May 13, 2020

Derek Clark

Definitions

Definition 018 | Travel

May 13, 2020

Derek Clark

Definitions

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

Apart from not being able to see family and friends during this pandemic, the two things I miss most are street photography and travel. No matter if it’s trains, planes, or automobiles (boats too), I love the feeling of going somewhere! Of being on the move! It’s probably the possibilities of what might lie ahead, a blank notebook, memory cards to fill, miles to walk and explore.

I love the feeling of being self-contained, only carrying what I need and only needing what I carry. Headphones, iPad, notebook and pen. Two or three small cameras and the bare minimum of lenses. I know when I’m in the right place because I don’t want to go home. But still - I could keep moving, exploring, discovering all things new.

Who knows what travel will look like in the months or even years to come. Maybe it will go back to normal, maybe it never will. Hopefully, we won’t feel like other humans are a threat for much longer. I for one miss being in a crowd with a 28mm or 35mm lens.

TO THE BAT CAVE. Depending on where you get your information - Covid-19 might be their gift to us…or their revenge.

March 17, 2020

Derek Clark

Essay

Definition 010 | The Story Of Her Beauty

March 17, 2020

Derek Clark

Essay

PHOTOGRAPHY & TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

There is only a handful of things that defines me and most of them involve photography. I spoke about street photography in my first Definitions post last month, which is a form of documentary photography. But I also like straight-up photojournalistic stories that are plain and simple, with no frills. What you see is how it was, and all the better if it has an impact on the viewer.

Documentary photographers have to keep their eyes and ears open for opportunities to tell someone’s story. It’s very easy to miss the chance of a good story simply because you were not paying attention to the signs in front of you. Almira simply wanted a portrait taken the night before her operation. She was about to go through gruelling surgery that would be life-changing and the outcome was uncertain. This is the story of her beauty, a title I got from a conversation with Almira.

Almira’s body language shows the apprehension the night before the operation

Almira contracted German Measles when she was just a few months old in the Philippines, which led to facial disfigurement. An operation was performed many years ago that involved inserting a piece of bone into her jaw, but that bone started to grow and it began to restrict movement. Eating would become a problem unless she received an operation to fix this. She has lived in Scotland for many years with her husband Alex, and although it has taken almost 5 years, the operation was finally scheduled.

We left for the hospital the following morning at 6 am, setting off early in case of traffic but arriving so early that the nurses had not even started their shift. We waited outside the ward, mostly in silence. When the nurse finally opened the door and led Almira and Alex down the corridor to the waiting room, she explained that the ward was empty because no other surgeries were scheduled for that day. She joked with Almira about how special she was to get the full unit dedicated to her. The nurse let Almira and Alex say their goodbyes and then led her off down the corridor until they were both gone.

A nurse leads Almira down a corridor toward the operating theatre

The surgery to repair Almira's jaw with titanium was scheduled to last 5 or 6 hours, but she was in theatre for a total of 13 hours. The following day we arrived at the hospital to find Almira asleep on the bed. She looked like she had been through a war, battered, bruised and swollen. She woke-up and was helped to straighten up on the bed, still drugged heavily, but possibly not heavily enough. She struggled to eat some chocolate mousse, which along with soup and ice cream, would be her only food for the foreseeable future.

Almira was discharged the following day. It was hard to believe the difference from when I had last seen her the day before propped up and looking like she had been used as a punching bag. As she entered the elevator and looked in the mirror, it was as though she was staring into the face of a long lost sister. She held on to a tub of ice cream, even though it would be melted by the time she got home.

Almira stares at her face in the elevator mirror

Almira shows pictures on her phone from when she was a baby - before the German Measles attack.

Almira was back at the hospital a week later to have the staples removed from her head and the stitches from her face. The surgeon had made incisions each side of her eyes and packed them so that each eye would be more level. The wound ran from almost the top of her head down the front of her ear, with a second scar on her jaw.

She had suffered a lot of pain to get this far and she was anxious about the staples being removed. The nurse gently parted her hair to reveal the scar and then proceeded to remove the staples one by one. Almira held the second nurse's hand and gripped it even more tightly each time a staple was removed, her swollen face grimacing with the discomfort. When the staples had been removed the nurse then started to snip each suture, before removing it with tweezers.

Almira anxiously waits for the staples to be removed from her head, and the sutures from her jaw and next to her eye.

When it was over, Almira looked relieved with an almost child-like expression. It was the end of this procedure. But there may be more surgery needed in the future. For now, all that was left was to heal and have the braces removed from her teeth that were fitted to hold everything together during the operation.

