there was no empirical basis for the results. The message was clear: personality tests might have some significance, but they are neither the whole answer, nor do they necessarily provide any more information than can be gained intuitively known by those with a sensitivity to personality, whether theirs or others. With this admission having been made, I was able to see beyond the terminology and respect the professionalism of the tutors involved. These were not people who had swallowed wholesale the heavily theorised ideals of "team building" etc. Rather, they had real-world experience of the applicability and, crucially, the flaws of management exercises. They inspired by example, and not by the book.

Not that I was aware for much of the time that I was engaged specifically in team working and managerial skills. This was because the "tasks" came with healthily sugared spoonfuls of enjoyment, since they took the form of role plays and realistic (though idiosyncratic) scenarios. So rather than being told how to rise up the academic career ladder, we were asked to act out an imaginary job appeals panel. From the grumpy and time-pressed head of department, to the research co-ordinator who didn't give a monkeys about the appellant's teaching credentials, this was a fairly recognisable situation. Academics are always being encouraged to commercialise and seek funding for their research, but rather than simply looking at slideshows, our teams were instructed to develop a business plan and give presentations as if delivering a sales pitch in the BBC program "Dragon's Den." We rounded off the course by putting our new teamworking skills to the test, as we acted out a scenario (based on a real event) in which a sewage leak was putting residents in danger. Playing the GMB union, we had to think and work on our feet, quickly liaising with the companies and residents and environment agencies played by the other teams (and bypassing the manipulative media as much as possible!) in order to ensure the safety and financial position of our workers at the sewage plant.

I went into the Grad School hoping that I would either have a great deal of fun, even if I learnt nothing, or that I would learn lots of new practical skills I could bring to my work, even if they were not presented in the most stimulating way. In the event, I got the best balance of both: four days of laughs and enjoyment with some fantastic people, some useful advice on careers in academia, and more holistic ideas about how I see myself and my own research. Take this as a recommendation that if you receive an email invitation to a Grad School in your inbox this time next year, hit the reply button right away.

Labels: Grad School, HEFCE, Postgraduate Diary

In my essay "Online Text Databases and the Literary Canon," I noted that "the popular proclamation that the texts found on the Internet (either within academic databases or in informal online publications) democratically represent, or are equally accessible to, the body of global authors and readers, is a fallacy. The "democracy" of the web and the "accessibility" of the Internet are rhetorical phrases commonly proclaimed by the media and political institutions to describe the globalisation of information; however, these claims, when used in a literal sense, are not endorsed statistically: fewer people worldwide can access the internet, with its online books, than have access to paper media through public libraries."

With a similar demythologising intent, though with greater import, the Irrepressible.Info campaign run by Amnesty International and The Observer is designed to highlight the fact that governments around the world, often in collusion with IT companies, are repressing online content, censoring information, seizing equipment and arresting people who use the internet to challenge official politics. As part of the campaign the group is offering web publishers in free countries the opportunity to undermine censorship by publishing previously censored material on their own sites. With a brilliant irony, through this system the more content is repressed, the more distributed it might become. I am smugly happy that from today, in the sidebar to the right of this blog, the information some one doesn't want people to read is now displayed to the 10 000 or so visitors who access this site each year.

Labels: Amnesty International, Irrepressible.info, Politics

The publicity for Samuel Taylor Wood, whose Still Lives exhibition runs at The Baltic until September 3rd, acclaims her "compelling psychological portraits in photography, film and video." But whose psychology is being examined?

For example, in the piece that I found most arresting, Wood filmed David Beckham sleeping. In his celebrity life outside of football, we are used to seeing him in the glossy pages of Hello magazine, child or wife in one hand, cellphone in the other, trapped in a moment of a busy - and apparently fairly ordinary - life. On the pitch, television cameras pursue his sweeps down the right wing, chase the glorious arc of his crossed ball, track in slow motion replays the agression of his tackles. By focusing on him asleep, however, Wood removes him as far as it is possible to be from both of these contexts.

Cleverly lit, like a Titian or a Michelangelo, swathes of light lie across his face like soft brush strokes, structures of shadow bringing out his angular jaw. He is heroic in his physical looks, a canonised statue in his peaceful sleeping. This is a static vision of the transcendent, an iconic aid to contemplation. Then, suddenly, he twitches and the hand on which his head lies shifts slightly. The image now revealed as playing video suddenly switches its focus, accusing the viewer as voyeur, a media obsessive pruriently spying on this most famous face in its intimate moment. Ironically, however, this is one interior video log to which no one can have access. Caught in this unusual transitional medium part way between print and screen, neither celebrity nor sportsman, his face transcribes with infuriating partiality the complex dreams going on behind the mask, beyond the reach of the lenses of the pap.

