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A visit to Ilford

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Some time ago I standardised on just three films for much of my work. For silver-gelatine fine printing on 120 format for contrasty situations, I use Ilford HP5+ in combination with Ilford’s Perceptol in various dilutions. For soft light I use FP4. For street work, exclusively in 35 mm format, I use Ilford XP2 Super. I do not print street work, it being destined for on-line presentation, and therefore XP2 seems such a good option. It scans well, has a wide exposure latitude, enables multiple ISOs on the same roll and is compatible with Digital ICE. For printing I use Ilford FB warm-tone and cool-tone papers. You can say that I am heavily invested in Ilford.

So, a recent invite to a focus group at Ilford’s head-office and factory in Mobberley seemed all the more pointed following Agfa’s withdrawal from the black and white market and Fuji’s recent announcement that its Acros film would be discontinued. We film photographers worry about the ever diminishing availability of film. I was genuinely interested in seeing the factory processes but I was also keen to gauge what state the business was in. Once a corporate auditor, always a corporate auditor! Over a long career I have been on hundreds of factory assessment tours all over the world.

Ever since Harman was acquired by the Pemberstone Group (a private equity investor) in 2015 there has been much speculation over its future, in particular whether there is a property game in play. Over a long career, I have learned to ignore speculation. It always seems to be wrong.

No-one would deny that the factory has significant over-capacity, an ageing workforce, a large and under-utilised site. The position on the remaining lease term is unclear. The most recent available accounts (2016) show growth in overall sales (due to film sales we are told) and respectable if unspectacular profits. Capital investment is low and significant, I think, is the fact that profits are flattered by the low depreciation as a result of assets having already been written down. Against this though, maintenance costs are probably high as the kit is old and difficult to source because it is so specialist.

You could say that the accounts show the typical profile of a business that is ‘in abeyance’. Pemberstone’s acquisition was nearly three years ago now, and no announcements of any major initiative as yet. For me, one thing is clear. Input cost pressures will continue to mount, and given that further process efficiency is unlikely to offset these without further investment, decisions will need to be made. It’s unlikely that the business will be able to pass on increased costs to customers through increased prices. The products are price-inelastic, as economists are fond of saying. A further issue is that the biggest market is the US and hence sales in sterling depend on the dollar rate. Although hedged, cash-flows could be hit by adverse movements.

Is this outlook overly gloomy? I would like to think so but it depends on how real and sustained is the pick up in film sales and the way in which this increase is demographically distributed. ‘Old Timers’ (like me) are dying off. How much of the increase relates to Old Timers who have got sick of the expense of continuously upgrading digital kit? How many of the young film photographers repeat buy and for how long? If other companies, Kodak in particular, start to close film manufacturing the short-term outlook for Ilford may turn out to be difficult. Ilford films tend to be cheaper than Kodak’s, and hence tend to be used by student photographers, the key target population. If film (any film) becomes harder to source, then this could act against Ilford until such time as distribution channels were expanded. I am not a believer in the ‘last man standing’ argument. Sales need to continue to expand, particularly given the fact that the company is financed through an invoice discounting facility. The 2017 accounts will be interesting.

All of this is fairly obvious, of course. I want Ilford to succeed, as I have a vested interest. But there is another reason. The people that I met during my tour were open, friendly, passionate about Ilford and really nice people.  I would like Ilford to succeed for them. Let’s hope sales continue to grow. I will continue to do my bit!

 

Control room – face blurred for protection

 

Coffins – used to transport light sensitive coated paper

coatings process

Big site

 

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A philosophical statement

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A Philosophical Research Programme

As someone who has spent 40 years pursuing a career in Industry and Commerce and now occupy my time as a photographer and print maker, I find myself with little remaining time to properly investigate what it is to take a philosophical stance with respect to the world. However, unaffiliated as I am to an institution and free from the straight jacket of the peer-reviewed ‘philosophical paper’, there is a sense of liberation in just being able to follow one’s nose. Or so it seems to me.

So, here is an inquiry that I hope to explore, couched in terms of 5 assertions. 