Thanks to Almira for allowing the world to see her at her most vulnerable. People have to throw vanity out of the window to allow documentary photographers to tell real stories. That takes real bravery.

A special thanks to all the people that make the UK’s health service one of the best in the world. We are on the brink of the most devastating health crisis in over 100 years, and even though the NHS has been getting underfunded for the past decade, the amazing doctors, nurses and all the other staff will give everything. Sadly for some that could mean giving their lives.

January 22, 2020

Derek Clark

Essay, Definitions

Definition 002 | God's Lonely Man

January 22, 2020

Derek Clark

Essay, Definitions

BY DEREK CLARK

““The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.””

— Thomas Wolfe

I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but that quote has followed me almost all my life. It has been moving around in my mind for decades, sometimes slipping to the back, sometimes pushing to the front. I’ve spent a good part of my life being alone and you could say a chunk of my teenage years and my early 20’s being a loner. But although I’ve found the perfect mate, I have two great kids, and a small but tight group of close friends, being alone is an important part of who I am. As a general rule; the larger the group of people, the more alone I feel. But when this is applied to the streets, something is different.

Kids have got it backward these days. They (and I’m generalizing) have this lust to be famous. To be recognised. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I love to move through crowds of people without them taking the tiniest bit of notice of me. I’m a documentary photographer and as we work through 2020 and our Definition project evolves, that should become apparent. I consider street photography to be at least part of my documentary work. Perhaps it’s the purest form of documentary?

Catching a train and heading to the city to shoot on the streets is my drug of choice. I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t do drugs (not even prescribed ones). But I crave the ultimate me-time. Just like being an alcoholic or a drug addict, a loner is always in recovery...we just fall off the wagon more often. It’s lonely out there on the street with only a rectangular box and a piece of glass for company, but I love it. I walk an average of nine miles in a typical day’s shooting. Sometimes I’ll pick a spot and shoot for a while when the light is right and falling the right way. I have places I hang around as the sun is going down because I know it bounces off the buildings and funnels into a perfect pool of light for an all too brief amount of time. But mostly I just keep walking. As Alex Webb has said

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch, and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the next corner.”

— Alex Webb

So I savour each trip to the streets. Sometimes listening to the sound of the city, the traffic, the arguments, the beggars, the over-enthusiastic preachers. But quite often I have my earphones in, listening to various movie soundtracks and making the act of street photography that little bit more cinematic (in my head at least). And if you will forgive me for using just one more quote from Robert DeNiro, this time in the movie Heat. “I’m alone. I am not lonely.” On the street at least.

This is why I don’t take drugs…you never know where they’ve been.

May 27, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

Time In Motion

May 27, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

GENERATOR

Guidance: Decorate, decorate.

Assignment: Today you must shoot moving vehicles or individual motion, using a lens closest to 135 millimeters (35 equivalent) and your best camera.

Photography & Text By Derek Clark

Shoot vehicles or individual motion. I started out using a tripod in the middle of the day with a variable ND. I hated the colour cast and I just wasn’t getting what I wanted. So I moved to nighttime, still on a tripod. I shot light trails over a motorway, but that’s been done to death. In fact, I have a slide that I shot on the opposite bridge to this one from 1979 or 1980. Light trails with a horrible green colour cast, but it worked and it was an important shot in my early development in photography.

So I took the camera off the tripod. I shot handheld out of focus shots of moving vehicles, eventually arriving at the idea to shoot moving vehicles with a moving camera at around a 5-second exposure. Vehicles moving, camera moving and time is moving.

April 23, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

In The Second City of the Empire

April 23, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

PHOTOGRAPHY & TEXT By DEREK CLARK

I’m a street photographer, and for me that equates to candid pictures without asking permission. But for this latest Kage assignment, I wanted to get out on the street and ask if I could take peoples portrait. I went out with a Hasselblad 500c/m with an 80/2.8 and an X-Pro2 with a 50/2. I wanted to capture the men of Glasgow with as much character on their faces as possible.

An old man near the train station was causing a bit of a commotion with a piece of religious artwork. Although he looked impoverished, he had actually commissioned an artist to create this painting and having just collected it (on his wheelchair), he wanted to show it off.

I was given a poem about a female athlete by the man with the silver hair and I was asked on several occasions if I was from the press. People are suspicious about cameras these days. It seams that if you shoot with anything other than a phone, you must be press or up to something dodgy, even with an old Hasselblad.

