Crack the whip

I’ve walked up this pathway a thousand times, I’ve photographed the trees before: their mistletoe baubles, pollarded boughs, the shards of trunks struck by lightning – I’ve even shared them on these pages.  But every time I walk this way I swear I see something different.  Once it seemed to be a ghostly shape emerging from the mist.  Another time, a leaf was magically suspended in mid-air, twirling and spinning for ages without visible means of support until I realised it must be hanging from the finest thread of spider’s silk.  This is the place just to observe and when you do, you simply never know what you’ll find.

And that’s how, as I walked up there a couple of days ago, I came across the devil.

Although distant, he caught my eye immediately.  Why haven’t I seen him here before?  I can only assume he is also a shape-shifter, his form ever changing as the wind and the rain and the sun sculpt his features each week, each month.  But the moment I saw him, I recognized him, from this:

19th Century illustration

Well, actually, more from this:

My photo below doesn’t do him justice but, believe me, he had perfect white eyes, small dark horns and the bulbous hindquarters of the Sabbatic goat.  And then there's that whip - the way he was wielding that whip!

I walked around him very cautiously, and came home with my soul intact.  Dare I go up there again tomorrow and see what has become of him, though?  Perhaps by then he will have changed form once more, and all I’ll find is benign old broken tree stump sprouting a long, thin branch.

Bauhaus: Lagartija Nick

Goth but not forgotten

A shock horror true confession

Aarghh!  This is a bit like therapy.  “My name is… and I was a goth”. Well, I’m saying that for effect really, as I was only a little teensy-weensy bit of one, for a rather short while, and a very long time ago.  It all seems far too earnest and po-faced for me looking back now but, hey, I was a young art student at the time.  (It’s amazing how much you can excuse with that line…)  Having touched upon the subject of horror in some of my previous posts, it seems rather fitting that I felt a fair amount of it when I uncovered some pictures from one of my first college photography briefs in the early ‘80s, so I’ve decided to exorcise those devilish demons here.  Then I’ll never touch the stuff again. Honest.

Firstly, a bit of background. These photo projects required you to load fiddly reels of film into your big, manual (and usually ancient, second-hand) camera, fuck about with focus settings, aperture and shutter speeds, take pretentious arty-farty pictures (never anything spontaneous – you were too busy twiddling knobs) and later develop your shots personally in the darkroom.  The college darkroom was a sacred place, with its ‘Do Not Enter’ sign on the door and a characteristic chemical smell, where you worked in the duskiness of a dim red light, preferably alongside a student of the opposite sex with whom to practise some coy flirting. As anyone who still uses a darkroom knows, it was quite a long-drawn out process (and I’m not just talking about the flirting…) but there is a huge amount of satisfaction to be found as you watch your earlier vision start to become real in its tray of development solution – just seeing it appear and get gradually clearer like something supernatural is quite magical.  I’m reminded of scenes from detective series and films like ‘Blow Up’ –  the moment a picture starts to form on the paper is so exciting and sometimes surprising. Luckily there was nothing macabre lurking in any of these images, although in the case of this project I might have been grateful for it (purely for aesthetic reasons, you understand…)

I like the way the tear in the photo looks like a lightning bolt…

So yes, these were the times of a very early interest in, well, I seem to recall that nobody actually labelled it ‘goth’ back then, perhaps just occasionally ‘gothic’ - but there were a lot of references to the associated music being ‘post-punk’ (and it seemed like a natural progression from my earlier punk days) - even the term ‘positive punk’ was used.  ‘Positive punk’ does sound ironic considering most songs were so dark and doomy… We liked bands such as Bauhaus, the Danse Society and Sisters of Mercy, and people who wore a lot of black and looked a bit vampiric.  Vampiric and gothic is not an easy look to achieve when you’re fair-haired and have a tendency to go pink (it’s far too healthy looking) but cosmetics help and I think I probably got through a whole eyeliner pencil just for the make-up here: Siouxsie-style eyebrows, Alice Cooper-ish death-mask eyes and black lips too.  It also came in handy for drawing that logo which was for a (non-existent) band.  C H stood for Critically Headless, which is pretty good as far as goth band names go, you must admit!  As so often is the case it’s much easier to think up a name than to write or play an actual song…  Oh dear.  And being the ‘model’ here I could at least get someone else to fiddle with my calibrations and press my camera button. I should also add that this wasn’t my usual daily look for a trip to the corner shop to buy a packet of Trebor Mints.  (I’d have put a top on.)

Because this was meant to be an art project rather than just pure self-indulgence (and perhaps secretly a potential record cover for a future Critically Headless single, ‘Evil Dolls Are Eating My Flesh’..?), we were encouraged to be experimental, so this second photo was created by developing another picture over an over-exposed version of the first one.  The intention was to make it look, well, ghostly, of course. 

Yeah I know it’s crap but hopefully laughable crap…

The other picture was taken in an overgrown disused graveyard (well, naturally) - I’m sure that’s a discarded Tizer can or something showing through the undergrowth on the left.  I think that was the only surprise lurking in this image, so no ‘Blow Up’ storylines to be had here. With no such thing as Photoshop these pictures did turn out to be really bad, but I quite like the fact that the only clicking needed then was that of the camera button.  And the sound of the darkroom door closing tightly behind me as I waited to see what might develop.  Sadly, nothing much ever did.

Phew…. I feel better for that.  I think. 

The shame will pass.

(And finally – I just realised this does still sound good to my ears!  It’s short, choppy and upbeat.  Crack that whip!)