  1. Assertion 1: Science cannot explain the whole world , experience in particular– Wilfred Sellars said that ‘in the dimensions of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not’ (EPM para 41). However, although Science is particularly good at understanding some features of the world from within a particular conceptual system (causation, space, time, force, mass and so on) that can be generalised in such terms, it does not have much to say about those features that relate to the particularity of experiences. Science is grounded in a commitment to generalisation. Some questions are only meaningful in the context of the particularity of an event (for example, ‘what it is like’ questions). I am a scientific realist but only in relation to that part of the world for which science is a paradigm of knowledge-acquisition through generalisation. (Readings: Aristotle, Sellars, Popper, Feyerabend, Husserl, Gadamer, Derrida)
  2. Assertion 2: Experience is the correlation between a subjective consciousness and the structure of objects presenting themselves. An understanding of the world must therefore embrace a phenomenological attitude. Subject and Object are tied to each other in such a way as to make meaningless any attempt to assert a separate existence to ‘Mind’ or ‘Object’, to posit the structure of experience as one where a Subject and Object act independently or to look for ‘things in themselves’. (Readings: Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, McDowell)
  3. Assertion 3: Experience is given in an aesthetic form. Experience is the crystallisation of an aesthetic form (aisthesis) as a concrete event. Aesthetic forms have a gestalt quality and a mode of articulation (affordance and possibility). (Readings: Heidegger, Gestalt theorists, Kant’s 3rdCritique, JJ Gibson, Embodied consciousness theorists)
  4. Assertion 4: Experience is articulated through language. Language is not to be seen in terms of a Fregean subject/predicate, concept/object type or solely in referential terms, as in Semiotics. Language is lived as an aesthetic form and has gestalt qualities. (Readings: Frege, Heidegger, Jakobson, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Derrida)
  5. Assertion 5: Aesthetic forms convey meaning through the complex arrays and hierarchies of properties that constitute gestalt phenomena. Meaning has little to do with representation and more to do with positional information. Representation is subordinate to the primacy of aesthetic forms. Mereological principles underpin meaning-constituting aesthetic forms.  (Readings: Husserl, Jakobson)
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Doisneau’s ‘L’Accordéoniste’

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I am hard pressed to choose just one photograph by Robert Doisneau. He is best known for his photograph of two lovers kissing, (“Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville”, 1950), but so many of his photographs strike a chord within me. ‘Gutter in Flood’ was an early influence, his café scenes show a delicate touch ….. his photographs of the Nazi occupation are so well observed. But for me, ‘L’Accordéoniste’ has a special place in my gallery.

 

PARIS, FRANCE – 1951: An Accordionist is playing in the street, rue Mouffetard, 1951 in Paris, France. (Photo by Robert DOISNEAU/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

It’s one of those photographs that is best served without further words…

 

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James Ravilious

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In an era of self-referentiality a ‘quiet photograph’ 1 can have much to commend it. There is a  simple and rare pleasure in looking at photographs whose subjects are allowed to present themselves as they are, unposed. On the part of the subjects, no acting, no hamming, no forcing of things beyond themselves. On the part of the photographer, a pursuit of craft as art 2.

I am of course referring to James Ravilious (‘JR’), for whom the craft of photography formed the basis of artistic merit. For him, no photographic embellishment underpinned by a dodgy artist’s statement; no forcing of an issue; no shouty pretensions. JR makes photographs in an un-sensational way which allows the viewer to be drawn in (and thereby draw their own conclusions). But, and here is the point, what Ravilious gives us is social documentary with an extra dimension. Where visual anthropology need only snap the world in the way of straight photographs, Ravilious gives us photography that works at a psychological level. To be sure his photographs document the disappearing world of 1970s and 1980s north Devon, providing a rich visual ethnographic record and all that good stuff. However, they also make us want to ‘belong’ to some place. We see in JR’s work a celebration of (a yearning for?) community and meaningful relationships, perhaps as a result of their absence in his early boarding school life 3. We enter his photographs perhaps with a felt but unthought sense of dislocation, for 40 years on a special sense of belonging to a place seems hard won.

First and foremost, JR’s photography expresses ‘mood’ and it is this that makes it compelling. When we look at his work, we initially experience it with a ‘pre-cognitive feeling’ rather than with a thought. In this regard Merleau-Ponty and his mentor, Heidegger, were on the right track 4. What we think about the world is already a result of us being tuned into what matters. What matters is governed by mood. Mood co-constitutes the content of our experience. JR’s photographic techniques pre-dispose us to see his photographs in a certain way before we even start to think about them.

Few photographers pull this off so consistently. JR understood, perhaps instinctively, those visual features that give rise to the invocation of moods 5, as certainly did his early mentor, Cartier-Bresson.

One cannot look at JR’s photographs without noticing his impeccable sense of timing:

 

‘Alf Pugsley moving a shed in case of flood, Lower Langham, Dolton, February 1978’: Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

 

Cartier-Bresson made much of ‘the decisive moment’ 6, and Lartigue, ‘the caught moment’. But there is more to timing than time! There is also structure. As Cartier-Bresson said,

“In a photograph, composition is the result of a simultaneous coalition, the organic coordination of elements seen by the eye. One does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form. Composition must have its own inevitability about it” (my emphasis).

The ‘decisive moment’ is a taking in of the totality of situation within a structure. We are used to conceiving it as the apex of an action, as in Cartier-Bresson’s ‘puddle’ photograph, but quiet photographs can also display such characteristics. For example, in this photograph:

‘Flock of sheep, Ashreigney, November 1977’: Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

we see sheep at close quarters all looking away from the camera. No great drama here but exquisite timing requiring patience and vision. Essential to the ‘decisive moment’ photograph is a ‘prägnanz’ structure of simplicity, harmony and balance in which the subject matter acts psychologically through figure/ground or closure gestalt principles. In ‘George Ayre with hay for sheep’  we see the gestalt principles of the ‘good curve’ and ‘closure’ working together to provide the characteristics  of a decisive moment.

‘George Ayre with hay for sheep, Ashwell, Dolton, February 1978’: Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

And in ‘Lower Gunstone’  we can imagine JR waiting ‘like an angler’ for the right elements to coalesce into the right structure:

‘Lower Gunstone, Bideford, July 1983’: Photograph by James Ravilious © Beaford Arts digitally scanned from a Beaford Archive negative.

