Picturing England
BBC are doing an excellent programme at the moment called 'A Picture of Britain'. It features Jonathan 'suppose I had better find something to do between elections and royal funerals' Dimbleby motoring around various scenic parts of the country in a Land Rover Defender, occasionally stopping to remark that this was where Constable painted the 'Hay-Wain', or some other landscape painter painted something else. The programme is excellent, as the picture of Britain is made up not just of painted landscapes but poetry and music.
To accompany the series, the BBC has launched a digital picture of Britain competition on its web-site. Enthusiastic snappers are invited to submit their photographs of Britain, to make up a gallery. It's interesting and heart-warming stuff - a sort of anti-happy slapping. Normally when one sees modern photography or a photo-essay about Britain, the photographer seems to go out of his way to get a picture of an empty crisp packet blowing across some scene of urban desolation, usually featuring a burned-out car. or, as it is more popularly known, Essex.
The photographs are pretty much of a mixed bag, although there is a tendency towards trying to capture photographically what the artists in the programme did in paint - not easy when they've built a shopping centre in most areas of outstanding natural beauty.
So I'm travelling with my camera these days, just in case I see something that would make a good landscape shot. This led me, yesterday, down the by-pass to where we have a McDonald's sitting next to a Tesco. I was trying to get a shot of the golden arches in the foreground with the blue and white fleecer in the background. Of course, this shot would be rendered perfection if the McDs car-park had been full of double-wide fatties waddling from their 4x4s to the burger joint, but no luck.
Got a couple of good shots, although this meant standing on the opposite side of the road and hence shooting over the roofs for cars stopped at the traffic lights. As I had my cycle helmet on (having cycled there rather than affecting to wear one at all times), I wonder if the drivers took me for some sort of green activist type. Why else would a cyclist be taking pictures of McDs? This would account for the scowls I got from the people in the 4x4 who were in one shot. The scowls only visible when I downloaded the shot to computer.
I can see now why people want to take pictures of lovely places rather than taking pictures of the McDs and Tesco that now, unfortunately, contribute to our landscape...they are ugly! Obviously these things are designed and manufactures in some factory in Guildford and then arrive in sections on flatbeds and are erected overnight. They lack any concession to the local environment, the McDs I was photographing looked like it would not be out of place in Arsehole, Kansas or Kowbutcherbaad, Ukraine. I imagine that some farmer can sign the sale agreement one night on his field and by the time he opens his curtains the next morning he's looking at the queue for the drive-through and somebody is asking him about happy meals.
So trying to capture corporate blah and shimmering tarmac was a bit of a bust. Instead, I decided to go in search of a photograph of something quintessentially English - the bowling green in the park over the road. Beryl Cook may make bowling greens look interesting in her paintings, but that's only because she populates them with randy Majors poking fat matrons up the bum as they bend over to take their bowl. While there's something lovely about a perfect square of close cropped grass, it makes for a very dull photograph. Okay then - next project...the allotments next to the park. Again, a bit of a disappointment. While we all know that allotments are places of danger, intrigue and cow-dung and that every shed hides a still and a collection of pornography so eye-watering that its use is forbidden in most of the EU, this is very hard to convey in a photograph. What was actually there were a few wheelbarrows, a few sheds and what appears to be the biggest crop of sweet peas outside of the main supplier for Tesco.
Cycling around these places at the moment is no fun, as the heat here in the UK this week is best described as punishing. The sun beats down relentlessly and the English seem to be as unprepared for this as they are for snow, rain and all other seasonal norms. Young girls walk by with shoulders the colour of post-boxes, office workers make a concession by shedding their jackers, all the better to display the damp patches they have been growing all day.
As for me, I'm in the second week of a two week holiday, spending it mostly sitting in the back garden alternating tea with cooling drinks and waiting until five o'clock when it's time to uncork dinner. The problem with this heat is that it seems to have an effect upon alcohol, the body or both. One glass of wine and the evening is more or less written off and it's the most one can do to sit there cursing the heat and discussing the origin of the word 'torpor'.