Around one in three said yes to having their portrait taken. In the end I only used two shots from the Hasselblad due to a problem with the lens. Medium format film or a 1.5 crop sensor, can you tell which two are from the Hasselblad without looking at the metadata?

February 21, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

Amused To Death

February 21, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

Photography & Text by Derek Clark

“But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise.
They logged the only explanation left.
This species has amused itself to death
”

— Roger Waters

We have finally reached the dream. Affordable goods and enough money to buy them. A lot of them in fact. Items that lasted for a decade or more are now being replaced yearly (helped I’m sure by manufacturers building things NOT to last). With the advent of the internet, we shop almost daily. We use YouTube to show us shiny new toys by our modern day evangelists and then use the affiliate link springboard like an Olympic diver, landing headfirst into the deep blue pool of the Amazon. There we swim around, basking in the majesty of it all. Delivery by 9 pm tonight. Fat arses clad in pajamas need not leave the sofa. We shop like our lives depended on it and feel good because we are a Prime member. Yes, a Prime member in every sense of those two words!

We shop constantly and it makes us feel great. Yes, it makes us feel great for around 10 seconds after we press that buy button. But don't worry, there's still the thrill of waiting for delivery. But we might as well go back to YouTube and take a look at the accessories, just in case we might need them. And so it continues. The chase for the transparent dangling carrot.

The truth is; the more we consume, the more empty we feel. We're not filling a hole...we're digging one. Shame we can't use that hole as a landfill to dump all that crap we bought. But there is another truth that is just as serious. We are prisoners and we are slaves. We work to make money. Money to buy stuff. That stuff will need to be replaced whenever the manufacturer decides they want more of your money. The cost of these goods increase but income rarely does. You want better, you want more. So you buy on credit and you work more to pay for it, and so the cycle continues. But at least you have that giant screen TV to sit in front of after each hard working day. Entertainment to numb the empty feeling consumerism brings to the table. All over the world, millions of us are sitting in front of bright screens. It's as though we are waiting to be amused to death.

X100

You probably know by now that we are shooting this month [Consumerism] essays using our oldest digital cameras. I first moved to digital using Olympus and then Nikon, but those cameras are long gone now. So the original X100 is my oldest digital and my oldest Fuji camera.

I looked back to see when I got the X100 and my first shot was taken on the 22nd of March 2011 (I think I bought the camera the day before). The image above was shot with this X100 three days later and although this looks like some sort of protest, it is actually people waiting on the Apple store to open on the release day of the latest iPhone. The queue actually goes around the corner and up the next street too.

So my X100 has come full circle, covering consumerism in 2011 and now again in 2019. I wish I could say I’ve enjoyed using this camera again, but although I have a soft spot for my original X-Series camera, it just made it blatantly obvious how far these cameras have come in the past eight years. So it's going back in the box, and a very nice box it is too. It's more like a jewelry box than a camera box. A far cry from the poor cardboard boxes we get these days.

*This post was partly inspired by Roger Water's ‘Amused To Death’, which is the title track from what is, in my opinion, the greatest rock n’ roll album in the last 40 years. That album was inspired by the book of the same name.

**You can win an imaginary balloon and whistle if you name all the gear pictured in the table shot. The prize will be sent via telepathic thought waves on the first Sunday during the week.

January 21, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

Constant Renewal

January 21, 2019

Derek Clark

Essay

Photography & Text by Derek Clark

Constant
ADJECTIVE
Occurring over a period of time.
Remaining the same over a period of time.
(of a person) Unchangingly faithful and dependable.
NOUN
A situation that does not change.

Glasgow, like most cities, is changing rapidly. But you may have noticed that the older something gets, the better the chance of survival. The Provan's Lordship is the oldest house in Glasgow. It's a stones-throw away from Glasgow Cathedral and was built by Bishop Andrew Muirhead for the chaplain of nearby St Nicholas Hospital in 1471. I was lucky to have the place to myself when I visited recently and I have to say that it was more than a little eerie. You can practically feel the history in each room as you make your way through the house.

Nearby graves at Glasgow Cathedral have alphabet gardens growing in the engravings of the tombstones. Nature takes back everything eventually and here the soil has blown into the channels, followed be seed. constant growth; Constant renewal. Nothing ever stands completely still.

A short walk towards the city centre reveals the latest area for architectural renewal. Glasgow College and the surrounding area has seen a massive change in the past few years with building after building being erected at great speed (at least for someone who lives outside the city). But if I had to put my money on which of these buildings would still be standing in 100 years, The old Provan's Lordship would win hands down.

