Anything but the Highway

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND BERT STEPHANI

I chose this picture by Derek Clark from his essay Death by 74 cuts to use as my theme. I love the graphic nature of that image although I’m usually trying to stay away from highways. I had a busy week and very little spare time to get on my bike AND shoot a story, so I tried to combine both.

Anything but the Highway

I get the idea: the fastest way to go from A to B. It’s useful but the fastest way is usually not the most interesting one. Whenever I can, I take the backroads. And ever since I saved up enough money to buy my first mountainbike when I was 16, I’ve been attracted to the even smaller unpaved roads. For decades one after the other was asphalted for the sake of progress. But in the last few years, it seems like there’s a renewed appreciation of unpaved roads and paths. Even some new slow roads are built without concrete or asphalt.

It was only when I was brainstorming about this story that I came to understand that the unpaved roads serve as a metaphor for the ways I choose to travel in my life and career as well.

Death By 74 Cuts

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

I chose this picture by Patrick La Roque from his essay Puddles Are Windows and Fissures are Roads to use as my theme. I almost chose dogs, as I can see two dogs in the top left corner, but in the end I chose differently. The converging lines in that same corner reminded me of roads, and the top of the picture feels like decay. Possibly converging lines cutting through the underdogs?

Death By 74 CUTS

The city of Glasgow, like a lot of highly populated places, is going through constant change. The always present cranes across the city skyscrape erect building after building, rubbing out the old and redrawing the new. But this only makes the places that are being left behind stand out; a slow painful demise. Tradeston is one such place, an industrial area that has been neglected for years. Decades of decay joined with decades of graffiti and vandalism.

In 2011, the M74 motorway was completed. Although construction started in 1966, the M74 didn’t reach its intended destination until 2011. This monster of a road rises up on stilts as it cuts a path straight through Tradeston, barely revealing what lies beneath to the unsuspecting drivers. But still, I’m drawn to this place, and I will probably return to document it more before it gets torn-down in favour of luxury flats or offices.

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The Chain: An Introduction

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By Patrick La Roque

One year of the pandemic. I’m sick of it, you’re sick of it…we’re all tired of hearing or reading about it. But I write this on March 11, 2021—the official, international commemorative day; it’s hard not to acknowledge. The flags here are at half-mast and the church bells rang as we observed one minute of silence. What some people have lost is beyond words.

It was clear from a recent meeting that all of us in the collective (like most of you, I’m sure) have also been deeply affected creatively. But it was obvious we all needed to get our act together and carry on. Feeling inspired may be hard, opportunities may still be few, but settling into apathy is the worst thing any of us could do. Eventually, it only leads to a mild dissolution of our soul.

Besides: life appears to finally be changing for the better. Jonas—our resident physician on the front lines—was vaccinated. We all should be in the coming months. We’ll step out of our closed circles again, tentatively at first, I imagine, but with increasing confidence.

We’re a stubborn bunch, us humans.

…

The Chain isn’t a theme, but a mechanism. We’ve decided to steer clear of an overarching subject this time, and instead use each story as a springboard for the next one. If you’re familiar with the surrealists’ exquisite cadaver (or corpse) technique, the concept is similar (1). The idea is that each of our individual essays will be inspired by an image from the one that came before. We’ll then have six days to find and prepare the following week’s content.

Of course, as the first one in line I get to cheat, don’t I? Well, sort of. Last week I read about a re-edition of Robert Adams’ Summer Nights, Walking, from Steidl. Leading me to New Topographics. I love the work behind this movement, but I’ve also always been envious of the name they chose. Downright jealous, really, of how powerful those words look on a page, the images they conjure, and how well they fit their subject: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Damn.

Long story short, I used this as my springboard, to force myself into a somewhat similar framework to the one we’re adopting. The pictures have nothing to do with the movement or its approach, but they do illustrate a makeshift topography which wouldn’t exist without man’s imprint. And they connect to our still inescapable reality—where imagination remains our only means of travel, however abstract.

We’re excited about this new project and hope you’ll enjoy where it takes us. In the immortal words of Fleetwood Mac: chain, keep us together.

…………………….

  1. With the exception of only seeing part of the previous contribution. That would be hard to do in this case. 

Puddles are Windows and Fissures are Roads

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By Patrick La Roque

Imaginary shorelines and mythical roadmaps.
I drown in the depths of my mind’s eye, waters remixed
into new materials.

NUCLEAR PHOTOWALK

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BY NEALE JAMES

Sixty three years ago, just after 4pm, on the 28th February, a B-47E Stratojet belonging to the United States Airforce, a strategic bomber designed to strike targets from very high altitude in the Soviet Union lifted from an airbase called Greenham Common in leafy Berkshire, England, sixty miles west of London, a further 1,800 miles west of Moscow. It was loaded with 103,000 lbs of aviation fuel. One minute into the flight, technical problems forced the crew to shut down engines two and three of the six available to this aircraft. The crew requested an immediate go around and emergency landing.

Because of the large amount of fuel aboard the aircraft, air traffic control gave the order to drop their 1,700 gallon external fuel tanks in a specially designated ‘drop zone’ first.

At 4.23pm, the ‘drop tanks’ procedure was initiated, but one tank struck a hanger, and the other a hard stand area, close to a parked B-47E. There are conflicting reports of a pilot being on board the aircraft on the ground and the possibility of a weapon loading operation being in progress. The parked plane is reported to have been carrying a 1.1 megaton nuclear bomb. The aircraft and bomb were engulfed in flames.

I live close to Greenham Common on the ‘right side’ of the now abandoned airfield, not an indication of direction, but a suggestion that the ‘wrong side’ for years had suffered from a cluster of unexplained cancer cases, possibly the result of a nuclear accident nobody wants to talk about. Or was it? Did it even happen?

Last Sunday, I set out to attempt to find the place the tanks landed, the drop zone, Stand 32. I’ll tell more of the story in audio format. Join me on my Nuclear Photowalk.

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I’m not one to subscribe to conspiracy, I do think we have a predisposed ability to embellish a story. Our forefathers and those for all their generations before them could and I am sure did the very same. But I’ve always been fascinated by this huge former airbase, once the home to the longest runway in Europe, a most infamous women’s peace camp, enough nuclear warheads to unleash nuclear winter and a story that nobody can quite agree on.

Today you can run, cycle and enjoy rambling across miles of paths across land that would once have been privy to Britain and America’s closest secrets behind razor wire, guarded by elite special forces. The land gives clues to what was once here. Some buildings and landmarks have slowly started to be devoured by bushes, shrubs, trees even. Some will never leave, such as the massive silos used to house the vehicles destined to deploy deadly intercontinental cruise missiles.

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White cattle roam freely on this now common ground. This one is walking in roughly the same area as aircraft will have taxied and stood on ‘standby’ in view of the old control tower, very recently refurbished to become a visitor centre, café and pop up wall space for art. Sadly closed whilst we await the end of pandemic restrictions.

Disused fire and emergency buildings with the large central command centre in the background which still houses a special launch bunker. The mock-up aircraft remains as a historical remnant, designed to resemble a C-130 aircraft. It would be doused in aviation fuel and set alight so that firefighters could train to retrieve people and ‘items’ in a worse case scenario.

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Close to the end of what would have been the main runway, from my research possibly the intended ‘drop zone.’

Definition 047 | Wild, Wild Life

Definition 047 | Wild, Wild Life

If you’ve been reading my essays for a while now, you might know a bit about my family in Canada—the birders of Southern Ontario, that’s them.

One of my sisters sent me a photo of the decorations going on their tree this year over there, which naturally enough included a lot of bird-related ornaments, gathered over many years. My dad and my uncle used to have a boxing day tradition of shopping for new ornaments, so the collection was pretty expansive by the time we were kids—and we had to be a bit careful around all that Czechoslovakian blown glass, I can tell you. But I think we did okay; most of it survives and is still being used by them & their own (careful!) kids today.

Not having kids, a tree, or ornaments here in Sydney myself, I decided to do pretty much the opposite of what I usually do for one of these essays: I took my longest lens, and my largest camera, and went looking for actual birds I could capture, and send to my mum over in a wintry lockdown in Toronto, to give her a bit of colour and summer light to enjoy for a while…

DEFINITION 46 | F*** CVD-19

Photography and Text by Vincent Baldensperger

Interdictions, restrictions, contrôles…
Humain d’ici ou là, tu t’adaptes, tu patientes, tu attends l’aube.
Et plus ces heures s’assombrissent, plus la Vie s’impatiente.
Révérence à 2020…
•••
Prohibitions, restrictions, controls ...
Human from here and there, you adapt, you wait, you wait for dawn.
And the darker these hours, the more impatient Life becomes.
Reverence to 2020 ...

DEFINITION 45 | Looks Like We Made It

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

I reached the grand old age of 55 last month. The number in itself is nothing special, but it’s the age that my sister Joyce died of a brain tumour in 2018. Dark humour has always been a part of my family and when I visited Joyce on her birthday, she gave me a rendition of Barry Manilow’s ‘Looks Like We Made It’. She of course meant she had made it to another birthday. She died less than two months later.

There is a naïveté that makes you think these things are more acceptable when someone is older, even just two years older. But as I reached 55, I realised that I feel no different than I did at 53, nor 43 for that matter. My dad passed away in 2019 pretty much of a broken heart, so to say that death is never far away from my thoughts is probably an understatement. I don't know if it's my age or recent events, but I find myself wondering how many more days I have left before I will wake up dead myself. Maybe mid-fifties are the age when these thoughts start to creep into your head more often, but my sister got 55 years, what makes me so special that I would deserve more?

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We took my mum away for a few days in October. It was the first anniversary of my dad's death and we didn't want her all alone and rattling around her house dwelling on it. While we were away, my wife Fe got word that the unit at the care home where she works had cases of Covid19. She knew there was a high risk she would become infected when she went back to work, but she, of course, went in anyway. Because while Joe public is fighting over toilet rolls in supermarket isles, carers, nurses and countless others are putting their lives on the line.

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Four days after she. went back to work, the symptoms started. A trip to the local testing centre confirmed she had the virus. Eleven days of cold and flu symptoms and we thought she was starting to get over it. But then it really hit. She spent the next three days flat on her back, too weak to do anything but be sick. Even now, three weeks on, she still gets tired doing small things. Nine elderly people from her unit passed away from Covid19.

Janel and Fe both had birthdays this month. Janel turned 13 and found the new normal for blowing out candles is not normal at all. I could mention how old Fe is, but I’d rather the candles were stored in the cupboard than in me.

It is almost December, and what should have seemed like a drag of a year has actually flown by in a flash.

So if you're reading this, almost a year into the Covid 19 pandemic, - It looks like you made it too!

DEFINITION 44 | THE 1200M MIND SPACE

By Patrick La Roque

We’d been raking the last leaves from our yard and had moved to pulling out the few dead remnants left in our garden (tomatoes mostly), when Heloise ran up to us with an iPad in her hands: “Joe Biden has won!”.

I didn’t react with any real joy or relief; just a sort of workmanlike acknowledgement: good, that’s done then. Like a checkmark on a long list of todos. It was only hours later that my senses finally caught up to the opposite reality of those words: he was out. We still had a chance at normalcy and kindness. 

Maybe.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre-Elliot Trudeau (yes, our current PM’s dad) famously said, during a meeting with Nixon in 1969:

“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt,".

Sleeping with an erratic and enraged animal has been mind numbing these past four years. Witnessing such a profound derangement of every norm we took for granted—on human and political scales—has maintained us in a constant, unrelenting state of unrest. It’s been economically and psychologically exhausting. And now, despite the outcome, we’re forced to witness just how close we are to a complete destruction of the world order, as authoritarian levers are, predictably, being pulled one by one: the claims of electoral fraud and vilifying of the press and media; the firing of top administration officials and military leaders, replaced by loyalists; the complicit cabal of talking heads spewing conspiracy theories night after night, feeding the fables and frenzy of the misinformed.

There is no courage, no humility, no decency. No sense of duty. Only the raging fear and cowardice of a beast facing its demise.

...

I did a quick calculation this week: it’s been 255 days since I set foot in Montreal. We mostly exist within a 1200m radius of our home, in the suburbs. Sure we drive further on occasion—Jacob works at the supermarket twice a week—but beyond this, the circle is rarely broken. The circle defines our mind space now. 

In this year of dwindling horizons, I’m desperate for a ruffling of wind in our sail.
For new and old shores to appear;
for sacred illuminated lands;
for hope,
injected in poisoned bloodstreams.

DEFINITION 43 | 28 DAYS LATER: LOCKDOWN 2

By Neale James

A comedienne friend of mine said over the weekend; “If I didn’t see Lockdown 1, do I need to see Lockdown 2?”

And so here we are again, if of course you reside in England. It’s Lockdown 2.

DAY 1: Thomas, our youngest, joins me as I edit the next day’s podcast.

It has not been lost on me that there are 28 days in this planned lockdown. We went in November 5th just after midnight and emergence day comes 28 days later on Wednesday 2nd December. I am reminded of the 2002 Danny Boyle movie, ‘28 Days Later,’ the post apocalyptic drama which shows a breakdown of society following the accidental release of a highly contagious virus. Ring any bells?

Someone in government has a warped sense of humour, or it’s coincidence, or it’s somewhat more sinister. I can take no more.

There was a sense of ‘Lockdown Eve’ in our place. My sons played their last competitive badminton for the foreseeable as the sports centre closed its doors, we ate out to support the local curry house before its doors were glued shut with mango chutney and my wife celebrated securing the last hair appointment at our local salon. I simply bought a blade and foam. Small wins.

I’m a photographer.

My chancellor suggests I am ‘non viable.’ I am most certainly labelled as ‘non essential.’

During Lockdown 1, my daily exercise walk took me along a canal towpath, a popular haunt for members of the local angler’s association. I’m taking this walk once more, during the second ‘interference.’ The ‘fishing line, as it’s colloquially called, stations numbers some twenty metres apart. The numbers that are pinned, taped, strapped to fences and posts that protrude from the foliage covered ground are indicators of where anglers may pitch. They are angler stands. I have photographed the first twenty-eight. Each angler stand represents a day of our lockdown.

Each day that passes I will replace one angler stand number with my lockdown offering, to form an organic living post.

I did not choose to photographically record the original lockdown. I was battle weary within weeks of our original incarceration. But I do this time. It’s a different lockdown. It’s not nearly so stringent. We are not locked behind our front doors in quite the same fashion, though the message, ‘Stay At Home’ applies to me and my occupation.