Have yet to spot my favourite blazingly hot weather sight, that of the aged chap who, in defiance of the heat, is wearing a vest, shirt, tie and suit. Pity that the BBC competition doesn't allow portraits of people because sights like that ARE the British landscape.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/apictureofbritain/
To accompany the series, the BBC has launched a digital picture of Britain competition on its web-site. Enthusiastic snappers are invited to submit their photographs of Britain, to make up a gallery. It's interesting and heart-warming stuff - a sort of anti-happy slapping. Normally when one sees modern photography or a photo-essay about Britain, the photographer seems to go out of his way to get a picture of an empty crisp packet blowing across some scene of urban desolation, usually featuring a burned-out car. or, as it is more popularly known, Essex.
The photographs are pretty much of a mixed bag, although there is a tendency towards trying to capture photographically what the artists in the programme did in paint - not easy when they've built a shopping centre in most areas of outstanding natural beauty.
So I'm travelling with my camera these days, just in case I see something that would make a good landscape shot. This led me, yesterday, down the by-pass to where we have a McDonald's sitting next to a Tesco. I was trying to get a shot of the golden arches in the foreground with the blue and white fleecer in the background. Of course, this shot would be rendered perfection if the McDs car-park had been full of double-wide fatties waddling from their 4x4s to the burger joint, but no luck.
Got a couple of good shots, although this meant standing on the opposite side of the road and hence shooting over the roofs for cars stopped at the traffic lights. As I had my cycle helmet on (having cycled there rather than affecting to wear one at all times), I wonder if the drivers took me for some sort of green activist type. Why else would a cyclist be taking pictures of McDs? This would account for the scowls I got from the people in the 4x4 who were in one shot. The scowls only visible when I downloaded the shot to computer.
I can see now why people want to take pictures of lovely places rather than taking pictures of the McDs and Tesco that now, unfortunately, contribute to our landscape...they are ugly! Obviously these things are designed and manufactures in some factory in Guildford and then arrive in sections on flatbeds and are erected overnight. They lack any concession to the local environment, the McDs I was photographing looked like it would not be out of place in Arsehole, Kansas or Kowbutcherbaad, Ukraine. I imagine that some farmer can sign the sale agreement one night on his field and by the time he opens his curtains the next morning he's looking at the queue for the drive-through and somebody is asking him about happy meals.
So trying to capture corporate blah and shimmering tarmac was a bit of a bust. Instead, I decided to go in search of a photograph of something quintessentially English - the bowling green in the park over the road. Beryl Cook may make bowling greens look interesting in her paintings, but that's only because she populates them with randy Majors poking fat matrons up the bum as they bend over to take their bowl. While there's something lovely about a perfect square of close cropped grass, it makes for a very dull photograph. Okay then - next project...the allotments next to the park. Again, a bit of a disappointment. While we all know that allotments are places of danger, intrigue and cow-dung and that every shed hides a still and a collection of pornography so eye-watering that its use is forbidden in most of the EU, this is very hard to convey in a photograph. What was actually there were a few wheelbarrows, a few sheds and what appears to be the biggest crop of sweet peas outside of the main supplier for Tesco.
Cycling around these places at the moment is no fun, as the heat here in the UK this week is best described as punishing. The sun beats down relentlessly and the English seem to be as unprepared for this as they are for snow, rain and all other seasonal norms. Young girls walk by with shoulders the colour of post-boxes, office workers make a concession by shedding their jackers, all the better to display the damp patches they have been growing all day.
As for me, I'm in the second week of a two week holiday, spending it mostly sitting in the back garden alternating tea with cooling drinks and waiting until five o'clock when it's time to uncork dinner. The problem with this heat is that it seems to have an effect upon alcohol, the body or both. One glass of wine and the evening is more or less written off and it's the most one can do to sit there cursing the heat and discussing the origin of the word 'torpor'.
Have yet to spot my favourite blazingly hot weather sight, that of the aged chap who, in defiance of the heat, is wearing a vest, shirt, tie and suit. Pity that the BBC competition doesn't allow portraits of people because sights like that ARE the British landscape.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/apictureofbritain/
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