In contrast to this, there is no subtlety in Wang Du'sSpace-Time Tunnel, which is exhibited on the floor above Wood's work. An elaborate steel and chicken wire construction, the viewer (participant?) walks through its hunched and dimly lit shape, which is punctuated regularly by TV screens above and left and right. Playing live broadcasts from stations around the world, they assault with bursts of noise, in different languages, a diaspora of programmes: shopping channels, music TV, news. In an attempt to draw a single strand of coherence out of this clutter of competing narratives, people seem drawn to what is familiar: I found myself pausing before News 24, reading the ticker tape update on the Lebanon conflict; the German or Austrian couple ahead of me halted suddenly, and turned to watch a Deutsche TV sports show.

At the end of this disorientating tunnel, is a child's slide. Having been bewildered by the strange images, one is suddenly puzzled by this everyday one, and I halted at the top, uncertain as to what I was supposed to do. It seemed incongruous that this is how to leave this serious piece of modern art. But with no other way out, having glanced quickly over my shoulder, I skidded and scuttled awkwardly until a few metres before the end, at which point I stood and walked the rest of the way, unwilling to face the waiting Baltic "crew" member in a liberated, but awkward, position on my arse.

Labels: Baltic, Photography and Art, Samuel Taylor Wood, Wang Du

The bug started in the sales last Christmas. In the window of Jessops was a bright red poster advertising a Panasonic Lumix FZ20, for just £199. At first, I just walked past, dismissing Panasonic as one of those electronics giants simply piggy-backing on the digital photography revolution, not in the same league as Nikon or Canon. Or Leica? Curiosity getting the better of me, I did some research, and I discovered that this was actually an award-winning camera, with a lens produced by one of the finest manufacturers. Armed with this knowledge, I ran to Jessops, only to discover that they had sold out nationwide within 24 hours of the sale.

And so it began. I have always maintained that the majority of great images can be captured by almost any camera, in most circumstances. As I said in a previous post, it is the eye that sees over a prolonged period rather than the camera that snaps in a few milliseconds that is primarily responsible for a good shot. With that disclaimer, however, physical equipment is still an important factor, and I was I was beginning to feel limited by mine. Framing landscapes on my film compact was difficult, because of the parallax, whilst my little digital could not quite achieve the resolution needed for anything more than macro or portrait work. Having got a new tripod, night shots on my film produced reasonable results (as in my image of Gateshead), but they were clearly nowhere near professional quality with options to control shutter speed. There have been several occasions when I have wished for some way to control depth of field, as well as focus. I like to keep post-processing to a minimum, but without decent exposure controls on my camera, it was inevitable that the curves and levels tools were going to receive heavy use in GIMP.

So for the six months following Christmas, I scoured E-bay for bargains, and read the reviews on DP Review; I signed up for Jessops’ bargains bulletin, and kept an eye on the used equipment window of my local camera shop. One day a Canon EOS 300Da appeared in the latter, and although it had been sold by the next day when I had had time to read the reviews, I was convinced I needed to raise my sights past a Superzoom compact (the category into which the Lumix falls) and go all out for a DSLR, with its near-infinite potential for expansion.

Finally, I settled on a Nikon D50, and today, armed with three or four lower priced quotes, I marched into Jessops and demanded a good price. Although I managed to get only £15 off, the price for what was last year the top entry-level DSLR was a great deal. It may only be 6.1 megapixels, unlike this year’s comparable models, but these will still blow up to a couple of metres square at 200 d.p.i. should I need it (which I won’t). Resolution may sell cameras to the naive, but it is the body and lens which matter, and with its chunky feel and a feature set that matches that of its bigger brother the D70, this camera had the edge (and the price margin) over its closest rival, the Canon EOS 350D. I will post a more detailed review of the camera on this blog in a few weeks once I have fully explored its features, and I will keep track of how my skills and photography change (hopefully for the better) in the photos section.

Labels: Nikon D50, Photography and Art

Listening to a radio debate on the current Middle East crisis, one of the panellists for the Israeli position condemned what she called "the game of ratios." This is the use by pro-Palestinian (and now Lebanese) groups of the ratio of civilians killed by Israel in comparison to their own side. In both cases, Israel, with the world's fourth largest army, invariably wins by about 6:1 over terrorists.

In both figures, of course, the proportion of civilians as opposed to legitimate targets killed is probably relatively the same. And this is why this number's game presents too simple a case of the situation in the Middle East. If it were 6 civilians killed on the Palestinian side to 1 Israeli military target assaulted on the other, then the figures would immediately illegitimate Israel's response. But, of course, neither suicide bombers nor military planners who factor in collatoral damages stand on such morally elevated ground.

And yet, in spite of my efforts to read a respectable newspaper, to listen to the Today programme, I find it impossible to avoid looking at the numbers behind this reportage. The political context that underlies the mathematics is so turbulent and densely intertwined with thousands of years of historical contest that the ratios of death are the only thing that, to this naive observer, seem to make any form of comprehensible sense in a conflict of which the successes and aims of both sides are otherwise starkly unclear.

Labels: Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics