Photo Jondo

I coined the phrase ‘Photo Jondo’ after the Spanish ‘Cante Jondo’, which refers to a style of flamenco singing and means ‘Deep Song’. I was introduced to it - and the concept of ‘Duende’, which partially guides my artistic practice - by the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. 

In my mind Photo Jondo translates as ‘Deep Photo,’ and also, perhaps, as ‘the relinquishment of power’. 

Who understands that the purest creation is always a collaboration as clearly as those who reject the whim to dominate! 

Perhaps it’s easier to understand this when you know what it’s like to have a foot on your neck. The gypsies, the nomads, the slave descendants playing the simplest blues, and my people - the cockneys and the immigrants - among others. The wise among us wish not to do unto others - especially the elemental - as has always been done unto us. 

Sufi’s, one and all; we spend our lives trying to reside in the opposite. 

The world is completely alive around me. All conduits of energy have thoughts and feelings, and my natural state is to yearn for power over none. Not even my concept of myself, any more. 

It’s usually only when the rich show us signs of a few crumbs from their table - the ability to get a mortgage, a holiday in Spain or Cuba, a coffee machine, a place in a costly school for our kids - in an effort to get us as scared as they are, that we sometimes lose sight of ourselves. I’ve done that frequently. 

I thought, as I sip coffee, that it’s important to consider the matter frankly. The more one has, the more the danger that one will fear to lose it and allow this fear to guide our beliefs and actions, and to our detriment if we’re not careful. The fear is possibly rational but if so then one of our tasks in this short life is to somehow master it. 

Palm outstretched, wispy backlit coffee vapours. I am alive!!! What do I value in being alive? What have I been clinging to during those times when life had looked in the balance? Drinking coffee in the early sun. Sitting by the water. Feeling the wind on my skin. Listening to birdsong. Seeing yellow warblers. Being hungry. Satisfying that hunger. Creating. That’s for starters. There’s a lot to love about being alive. 

I feel ready to meet the day, although unsure if I can offer it anything as worthy of it as birdsong or sunlight. Clearly, though, regardless of my lack of cultivation and ability, I have much at this moment. Life, and the ability to partially observe it, obviously. Also the clear head that comes from a night’s sleep in a comfy bed and a breakfast of warm toast and peanut butter. 

A comfy bed and a warm meal can also be stifling if you don’t notice them. These 2 wonders have induced fear into the thoughts of millions. That doesn’t mean to say that to be free you eliminate them from your life, only that you see them clearly. Then when you catch yourself running from reality because you fear losing your comfort, you can quit pretending that your thoughts are about something else other than fear, and deal with them properly. 

All this helps me prepare for a day of pinhole photography in the forest. 

I’ve also left garlic, onions, coffee and alcohol off the menu for 3 days now, and ran a marathon yesterday, to clear out the system. If the artist wishes to open a channel to the elemental, some say, it’s wise to remove what might potentially create a blockage. 

Ayurvedic and Ayahuasca ceremonial texts advise that garlic and onions may stimulate the notion of individuality, and I know from personal experience that coffee does the same to me. As for alcohol, I enjoy it but have seen that it makes me arrogant in a way common to man, drunk with the power of our species. All these things I’ve left out of my diet for 3 days in an effort to give myself more chance of opening a channel.

I will also attempt, hard though it may be, to meet the forest free of the romanticism that has guided many westerners' thoughts regarding the outdoors for hundreds of years. Today, I determine, I will meet the earth, and all in it, face on, free of baggage. A bold aim and perhaps doomed to failure, today at least. But I’ll try. 

I have advantages over those who’ve gone before me. No drive to light up the British Empire encumbers me as it has done so many. No great belief in the individual, religion, love, or science - and their opposites - stands in my way. Few legends or myths, compulsions to compare, compartmentalize and dominate. 

I’ll add that it is not just negatives that aid me. I’m influenced by many things, including Zen Shojin cooking. One of the core Shojin principles that has led to this current stage of working is ‘make the best of what you have and don’t complain.’ This concept has influenced my current art practice enormously.

I have no facility to print negatives, but I do have a free version of Photoshop Express on my phone, and access to a public library with a computer and scanner. After working a while with those machines I found I could see results in my pinhole photographs that would have been near impossible had I been printing by hand. 

For instance, I can overexpose the image in the camera then bring it back from the near dead via Photoshop to present its message from beyond the pale. Photoshop can only give what’s already there in the negative, if you’re using it honestly, but the measure of control the computer gives is such that all that’s there can come out. This is not often the case when producing a print from a 3.25 x 2.25 inch paper negative in the darkroom using a dodge and burn technique. So this Photoshop facility has led to different veins of thought, including ones that were closed to me all the while I was firmly entrenched in the ‘old style, traditional printing is best’ camp. 

Of course, one must be unafraid of revising the past, of learning from mistakes, in order to come clean with life and oneself. It has taken me years to become unafraid. One path to success lay in living in the moment. If you achieve that you’re almost free. Free of ideas of what a photo should look like. Free of producing for anything or anybody else, and free to explore the question of why we create at all. 

This adventure into the city park where hundreds picnic is a true adventure. Not made for money or fame, or in a haze of history and culture induced blindness and bravado. Further away destinations have called me recently, but I’ve weighed them and decided that there is no sense at this time of Covid in giving all, including potentially my health, for a flirtation with a glitzy far away escapade that can, with a little effort, be matched within the confines of my life right here. All life can be seen anywhere, if one has the experience and the will to do so. Everest will survive without my ‘conquering’ it. The great unknown is all around. On a well path trodden, in a valley of willows just near the playing field…

There will be no death, no glory, no expectation, no failure. No need to colonize or ignore - or conquer - those already there, human or otherwise. 

The most personally successful day will see me writing nothing, photographing nothing. But at this early stage of my development I can’t hope for that. If I can co-create a couple of signposts, this will be wonderful. Signposts? I’m 99% sure that there’s no revolving door between here and the realm of the elemental. No artist or thinker can venture into that domain and bring back a coherent description. Maybe our words and ways of thinking aren’t up to the job. All the very best I can do is create signposts which, if you’re fully committed, you can follow yourself. 

I’m going to walk to the park and then begin to write notes. They’ll make sense in the park but maybe not so much if you read them in your house. It was like this with the Bible for me. When I read it at home in England I just couldn’t take it seriously. But when I read it whilst walking across the Sinai Desert alone, sleeping outside, eating little, making myself vulnerable before nature for 12 days then I’d thought, ah yes, I can see what the writer was getting at there. 

So maybe with this essay you’ll need to step outside in order to really get it.

If by chance all this spiritual or deep talk scares or bores you, fair enough, perhaps just think of Photo Jondo as a technique to get to know your equipment, your subject, your light, and the feeling of your environment better. It will help you become a better photographer, for sure. 

I mentioned before about running a marathon yesterday. The purpose was to exhaust myself to the point that the ego is weakened and I’m left vulnerable and receptive, and to remind myself of the extremities of emotions that I shall be trying to revisit today. Kind of like you might run a fast km the day before a marathon to remind yourself what race pace feels like. 

Running marathons and ultra marathons offers an opportunity to spend time at the extremes of our emotions. During these events we’re often tired, hungry, pained, joyful, beautifully connected to other runners and nature, ecstatic, satisfied, content, doubtful, proud, and more. 

It was among these extremities that I first met the sign of the duende. Or Pan, the right hand of the elemental, however you wish to express it. Other runners might talk purely of facing their demons when they’re truly exhausted but I believe that demon and angel are the same, and that joy is wrapped in the same parcel as pain and self doubt and at times, dissatisfaction and self loathing. 

This running based adventure into the outer realms of ourselves lasts way beyond the time of the run. It gives us a foothold that we recognise, that we might seek out and step into again at other times, such as when we create pinhole photos.

My closest companion today is my mistrust of my surface self. I know this part of me is called something by some psychologists. I’m on the spectrum too, most likely. Who isn’t. But since my partner’s abuse at the hands of a Harvard professor I’m not much interested in the talk of the patriarchy. It’s my shame that it took the misconduct case that followed to make matters clear to me. 

All is new today and my descriptions will match the freshness of such a day. Do not believe yourself at this point, I know this to be true. I’m no better than anybody else, and look at them! It’s clear few if any of us can be trusted, and we have to build this into any artistic plan. The cure is to walk and be, to sit and be, and just be. Don’t try to name what you feel, or record it, just be in it. 

We must look beyond the view of the common rich. They so often only see what they can sell. Land, trees, peat, animals, stones, water. They call this landscape. At times wilderness. But there is more. Forget about what they can or cannot make money from. Go running in -30C, there is another perception of the world in this cold, a wilderness that cannot be mapped or named or sold. 

Where does passion, duende, this feeling of the message, show itself? In human society it can be a trembling lip or finger, a quivery voice, a prolonged silence, a stare beyond. This I will look for today in the forest. 

Minutes before I am due to leave I falter. I feel fear. I don’t want to go out for reasons I cannot fathom. But I can't bear the thought of the morning flowers not being smelt, and whilst there’s a chance others will honour the flowers, I feel a sense of responsibility to play my part. It’s enough to help me put on my shoes and leave. 

I walk to the park through a neighbourhood both affluent and oppressive. Give up expectations of success, I remind myself, but not hope. Be guided by circumstance. If a woodpecker alights on the willow mid pinhole exposure, take this as a cue and cease counting the seconds until you close the shutter. Instead, close it when the bird flies away. Enjoy the moment, allow natural interference in your plans. 

I recall walking from the Tom Thompson room in the AGO to where the Morrisseau’s are. I make the trip monthly. Passing through the David Milne rooms thinking ‘this guy must have known somebody because there’s no way he should be in here’ as I always do, and then, hang on, Milne has a couple of nice pieces! The basic ones. Made when he lived alone in nature for long periods. Ah, that’s it, like Thompson he gave nature a chance to show itself properly to him and like Thompson he was skilled enough to capture something of it. That’s what you’ve got to do if you want to let nature in, spend sustained periods of time in it. I’ve been spending all day in High Park for over a year now, I feel like I’m hearing it, finally.    

I don’t carry a tripod, if I did I might be tempted into choosing my angle. How can I trust I won’t be inspired to produce just another replica photo? I can’t. Each of us has been conditioned so deeply regarding what makes for a suitable image, what is beautiful, what is striking or noteworthy. We can’t expect to tap into our real self just like that. It’s going to take years to unravel the layers. So I work at getting past the conditioning, and in the meantime I leave the tripod at home so that chance will decide where I will put the camera for each exposure. 

Of course, you don’t need to do this if all you want to do is produce a standard, technically solid photo with the purpose of pleasing and selling. With Photo Jondo though, we’re looking for more than that, hence the healthy suspicion of all, especially ourselves. 

Beyond the golden crescent is where the prize is, I remind myself. Beyond the rule of thirds, and every other rule and expectation. 

In the park I find myself looking for a natural tripod and not the scene. A natural thing to do, but once realisation of the act is had, I work to not do it. A rule of Photo Jondo is that once any act becomes a formula, we must try to dismiss it. I heard Robert Rauschenberg say something similar. Perhaps he’d read Lorca too, and followed the threads.

If we have a firm idea of what we’re going to do next, then we are just performing. And we want to do so much more. The minute you master an action, which happens naturally to the committed artist, is the minute you discard and avoid it. 

I see an ‘easy win’ scene, a willow tree by the water's edge, whose perfect pastorality will look magnificent captured by the long exposure of the pinhole camera. I make an image just in case I’m wrong, and because I still find it hard to resist reacting to such obvious beauty. I wish to encourage discernment in myself and viewers, not adoration. Yet that’s a work in progress. 

Do not dwell on the feelings of love and death that appear so vivid in nature, I warn myself. These are merely food and drink, things which are facts of life but not what we are talking about. Resist the buffet, there’s a journey waiting and what point being human and able to travel the road if you don’t take it on! 

When I woke today I knew I was to photograph the heron. I had a strong feeling. A feeling like before my dad died. A powerful, knowing feeling that did not seem to come to me via my own efforts. It was like this with heron. I walk through the trees now, knowing that when I reach the pond the heron will be there. And so it is. 

The heron stands still for my pinhole. The longer I sit with the bird, the more I have an opportunity to question. I drop my centre of emotion into my stomach and beyond, get close to the ground, to the source. I become what the patriarchy laughs at. A navel gazer. A tree hugger. The heron responds by relaxing, by staying. 

I make pictures and catch myself thinking of how I'm going to share these moments later, online and in person. Will they please? Impress? Improve my reputation? Maybe I can even sell them?! I’m ashamed of myself, but recognise I am what I am, and if I want to improve, I have to be frank with myself. 

Half an hour passes and these thoughts cease, thankfully. Past and future are now beyond me; the vain, foolish ideas unreachable. I couldn’t exist in them even if sunrise depended on it, all I can do is live in this moment. I am a prisoner of this moment. 

I make a final pinhole, heron is in shade, I resolve to keep the shutter open for as long as our eyes are locked. I blink several times, heron once. 45 seconds passes, then a silent, slight elongation of heron’s neck signals the exposure is done. A fish wriggles in the muddy water. I lose the urge to pinhole. Heron and I stay, eyes locked, for 5 more minutes. An eternity in which all is known because there is remarkably little to grasp. 

Heron could soothe the wounds of the wealthy far better than their money does, and yet they don’t know it. Instead they dig themselves in deeper. You give yourself something to lose and it will cripple you as much as it helps you. It’s part of the deal of civilisation as most of us experience it. 

I ponder Lorca, his talk of Duende, and the Deep Song of the Roma people. 

“Don’t ask me anything. I’ve seen that things find their void when they search for direction.”

“Those who fear death will carry it on their shoulders.”

It’s by reading a master of words like Lorca that we recognise the boundaries of language. Ditto photographs. In the desert I travelled with words and pictures as companions at first but gradually they, conscious of their limits, left me to return to the safety of society. 

Lorca, focusing on the misery of life, says, no matter what you have, without equality you have nothing. 

Can poets be trusted? So many are in love with knives and the moon, with deep art and the wind, with the sea, and death, and love which is beyond, the dark, the night, and art beyond technique. Can poets be trusted? They think you can describe it in words. And this is their tell. Because words cannot do it. There are some, though, some poets, who understand this.

Lorca stuck in melancholy, an old life that exists only

In poems about poor old people.

Take this waltz called ‘it never was’

And dance free of angels. The bells we ring, knowing others will respond,

For Lorca was free of them, not so Cohen.

Stop your tears, he was paid, not what he was worth,

But more than he expected, which is part of his beauty. 

Niches, I despise them. They are the boxes into which the British, the French, and other colonists packed the world. Discern them by their sex, their colour, their religion, and more. Catalogue it, make it neat, dispose of the rest, the stuff that won’t fit. It’s worked, almost. I despise niches. They’re for the frightened, and I am not frightened. 

***

Just as I knew I would see heron today, I know that it’s now time to stop making pinholes of the bird. I wander into the forest. It’s 1pm, I have about 3 hours of pinhole light left. I’ve little interest now in subjects that used to attract my pinhole camera. Old buildings, universities, temples, the monuments of wealth and privilege, stone circles, castles. Whatever we focus our camera on - when we are making poetic images rather than corporate or documentary - we attribute importance to, and validate. I feel no urge to offer my approval to these hallowed halls of patriarchy, these venues of so many abuses of power.   

I begin a pinhole of Snake Mound. Before I know it I’m engaged in rational thought. I want to make the exposure extra long but it’s mostly sunny (and too bright for long exposures) so I observe the average cloud speed and begin my exposure 15 seconds before the next big one obscures the sun. A mix of brief sun and dense cloud allows the pinhole scene to appear in multiple lights over a 2 and a half minute period. I’m both pleased at working out this method and annoyed that I stoop to such gimmicks. 

Once again I tell myself, when what you do feels formulaic, like you’re mastered your art, move forward and avoid the comfort of the known. Remember, creating beauty that is easily digested by those who’ve had their sense dulled is not your primary game. 

I look for ways to let the world in. An exposure starts, I have an idea I’ll let it run for a minute. Then a fly lands on my camera and my mind changes. The exposure now has to run until the fly moves. A minute and 45 seconds on I close the shutter. I set the next exposure going and wait for a sign - a plop or a ripple as a frog emerges from mud, the tap tap of woodpecker on willow - to tell me it’s time to close the shutter. A scene that my experience tells me needs a 30 second exposure actually gets 3 minutes. 

I want to be operating within the outer regions of my emotions and physicality. My actions of the previous day start to help me out. I’m tired, hungry and possibly in danger due to lack of water. The ground is getting more level, the invite to the muse more alluring. 

A Cooper's hawk flies into frame at the start of another exposure. It's far away and won’t show, but I know it’s there. I sit quietly watching, the world wakes, revealing itself as a flower unfurls dewy petals to the dawn. I sink into myself and several minutes pass where I sense I meet the world in another place. The price for being there is I can’t bring word of it back. It’s that revolving door I spoke of. Ours is a world of words and what’s next is of so much more, a place with no gap between feelings and method of communication. 8 minutes later a couple bumble through the woods, heavy footed, clutching disposable coffee cups. The hawk leaves and my shutter closes. 

Chipmunks and squirrels often visit, standing on their hind legs a metre away as I rustle in my changing bag. They maybe think I have some nuts for them. I close my eyes and think I meet them somewhere beyond here, and I see and feel it all clearly and it makes perfect sense, but then I come back. 

Shot after shot, thoughts come from the silence of the forest. Don’t use the intensity of the process to hook society into praising you, is one. You take from yourself by doing so, although temptation is great. 

I want to make images that belong to no-one. Not me, not the tree, not you, not the wind.

I’m aware that with all this, mostly I’m still operating within certain boundaries. If I really wanted to throw the photo out there I’d give it a 20 minute exposure in full sun. Maybe I shall do that one day, but for now, this would seem like a crass act. An avoidance of collaboration. It’s true that I want to relinquish control, but I also want to give the world a chance, to give the muse an opportunity to visit. 

With my next exposure I think of one of Michelangelo’s working practices, referred to as “non-finito” (or incomplete). His ‘Slaves’ are a good example of this. They seem to be unfinished, showing figures emerging from the marble but not free of it. Michelangelo is famous for saying that he worked to liberate the forms imprisoned in the marble. He saw his job as simply removing what was extra. He was a tool of God, he thought, not creating but instead revealing the powerful figures already contained in the marble. 

With this in mind I think, what is the photographer's version of chipping away the excess. How can I reveal what is already there?

Naturally, according to the rules of Photo Jondo, I discard this thought. And then, I contemplate on that since I made up the rules, they are by default under suspicion. So I continue to think of the implications of Michelangelo’s working practice. How might I set this scene free of the boundaries my education has placed on it? How can I reveal the magic that is everywhere?

I take a 2 minute pinhole selfie. Staying still for that long is tough! I steady myself on a fallen tree. There is rustling behind me in the woods. Squirrel? Coyote? Do I look, and risk spoiling the photo? No! 

The duende is easily seen in nature. The hawk - malevolent, powerful - is a figure artists often wrestle raw beauty from. Life and death in the same wingbeat, no good and evil here unless the viewer dictates. 

Photo Jondo is far from Cartier Bresson's perfect or decisive moment. The perfect moment was a snapshot that allowed people to feel less and yet remain complete. Titillation. The real moment is a myriad of happenings and sensations, and is not a moment at all, just as when Kapuchinski or Chatwin would tell 5 lies to make a truth because they understood that a single truth is only ever a lie.

Lorca related this story.

‘Once the Andalusian singer, Pastora Pavon, was singing in a little tavern in Cádiz. She sparred with her voice, she tangled her voice in her long hair or drenched it in sherry or lost it in the darkest and furthermost bramble bushes. But nothing happened - useless, all of it! The audience remained silent.

And so Pastora Pavon finished singing in the midst of total silence. There was only a little man, who observed sarcastically in a very low voice: "Viva Paris!" As if to say: We are not interested in aptitude or techniques or virtuosity here. We are interested in something else.

Pavon got up like a woman possessed, her face blasted like a medieval weeper, tossed off a great glass of Cazalla at a single draught and settled down to singing - without a voice, without breath, without nuance, throat aflame - but with duende! She had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulnerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang!’ 

This is how it is with Photo Jondo. We must care little for style or what we think others think and instead focus on overcoming our bias, and providing either a conduit for the elemental, or a stage upon which we can collaborate honestly with the world.