Toeing the Line
The need to photograph something again and again
Jill, in her Monday's "Indoor Camping: Fixing Up the Fixer-Upper" blog wrote "...The guy spent most of his time trying to line up his toe and something on the carpet," he said. "He was worse than me."
I read "Indoor Camping" because it reminds me of the travails we've had fixing up houses before we met and together since... and where did it get us? Of the problems with kids... wow, it seems mine were too good to be true... I guess times have changed. And because it's good writing... it makes you want to read what scrapes and hassles happened yesterday. It's great isn't it when it happens to someone else!
But when I read about the guy who was lining his toe and something (what something?) up against the carpet I stopped reading... and realised that not only do I do just that more frequently than is probably healthy... but I also photograph my toes, or feet, aligned with something more times than is normal too.
Maybe I got it from my mother. She used to count the repetitive designs on the edges of her Persian carpet by pointing her toe along the line as she counted so as not to lose her place... and it bobbed up and down rhythmically as she counted. If she was into the hundreds and lost count she'd start over again. The same when she saw a dropped stitch on the front of a pullover she'd been knitting... she'd undo the piece and start again from the row or two before the dropped stitch. I think she was trying to be perfect... to my father and I it was an annoying habit.
I can think of many annoying habits I've got which I try to stop the second before I do them. I run my fingertip along the arm of a velvet chair as I walk through to the kitchen... because the fabric is lush. I tap, tap, tap the nails of my three middle fingers along the lock-rail of the door as I walk back from the kitchen... and like the former habit I say to myself that this time I'm not going to do it... but I do just the same.
I don't think about the subjects I've photographed literally every time I've passed them... my father used to chide me about them, and especially when I developed yet another roll of film shot in or of the Avebury Stone Circle in Wiltshire. He may have gone there with me twenty times or more but only took his camera out on his first visit. My father's background was engineering... he'd taken photos on his first visit and it was always going to be the same in his eyes... especially as the megaliths had been there largely unchanged for the past 4,500 years!
My background was art... I see things differently every time. I'll continue taking shots of my toes (or feet) pointing towards something or nothing tangible in the case of the light and shade here. I simply pointed my Hasselblad SWC downwards... the apparent "perspective" distortion produced by the 38mm Zeiss Biogon wide-angle lens (there's no actual distortion with that superb optic) making my legs look very long was part of the design. I contact printed two short strips of the 120 roll-film in an opposite alignment to how they'd been seen and taken... and made a cyanotype print on Arches Platine paper. The detail in the negatives is very fine although you can hardly see it printed onto artist's water-colour paper. The detail may have been lost in the rendition... but the act of pointing my toes, feet or something isn't lost in my mind.
9:16:46 PM 
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