An old London bus passes by the modern architecture, the rattle of the Diesel engine cutting through the quiet like a chainsaw. It heads toward the Provan's Lordship. A link between new and old.

December 20, 2018

Derek Clark

Essay

The Hidden Lane

December 20, 2018

Derek Clark

Essay

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

DECEMBER 20th, 2018

Back in March this year, I shot some pictures of The Hidden Lane. This post has been sitting as a draft since then as it didn’t tie in with whatever we were doing around that time on Kage. Although it’s a bit out of season, I thought it would be a good idea to put this out as my last Kage post of the year. Sort of clearing out the cupboard so to speak.

When I revisited this post I was struck by how bright and colourful it was. I’m not sure if it was denial or a sense of false hope, but it surprised me that 2017 was not all doom and gloom (even though most of it actually was).

MARCH 20th, 2017

Like the wardrobe leading to Narnia, a typical close on a Glasgow street leads to the Hidden Lane. To be honest, there is actually a sign telling passersby it's there (businesses gotta survive), but it's still a bit of a surprise when you go through the close and arrive inside the Lane.

Brightly coloured doors and even a large building painted in the brightest yellow paint let you know you have arrived somewhere a little different. Different for Glasgow at least as we're not known for bright colours on buildings (although some of the islands off the west coast do embrace that sort of thing). There is actually a slightly odd feeling of stepping into another country, no doubt helped by the sudden appearance of sunshine on the day I visited.

I stepped into the tea shop and ordered a cup of tea and a piece of walnut cake. Sipping my tea from an old China cup that reminds me of visiting my granny as a child, I chat with the waitress about the lane. She tells me that one of the offices belonged to an MP from the Green Party and another was used for restoring antique furniture. I ask if it's ok to take a few pictures inside the tea room and with permission, grab my X-Pro2 and X100F and shoot a few photographs. The waitress comments on my cameras and asks if they are old film cameras. I wish I had brought the Hasselblad as I had intended, but wanted to travel light as I would probably be doing a lot of walking today.

I step out of the tea room and into the cold air, I turn right and enter an alley with brightly coloured doors. The second door is open and I look inside to see a young woman restoring an antique bench. Stepping inside, and with her permission, I shoot a few pictures and chat to her while she works. The bench is around one hundred years old and when she has finished it will hopefully be in use for another hundred or so. Isn’t that what we all wish for? That our work will live on after we’ve gone?

November 15, 2018

Derek Clark

Essay

100 Years And Still As Stupid

November 15, 2018

Derek Clark

Essay

By Derek Clark

The war to end all wars. Obviously, that was just a suggestion and not something to be taken too seriously, because it’s fair to say there have been a few wars since the first world war ended exactly a century ago on November 11th, 1918. I looked at the Google Machine to see how many wars there have been in the last hundred years, but it’s nearly impossible to get an accurate number. The number of deaths due to war in the 20th and 21st century is also hard to work out, but between 118 and 187 million, give or take.

It’s hard to figure us humans out as a species. We watch movies (for fun) that are mostly about killing each other. Lone gunmen shooting crowds of people are becoming the norm and each time it happens there’s an outrage (for a very short time at least), but we don’t bat an eye when thousands die every day on the other side of the world.

I went to the Remembrance Day parade in Glasgow on Sunday. It was busier than previous years obviously, due to the 100 anniversary of the end of WW1. It’s an emotional experience and an important event. I have so much respect for the men and women in the forces, but not so much for the powers that be, who send them to foreign soil based often on reasons far removed from those of World War II, but more to do with power or money.

We commemorate. But we don’t seem to learn.

October 16, 2018

Derek Clark

chronicle90

October 15, 2018 at 20:10 PM (Lake District, England)

October 16, 2018

Derek Clark

chronicle90

By Derek Clark

I thought last weeks Chronicle90 post was my last, but it turns out I had one more to do (this one). I’m in the Lake District in England with very poor wifi, so this has been a challenge to get posted. We visited an aquarium today with various creatures, both in and out of water. The ants were by far the most fascinating and i could have watched them for hours.

Later on, I headed to Lake Windermere for a spot of long exposure photography. That went well until my X-T3 fell off the tripod while walking back to the car. Luckily the battery grip saved the camera from receiving any damage in the 5’ fall to the ground. I can’t say the same for the battery grip though. At least it’s still usable.