Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Photography: The Colour of Shadows

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As shown in a previous blog, this is a picture of my grandparents’ garden in Headington, Oxford, taken sometime in the mid 1970s.

This was, growing up, a very special place for me…

…I remember well my grandad’s vegetable patch, the plastic greenhouse and the Victoria plum tree (all shown above);  the brick outhouses with their giant spiders (in which the red tricycle was kept); the large apple tree and the wooden lattice-work gate. I remember too the giant Christmas tree (pictured below behind the fir tree), planted – when the tree was considerably smaller – when my mum was a girl.

The following two photographs were also taken in Headington, some 60 years earlier at the time of the First World War (or a few years before – the second photograph is possibly 1908). They are by one of the pioneers of autochrome photography, Ethelreda Laing and show her two daughters, Janet and Iris.

What’s interesting about these photographs is that they were taken in what is now Bury Knowle Park at a time when the house was a private residence. What makes them even more interesting is the fact they are in colour. But what is it about a colour photograph that enables me to better connect with the referent? (This is a subject I started to discuss before: see ‘Empathy and the First World War (Part 2)‘.)

The photograph below shows me and my brother in the garden of the house where we grew up, also in Headington.

This photograph which, like the photograph from Bury Knowle, shows two children enjoying the garden, was taken c.1974. Looking at it now, I’m drawn to the patterns of light and shadow on the fence behind.
The fences were always well creosoted and when the sun shone they exuded a wonderful smell. I can smell it now, just by looking at this image, but what is more, I can feel the pattern of sun and shadow, the sensation of the cool dry earth below – the smell of the firs. It’s a synaesthetic image in that I can almost taste the pattern.
If the image above was in black and white, I doubt I’d have the same response. When we look at an image in black and white, it seems to me that our memory is stimulated less than if the image is in colour. When looking at photographs taken long before we were born this hardly seems to matter, but when looking at a colour image – such as that of the girls above – taken long ago, something strange seems to happen.
It seems to me, that a colour photograph is more likely to trigger a physical response than one which is black and white.
First of all, I’ll look at a selection of black and white images.
The image below is of my mum and dad. It was taken c.1960 in my grandparents’ garden (as can be gleaned from the windows – seen in the second image above).
This image, of course, elicits a response in that I recognise my parents and the location. But that is all.
The next image was taken at Carfax, Oxford in 1893 and shows St. Aldates looking south towards Christ Church.
The image also elicits a response in that although most of the buildings shown have all disappeared, Tom Tower – in the distance – is still standing. I recognise the location as one I have experienced countless times before – although of course I could not have experienced what is shown in the photograph. 
Looking at the photo more closely, one does begin to establish an empathetic response based on more than just recognition.
Again this is something I have talked about before but here, empathy is established through the movement of the man and woman. They have no idea that they are being photographed, an obliviousness which is vital for an empathetic response. It is an image of now, of the everyday. We can easily imagine the man and woman, unfrozen by time and the camera’s shutter, continuing up past the old Town Hall towards Carfax, deep in conversation.
But how do old photographs differ when they are in colour?
This photograph was taken 13 years after the one above and what strikes me about it, is the fact that like the one above, taken in my garden, I can feel it. And what I feel is the temperature difference between the shadows and the lawn where the sun is shining. I can imagine the texture of the grass and the tree, I can hear the wind and feel the air; and yet this photograph was taken 108 years ago. The shadows are living – they are not dead as they can often be in black and white photographs; they have a colour.
The same can be said of the next image, taken during the First World War.
One can feel the light, the heat of the sun; the cool of the shadows. Again the shadows live. The image too is abundant with texture which I know would be absent if the image was in black and white.
It seems to me that I’m responding to these images kinaesthetically; my mind, memories and experience read them, which is why perhaps I find often these old colour photographs – while amazing – so unsettling. My mind reads them, my body feels them and yet when the image was taken, I did not exist. There is a conflict between existence and non-existence; the age old tussle between life and death.
There is no time in the past; all those things shown in the images above are as much a part of the past as each other. All there is to separate them is a rule against which, the increasing improbability of my coming into being is measured.

Movement, Knowledge and Description

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Having read Tim Ingold’s book ‘Lines – a Brief History‘, I downloaded another of his books entitled ‘Being Alive, Essays in Movement, Knowledge and Description‘ as the title seemed to suggest it would be of interest to me insofar as my work on empathy and the past has found itself returning time and again to ideas of movement and knowledge; empathy is, I believe, an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge, and my aim as an artist is to articulate empathy through the description of this conversation between individuals and the landscape.

“It is by moving that we know, and it is by moving, too, that we describe,” writes Ingold early on in the book, which seems to bode well for my research and my search for the form that on an artistic level my research should take .

I’ve recently been working with the form of the folded map, inspired as I’ve written before by an old trench map which I recently purchased. In particular, I’m interested in the folds of the map, the creases which show that the map was used and in the possession of an individual. In ‘Lines – a Brief History‘ Ingold draws a parallel between creases in materials such as paper and the creases one finds on the palm of your hand which reinforces the connection between owner and object.

I’ve been wondering how I can develop this idea. I’ve already completed a ‘text map’ based on observations made over the course of several walks (below) but I want to develop the idea graphically as well.

I thought about the concept of a map and what the aesthetic of the folded paper alludes to. I came up with the following:

  • the idea of a specific place or of place in general
  • the sense of that place – through the map object – as belonging to an individual
  • the idea of the individual
  • the idea of movement in and through a place whether in the past, present or future
  • the idea of movement preserved in the folds

What I want to do is articulate the idea of empathy as a discourse between bodily experience and knowledge. The text map above is a document of bodily experience which when written down and presented as a ‘map’ becomes knowledge which other individuals could theoretically use. Its shape and its folds allude both to the idea of place and of possession (the concept of an individual as a place is something else which I’ve been exploring over the past few years). But what about the circular nature of experience and knowledge?

The fact is, when we think about the past, we can only ever build a picture through tiny fragments – whether pieces of pot, miscellaneous artefacts like coins, pieces of text, letters and anecdotes (unfolding through enfolding). Each of the phrases on my text map is a fragment from which the wider picture can be extrapolated, just as with a fragment of pot, one not only builds an image of the pot but extrapolates the wide world to which it once belonged.

Bartlemas Chapel Excavation

The piece of pottery has something in common with the phrase: “leaves drowned in disappearing puddles”which I noted on one of my walks. It is also interesting that when I found the above piece of pottery, I also discovered – almost at the same time – a leaf, which was almost identical in colour. The transient nowness of the leaf then, serves – through its colour – to articulate the idea of the fragment of pot as being similar to the fragment of text.

A Flash of Genius at the London Art Fair

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Yesterday, at the London Art Fair, I found – amongst a plethora of ‘not very good’ and downright terrible art, an artist whose work – although disturbing -truly impressed me. It’s not the sort of work you’d want on your wall perhaps, or which would likely be snapped up by the likes of those idiots who it seemed were happy to shell out 5 grand for a print of one of Damien Hirst’s assistant’s facile spot paintings (albeit one signed by the Overlord of artistic tat), but its power was striking.

For a number of years I’ve looked to create work which facilitates an empathetic engagement with anonymous individual victims of past atrocities. This work has variously found its form in paintings, sculpture and mixed media pieces using documentary and archival material such as photographs. Where these photographs have been black and white, I’ve looked to see how colour might be used to foster that empathetic reaction.

David Birkin’s work, ‘Untitled I’ does everything that I have tried to do. It’s a brilliantly conceived work and one which is conceptually perfect. The work, disturbing as it is can be seen below.

The image shows a woman about to be shot by a German soldier. The woman, like so many of the Nazi’s victims is anonymous, one more human being to make up the grim toll of 6 million killed in the Holocaust. But where so many names have been forgotten, many of course remain, trapped – like flies in amber – in the meticulous records kept by those who carried out these unimaginable crimes.

The black and white photograph printed on the left of the image has been distorted with fragments of colour, and on the right of the image we find the computer code for the original digital image, into which Birkin has placed the name of one of the countless victims. This ‘anomaly’ in the code is revealed when the image – with the anomalous name – is reprinted. The distortion is the name as read by the computer.

It is a brilliant concept. The computer code, without the name, is to (most) human eyes, little more that an incomprehensible mass of letters and numbers. It’s the equivalent of the vast and grim statistic offered to us by history. Its equivalent image is black and white – a far cry from the reality of a world full of colour – the world we know and which every one of the six million victims knew. And yet when a name – an individual – is inserted, the image is changed (distorted) with a pattern of colours, reminding us that the world of the Holocaust was not black and white, but one full of colour, of summer days and everything which we take for granted today.

The average man, woman and child are not the types of people who normally make up history, unless they are heaped together as victims, masses and mobs. They are often anomalous where history is concerned, but nonetheless vital and full of colour, something which Birkin’s work brilliantly portrays.

Old Sky

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In response to my last blog entry, I remembered a painting by Howard Hodgkin which seemed to echo what I had written. It’s called ‘Old Sky’ and it’s a painting which, for me, is about the idea of that continuous cycle of time; of many cycles (single days) embedded in the cycle of years (which in terms of the pottery shard becomes a cycle of centuries).


The painting is an image of the end of a day and the remembered image of hundreds of days lost to memory and beyond. It’s about the act of remembering and the way the paint is applied to the frame becomes an attempt to reach beyond the limits of memory, to live again in the world when the memory was first formed. It’s almost frantic; an attempt not to forget what will certainly be forgotten. The frame remains intact, an acknowledgement perhaps that to relive a time that’s passed is impossible; that all that remains, inevitably, is a fragment of what has been.

As I alluded to in my blog, the relationship between colour and movement interests me a great deal and with this painting we have both colour and movement;  movement when the painting was made and the movement of the act of remembering itself. For me, this reflects the idea of the cycle of a day and its relationship to the cycle of centuries; the relationship between the leaf and the pottery shard found during the dig. When I look at the pottery shard (below) I try to picture the world from which it has come. It’s as if the edges of the shard are like the edges of the painting, and while we can’t return to the world from which the shard has come, we can with the aid of the present attempt to imagine it.

I wrote in my last blog entry how when I dug the shard out of the ground, the colours at once melted back into the world from which they’d been estranged. This idea serves to illustrate that of moving beyond the frame or the edges of the shard in an attempt to re-imagine the past; how the act of remembering is as much to do with the body as the imagination – how it’s a fusion of the two; a product of an embodied imagination; one which moves in the world just like those with whom we seek to empathise.


Leaf and Shard

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Out of a small pile of earth, greyish-brown in colour, a piece of brightly glazed pottery appeared as I scraped with my trowel. Although only a few centimetres across it was nonetheless striking given the colours of its glaze; an orangey-yellow and warm reddish-brown, as vivid perhaps as when it was a whole piece of pottery in use however many centuries ago.


Colour, in this example, becomes for me a vehicle for a more empathetic engagement with the past (a theme central to my work). The colour of the sky, the apples on the trees, the trees themselves and the grass were one with the colours of this small fragment of pottery, which until that moment had remained hidden for (perhaps) hundreds of years. It was as if, rather than a shard of pottery, a piece of colour (or colours) from a day hundreds of years ago had lain buried in the soil; colours which at once melted back into the world from which they’d been estranged so long .

Pulling this shard from the almost monochromatic soil, was like looking at an old black and white photograph, where one imagines colour then movement. And looking up at the chapel, at the world moving all around me, I could, in that split second, glimpse the mediaeval past, acknowledging that that distant time was (although very different) just like the world today; there were colours and movement, experienced by individuals just like me and whoever had used whatever the fragment had once been a part of.

A little later as I continued to dig, I found a leaf inside my trench which had blown in from the side. The colours were very similar to that of the pottery (although they have darkened since). And once again this link between the past and present came to the fore. I was thrown back to a mediaeval autumn and imagined autumn in that very spot centuries ago. Like a chain reaction, I imagined the buildings, the road nearby, the walk into town. What was Oxford like at the time as the world moved towards the winter?


This single leaf (pictured above) is pregnant with the passage of time, the unrelenting march of time through another year, towards its end. The colours are like a sunset; the end of a year, the end of a day. But after night comes morning and after winter, the promise of spring. This idea of a continuous cycle seems embodied in both the leaf and the shard. One is young, the other very old – they turn or move in different ‘orbits’ – but nonetheless, in their colours, they have something in common; something I have in common with the individual who owned the pottery (from which the fragment comes) centuries ago; that is, we are part of the same world.

Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin 2

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Since carrying out the observation of the Roman Coin discovered during a dig on 11th June I’ve been thinking about the coin in greater detail. One of the things which interests me about it are the vivid colours formed during its time in the ground; in particular those on the reverse side of the head, as can be seen in the image below:

Colours on a Roman Coin

It’s easy to think of the coin as having occupied two distinct periods (i.e. the 3rd century and today) and that it’s almost two distinct entities; the ‘new’ coin of some 1700 years ago, and the clipped and rather decayed coin it is now.  But of course this coin is a singular entity which has occupied a span of time covering a range of years difficult for us to imagine. To borrow from Bill Viola, this coin has ‘lived’ this same continuous moment ever since it was ‘conceived’ – or in this case minted – and for much of its existence, it’s been laying out of sight, in silence, underground.

At some point 1700 years ago,  the coin (we might assume) was lost and during the dig a week or so ago it was found. I find it easier however, to conceive of the coin’s entire existence if I forget these two ‘divisions’ and think instead of the coin as always existing – not lost or found, just always there – somewhere. Stating that it was first lost and then found creates a kind of void in between, in which the coin just sits – not really existing at all. Of course the coin was in existence for hundreds of years; before the city of Oxford was even established, and throughout the time during which it was made ancient. And in that time, beneath the ground, things were acting upon it, slowly changing its shape and colour; to make the beautiful colours we see today. The colours therefore can be linked to the passing of time – to the coin’s continuous existence. There’s a correlation between the passing of time and the formation of the various colours.

There is also something rather poetic about this as regards the way we imagine the past. For me, the distant past is often a dark and silent place (in the sense that it’s largely unknowable – not that it really was dark and silent) but one in which there was movement and colour – just as with the coin beneath the ground. Although out of sight to us today, we know that that things moved, that things were formed, that entities acted upon or influenced other entities. That there was of course colour.

Thinking about the coin a little more, I realised how else it’s changed from the 3rd century AD. Back then it wouldn’t have been valued as an object in its own right per se, but rather in regards to what it represented, i.e. a monetary unit. If I have a pound coin in my hand, I don’t value the object (the coin) so much as what it represents (a pound sterling). Now of course, the Roman coin’s original monetary value has been lost and it’s the coin as an object which has become important.

Belzec Video: Snow 3

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What interests me about the video footage from the archaeological dig at Belzec (1999) is the sense of colour and movement. Often, when one is researching the Holocaust and sites like Belzec, most of the imagery one encounters is black and white and often still (although of course there is a great deal of moving footage as well).

As I’ve said, it’s difficult, given the quality of the footage, to make anything that would resemble a narrative of the investigation carried out there. So taking the idea of colour and movement as something I wanted to work with, I decided to process the video and to use a mosaic filter to reduce the image to pure forms.

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I produced a series of paintings based on this idea in a work entitled ‘A Single Death is a Tragedy, a Million Deaths is a Statistic.’ I was looking at the idea of anonymity and the past as anonymous (something which I’m still looking at today) reducing the image of a man, through a series of canvases to a single coloured pixel.

One of the ways of understanding an event as horrific as the Holocaust on an empathetic level (as far as is possible) is through understanding that the past was once the present that what happened in places such as Belzec happened when the past was now. When I sit here now and look out the window, I see the trees move, I see their colours, I see the sky, the clouds drifting and so on. I see movement and colour.

Whenever I look at images of the past, especially those in black and white, I try to imagine the scene as if it was now. I colour it, I imagine what happened immediately after the shutter was released. The smallest details become especially important. When I myself visited Belzec in 2007, I was aware of the world moving all around me, of the trees especially; of the sounds they made and the colour. Putting this together with what I knew had happened there, enabled me in some small way to empathise with those who died.

The stills below are taken from the processed video and even though they reduce the place to pixels (and therefore render it anonymous) there is something about the individual squares of colour which serve somehow to represent both the anonymous individual and the nownes of the present.

Mosaic Stills

Mosaic Stills

Mosaic Stills

Empathy and the First World War (Part 2)

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This image was taken almost a year after the end of the First World War, on August 27th 1919 and is unusual in that, unlike the vast majority of photographs from this period, it’s in colour. What it shares with the image I described previously however – see Empathy and the First World War (Part 1) – is that it shows the process of burying the dead, long after the last guns have fired. We don’t see any corpses here, but we see the holes in the ground. On the right hand side, three crosses mark recent burials, while seven men look at the camera. A man sitting down by the tree seems to be writing.
With this photograph I can, perhaps not surprisingly, engage much more easily on an empathetic level compared with that I discussed previously. The colour and the texture of the soil, which the colour conveys, means that I can almost feel the ground. I can imagine walking into it, whereas with the previous image I’m kept at a distance. This photograph is about the soil and if the previous image seemed to me, to be about the thin divide between life and death, this image seems to say much the same thing. Like the (living) men in the previous image, these men are also all dead. The graves they’ve dug could easily be their own. But whereas the men in the previous image were looking at the bodies of their fallen friends, the gravediggers in this image, look directly at us. This is what awaits us all.

In many respects then, this image is, for me, quite an unsettling one – even more than that I discussed before. ‘The men that we’re about to bury,’ the men seem to be saying, ‘are just like you’. (I was reminded, looking at this image, of the fact that when soldiers marched to the front, just before an attack, they sometimes saw the huge pits dug in preparation for their deaths.)

But would such interpretations arise if the image were black and white? My feeling is they wouldn’t and having made the image monochrome, I can see why.

For one thing, it ceases to be an image into which I feel I could step; it remains very much an image. Colour delineates distance, whereas in black and white the image seems a lot flatter. (I have to point out that I’m not suggesting black and white photos don’t convey distance, or that this colour image, made black and white accurately reflects how it would look if shot on black and white film. The autochrome process, when made black and white like this, makes the resulting image very grainy). Secondly, the men no longer seem to be looking at me, but rather at the photographer. But most importantly, as a black and white image, this picture ceases to be about the soil, the substance which, during the war claimed both the living and the dead. The distinction between the soil and the grass is lost – a distinction which, in light of the time (1919), is especially poignant. Nature returns to reclaim what’s hers, and following the gaze of the diggers, that includes us. World War I was about, amongst many other things, the soil and vast ruination – and that is what this image is about. The grass comes as it comes upon castles ruined over long stretches of time. But as Christopher Woodward writes in his book In Ruins ‘Nature’s agent does not have to be flowers or fig-trees. In the case of Van Gogh, it was the miserable mud of Flanders.’

I see this photograph very much in terms of its texture. I see its weight, as if its colour makes it synaesthetic: I see in terms of touch. Empathy – as regards an empathetic understanding of this image – does not mean I empathise with what these men were doing when the photograph was taken, or what they too had certainly endured in the preceding years of war, but that I can see this moment as having once been now. As I wrote before, if anything hinders an empathetic engagement with the war, it’s the sense that it’s always already happened. In this image, it has already happened, but the wounds are still raw.

Empathy is a dialogue between bodily experience and knowledge. Visiting a battlefield, what we know of the war influences our bodily experience and vice-versa. Empathy is in many respects articulated through metaphor. The same is true of the photograph; but whereas on a battlefield we stand in the landscape, we can only look at the image, such is where a synaesthetic response is so important, and synaesthesia is after all a kind of metaphorical discourse.

Colour

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Each string (in what I have so far called the ‘net’) represents in its ‘cut end’ the end of a path, the end of a life. Each string also represents a life entire as measured by the three fates. Furthermore they could be said, as a group to represent the combination of paths which, at a specific moment in time created one of the many terrible moments of the Holocaust. Also, the image of the whole represents the sum of the snatched visions of the tower at Birkenau (the drawings).

Of the physical appearance of the net, the following quote from Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ is very pertinent:

“I also have my crochet,
It dates from when I began to think,
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole,
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing,
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.”

The image of the net looks like a ‘dream-catcher’ and in many ways that works in respect of this theme; dreams which many would have had of going back home, trapped in its strings. (There is also the idea of the writes of the telegraph poles carrying messages out of the camp and across Europe).

I was also thinking today about work by two of my colleagues which was very much to do with colour. This made me look at my own work (which is anything but colourful) and the subsequent contrast interested me. It reminded me of a television programme I watched last night about the photographer Albert-Kahn who documented the First World War in colour photographs. When we think of the past, in terms of the war, pre-war and Victorian periods, we think of it in terms of black and white. When we see colour photographs of the First World War they seem to validate reality – the very fact of time before we were born.

In my work there is no colour as such, but it is there, just as colour is there in Black and White photographs.

12-11-07
In the image above, I was reminded of the stained glass windows in the many tombs of Montmartre and Pere Lachaise cemeteries. The lines of the image (of the net) could just as easily be the lead work of a broken stained-glass window; what is missing of course is the colour.

Pere Lachaise, Paris

Colour could be a validating factor in this case. Often when we think of the Holocaust or World War One for example, we see them in Black and White (like the cats (although evidence suggests they may have limited colour vision) we saw in the cemetery); we often think of the weather as being dull, grey, miserable, always winter, and when we read evidence of the time that talks of blue sky and sun, it always seems somehow shocking. The following is an extract from Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen.”

“‘…You have no idea how tremendous the world looks when you fall out of a closed, packed freight car! The sky is so high…’
‘…and blue…’
‘Exactly, blue, and the trees smell wonderful. The forest – you want to take it in your hand!'”

When imagining arrival at somewhere like Birkenau, one imagines it being night, or the smoke from the chimneys hiding the sky like a fog. But of course, people would have arrived on beautiful summer days, when colour was abundant.

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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