>> Buy the ‘zine version of this project here.
January 2021 was like all the Januarys of all my years on earth merged into one. The days were short, the nights were long and time seemed to stretch into an amorphous jelly of all-encompassing introspection. We were all locked down in our houses with nothing to do but work, watch TV, cook, eat, look deeply into the abyss, wait for the hours to pass and then do it all again the following day. This was a tough call for a grounded travel photographer.
With all this time at home I’d started cultivating an array of house plants and they were dotted around my home. They’d become a wonderful distraction; I ordered them from a local plant shop, took delivery and then tried my best to follow the instructions and not kill them. As the nights were so long and daylight was in short supply, they all ended up as near to the windows as I could put them; jostling for position, craning for as much light as they could get from the murky skies.
I often took to the streets of Margate in the evenings for a brisk walk around town before sleep. It was bitterly cold, the streets were unsurprisingly deserted and there wasn’t much to look at apart from into the windows of the homes I passed by. I started noticing other people’s house plants sitting on windowsills – from the Georgian townhouses of Hawley Square to the takeaways on Northdown Road. Why had I never zoned in on these things before? Was it my newfound house plant preoccupation that was infiltrating my vision? I think I must’ve developed house plant envy – especially of those giant monsteras that made beautiful silhouettes behind frosted glass – and it gave me an idea. I realised there was a whole gallery of living works out there, illuminated by the light, warmth and activity inside so it wasn’t long before I took the camera out on my walks and started photographing them.
These nightly jaunts became a bit of an obsession and the plants became an embodiment of what we were all going through; sitting there all night long waiting for the glimmers of daylight to nourish and nurture them, sitting pretty in eternal faith that the darkness would lift, waiting for the light at the end of the night….waiting for the light. To begin with it was like a treasure hunt and a distraction from my own internal machinations. I took hundreds of images but, gradually, I found it was the more abstract images that gave me the idea that this could become a collection of images with a life beyond the windows of Margate.
This is a project that gave me hope and purpose in a time of universal darkness and it taught me a lot about the art of looking for beauty in the everyday.
With a slightly less itinerant lifestyle than other times in my life, I find myself working from home a lot these days. I’m lucky; there’s a Georgian square with plenty of trees out my front window and there’s the sea – albeit with a multi-storey car park and a few Margate backstreets in the way – out the back windows.
This is a very simple project: it’s the view from my bedroom window taken with the 300mm lens. The idea is to capture the same scene in as many different sea/sky colour and light combinations as possible. It’s a constantly changing marvel.
For a few years, I lived a minute’s walk from Cornmill Meadow, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), owing to its dragonfly and damselfly populations in the summer months . I’d go there every day, year round, with and without the camera. I’d notice the little changes as the the seasons turned and I’d ponder the big and the little stuff. It started off as therapeutic way of connecting with nature, rather than as a photography project. But over the years it has grown into a body of work that takes on more importance now I live elsewhere.
Some words I wrote one May evening:
“Yesterday’s walk was just after the rain and there were little tiny beads of moisture on all the leaves and flowers. The cow parsley is now about knee high and peppered with buttercups and occasional clover. The sky was still dark grey with indecisive rain but the late-evening glow from behind the clouds gave everything a slightly peachy hue. I had the place to myself as everyone else clearly had somewhere more important to be on a Saturday night. I couldn’t think of anywhere more important than revelling in nature: you can practically see it growing at this time of year. Around 8pm the sun had dropped enough and found a way through the low-lying clouds. It backlit everything in its path with rusty warmth, turning the droplets into diamonds. My nose was alive to the multiple aromas emanating from the dense undergrowth and my ears in awe of the surround-sound philharmonia of birdsong. I thought about human history and how pretty much every previous generation would’ve known how to read all these signs. In the absolute stillness I could believe fairies existed.”
It was a truly magical place.
The River Lea is a major tributary of the Thames, and it’s an important city artery for those who live and travel by boat (or, indeed, those who don’t but cycle down the towpath). It’s looked after by the Canal and River Trust and the Environment Agency, as well as boaters’ collectives – and is well loved by many of those who use it – but that doesn’t mean errant litter doesn’t make its way into the water.
As I cycle along the River Lea on grey winter days, I notice colourful, redundant objects bobbing among the pondweed and saw something of Millais’ Ophelia about it. The pond weed, along with autumnal leaf litter and other organic detritus, is often cleared from rivers for tidiness and cleanliness but many environmentalists will argue that this isn’t a good thing; organic matter can halt the flow of water which helps reduce flood risk, plus it’s also an important part of the food chain that keeps the ecosystem healthy and functioning. I quite liked the side-by-side juxtaposition of the human detritus and nature’s detritus and set about capturing it on my long cycles into the city.
The title of this project comes from a 1996 album by Tortoise*. I’d always thought it quite a sinister phrase, tinged with eternal damnation in an already full planet. It turns out they took it from a series of talks from key Jehovah’s Witness texts that proclaim the coming resurrection – scheduled for 1925 – of several bible characters. Read in this context, the phrase seems full of joyous religious zeal and the promise of heavenly eternal life on earth. This dualistic reading somehow seems fitting for the commingling of endless detritus, whether it be organic matter decomposing into another form or brightly coloured shards of useless rubbish that has no inner properties with which to reform itself into something useful.
*Also, coincidentally, the last track on the album is called Along the Banks of Rivers.