Much has been made of JR’s camera technique: his use of uncoated Leitz lenses, the creative inclusion of lens flare, the taming of deep contrast with compensatory developers all add to a signature look:

View of Pitt Farm near Cadeleigh, and the River Exe Valley, 1996 © Robin Ravilious

As beautiful as this signature look is 7, JR’s success is really grounded in the relationships that he built. For sure his camera technique contributed to his Millet-like images, but the real work that James Ravilious put in was the countless hours he spent over many years in becoming accepted and therefore invisible. His mentor, Cartier-Bresson achieved this through stealth and looking inconspicuous. But Cartier-Bresson moved through a scene never to be visited again. Ravilious visited his locations many times and, in so doing, became part of the community he photographed. Sometimes the best place to hide is to be in full view, to be part of the natural order and therefore in tune with the surrounding flow.

One of my favourite photographers, Gordon Parks, once exhorted ‘Make pictures that matter!’ JR achieved this. Someone in 100 years time will look at his photographs and, like me, be deeply moved.

 

James Ravilious © Robin Ravilious;  with thanks to Robin Ravilious.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the trustees of Beaford Arts for the free use of JR’s photographs from the Beaford Archive and in particular Olivia Riley at the Beaford Archive who was extremely helpful. The Beaford Archive holds digital scans of the 1,700 negatives which James Ravilious regarded as his finest work. It is slowly uploading 10,000 unseen (until now!) photographs by Ravilious and Deakins and are about half way through a 3 year digitisation project to make the archive more accessible.

I would like to thank Robin Ravilious for the generous support she gave me in this short article.

Robin has written a magnificent book portraying both James’s life before she met him and their life together afterwards: ‘James Ravilious, A Life‘, by Robin Ravilious, published Wilmington Press, an imprint of Bitter Lemon Press, 2017. It is an honest account of their lives, both ups and downs, which I enjoyed reading immensely.

As a photographer myself, I have been inspired by JR’s photographs. In this regard I have studied the photographs selected by John Hatt in the book ‘The Recent Past, James Ravilious‘, with an introduction by Robin Ravilious (published 02/11/17, Wilmington Press, an imprint of Bitter Lemon Press). This is a very thoughtful collection, beautifully reproduced.

  1. The Pleasures of Good Photographs, essays by Gerry Badger; Aperture, 2010: – “The primary characteristic of the “quiet” photograph is that it should appear to be “without author or art. That is to say, transparency is its main objective. The photograph should seem to be a direct and unmediated transcription of the scene before the camera, as if taken, indeed, by the unaided camera. The quiet photographer, therefore, interferes as little as possible with his subject”. ↩
  2. After the manner of Gropius, in which harmony of composition includes ‘structure, finishing, ornamentation, and furnishing’ ↩
  3. See ‘James Ravilious; A Life‘ by Robin Ravilious; Bitter Lemon Press, London; 2017 ↩
  4. Heidegger said ‘Existentially, disposedness implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us’: Being and Time 177/137-138. As Heidegger said, moods are ‘import-disclosive’, that is they disclose the way things matter. At the same time moods are atmospheric: they function phenomenologically, not as private interior states but rather like atmospheres in which we dwell. Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ is a tricky read. For the interested reader not versed in Heidegger, a good introduction is provided by William Blattner in his ‘Heidegger’s Being and Time‘, published by Bloomsbury, 2006 ↩
  5. In this regard, I refer the reader to the extensive literature concerning gestalt forms, affordance and the salience network – see my essay ↩
  6. In 1952 Cartier-Bresson published ‘Images à la Sauvette’, which approximately translates as ‘images on the run’. Cartier-Bresson cites 17th century Cardinal de Retz, who said ‘Il n’y a risen dans ce monde qui n’air un moment decisif’. ↩
  7. Of course, this scan from a print does not do justice to the tonalities and textures of the actual print. Many still try to copy this look, including me. For those interested, I use a Leica M-A with an uncoated 50mm Leitz Elmar f3.8 with HP5+ film, developed in dilute Perceptol or Barry Thornton Two bath. I still have not quite got it but I am getting closer ↩
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Carnwath

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Wikipedia has it that Carnwath ‘is a farming village set in rolling countryside, on the edge of open moorland and with views to the Pentland Hills. Its proximity to the A70 makes it popular with commuters to Edinburgh’.

According to Undiscovered Scotland Carnwath ‘is an unusual place with a distinctive and attractive character. The functional and largely undecorated one and two storey buildings lining Main Street combine with a (near) absence of modern shop frontages to give a strong sense of stepping back into another century, and not the one recently departed’.

A local sign lists the main amenities as being the pub, the church, the masonic lodge, the school (many years closed) and the West End cemetery. It is thought that the first inhabitants lived here 2000 years ago. The discovery of the old dwelling near Wester Yardhouses showed people living above ground in the summers and below ground in the ‘Souterrain’ in the harsh winters.

On the day that I passed through, [Read more…]

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