Valentine Woe

Oh no. It’s February. Again. And the shops are filled with red tat. Cards. Teddy bears. Flowers. Meaningless declarations of love. How do I really feel? Fuck off Valentine’s Day.

Regular readers will know how much I loathe Love Day. Why put the effort into one day when you should be doing that for the other 364 days of the year? Why drag your partner to a restaurant to pay twice the price of any other day, in a goldfish bowl crammed with other couples.

I’m doing my best to stay out of the road of all things commercially sentimental, but its difficult when Tesco has given over as much floor space to this bullshit as it does to Christmas week. Shelves loaded with tackily tagged chocolates and cards and mugs and mops and wine and food and “buy this thing for a fiver that normally costs a quid cus its red and its Valentines’ week”.

I strongly advise against getting involved with anyone new between mid-November and mid-February. Winter is such a time of flux and if you don’t spend every penny you have on your new object d’amour then you could well find yourself on the scrap heap before your time. Buying stuff is not the way to find real affection and certainly not a real relationship. And if you’re doing it for the sex then you may as well look at it as prostitution, and I suspect a prostitute would be cheaper – certainly less emotionally testing.

I recall being in a dead relationship and still being compelled to write meaningless platitudes in a card because life would be a hundred times harder if I didn’t. Why put ourselves through such nonsense?

Thrusting ourselves into something new during the height of winter rather forces our hands. Rather than letting a relationship play out properly – some delicate dating, furtive fumbling, patient probing – we’re already thinking ‘Must buy expensive gifts’, making grand gestures, and before we’ve really decided if this is a medium-to-long-term thing or one of those couple-of-nights only affairs (a guest appearance rather than a residency). In that magnified microcosm how can we trust what’s going on? Simply we can’t.

Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday this year which also means for many the most sinister of stalker traditions – the sending of the anonymous card loaded with clues to the object of one’s affection – becomes more difficult. We cannot depend on the world’s postal services to deliver on the day itself. Singletons like myself can now find comfort when the doormat once again screams with the absence of red envelopes. Of course if one does show up on the day it means somebody has dug out your address and stealthily made their way to your front door and squeezed the card through the last defence that is the impossible letterbox. I for one would much rather any potential love interest declared themselves in person at an appropriate time to my face, or take the safe option of writing via private message so embarrassment can be averted if there’s no mutual attraction.

When you think about it, Valentine’s Day simply serves to tell people that if you pursue someone armed with words and gifts and an expensive dinner then you’ll find love, or at least get laid. There’s no long-term strategy needed, no real care, and no respect of boundaries. One can overlook it a little in the instance of a long-term relationship – you’ve already captured your prey – but Valentine’s isn’t really for the stable, those who are as likely to do something nice in the privacy of their own home, it’s for those who are insecure, who need reminded to put effort in just to talk to their partner.

If nothing else, one has to be dubious about a day that takes as its mascot, Cupid: a rather rotund winged young boy dressed with only a smile and a bow and arrow. In other words, the worst sort of jailbait.

Punctum I

Fig. 1. Resignation. Self-portrait. 2011.

The old adage states that a picture is worth a thousand words. Certainly photographs have great power – not only as aesthetic images in their own right, but also as items of record and archive. Within a single frame we have a record of a unique moment in time – of a specific location and specific people.

But they are also open to great subjectivity and interpretation, with meaning varying from individual to individual. Ultimately the only opinion on the image that really matters is that of the participants – those being photographed, or who were present at the moment the image was being taken. In turn they may distribute the image further, perhaps accompanied by a note to a loved one, further imbuing the image with specific meanings, and the recipient may place additional meaning on top of the image.

As a visual thinker, and a visual artist (a term I am finally coming to terms with using when regarding myself), photographs are particularly important to me. My vast personal archive – 35mm negatives, prints and digital files of my own work – is supplemented by an archive of photographs relating to my research work, a collection of images from films, made by others unknown to promote their commercial product.

I have images within my archive that I return to again and again. For some it is the pure aesthetic of a situation. For others it is the memory of a place or a person that I wish to recall. And yet others are a stark reminder of events and people I must try not to forget, and the journey made to a better place.

I have made some of my archive available on Facebook (mostly to share with friends) and via Flickr (which seldom contains images of family/friends, and is instead geared towards more neutral ‘work’ work).

A collection of images was removed once, because of the interpretation somebody else chose to give those images, and the inappropriate comments that they felt appropriate to make on them. But deleting an image does not remove a memory, and an interpretation does not necessarily reflect accurately on the truth within an image. I have cried over the loss of images, when compelled to remove something from a social networking site, or when a physical print has been destroyed by someone else. Only I have the right to destroy or alter an image that I have taken. And only I as photographer really know the meaning of any individual image. In the curation of a set of images, or on viewing a body of imagery over a lifetime, assumptions are made, interpretations are spun. It is no different from the English lit student dissecting the possible interpretation and history surrounding a particular written text.

Fig. 2. Me, c. 2006.

My undergrad professor once said in relation to film criticism that every interpretation was valid – because it is a personal response to the work. But a film as entertainment, is not the same as a photograph as personal record, or a single image taken in 1/80th of a second – a split moment in time, forever captured.

Alongside the assembly of a photo archive comes the redaction of same. As curator one makes choices regarding what to keep or what to make public. I keep all my negatives, and only in the instance of a completely botched photo (utterly blurred, unrecognisable etc) do I delete the digital file. What is the statement one is making. If one chooses a photograph is it because of the people, the place, or some other aesthetic choice? Is there a subconscious message being played out?

Above my desk just now are three photographs – not selected through any deliberate process, but because they became dislodged when going through some files and I posted them above my desk for refiling later. Only they’ve been there a couple of months now. Perhaps somebody else would come in and see them and make assumptions about the coded meaning.

Fig. 3. Hammer House

The first is a black and white photograph of the exterior of Hammer House in Wardour Street in London, which I took during a visit circa 2006. It isn’t a particularly good photograph, but was taken during one of my earliest visits to the site – a reference point for my ongoing research on Hammer. It helps me feel connected to the work.

The second (not shown) is a polaroid image of me dressed as Santa with my two female helpers sitting on my knees. A fun image taken a couple of Christmases ago while I was helping out with a local charity. Aside from the connection with the charity, I have no other dealings with the others in the photos. We’ve just passed the festive season, so it serves as a reminder of my own part in that, and seeing its a polaroid I am reminded of the explanation I gave to many of the children about the magic photographs – kids today aren’t used to polaroids.

Fig. 3 – c. 2001

The third (Fig. 4) is a candid photo taken in a fast food restaurant (probably the McDonalds that used to be on University Road), in circa 2001 while I was an undergrad. I’m facing a girl with long blonde hair – Lucy – the both of us with stupid grins on our faces and playing with cardboard cut-out characters from some tie-in. Perhaps the assumption is that this is a photo of a young ‘couple’, but in fact Lucy was one of my fellow film students and no more than that. For me, it is simply a rare photo of me in my university days, and smiling in the company of friends.

Put together and without explanations I’m not entirely sure what impression they give. Possibly a slightly narcissistic one as two of the images include me as subject rather than image maker. There are other images that exist that project a sense of happiness, fun and general positivity, but which may themselves be isolated moments from otherwise bad days or weeks. I cannot recall what happened either side of the McDonalds image, but in that instant I was evidently in excellent form.

Images and words need reviewed in context, and all projections should be considered within the light of evident bias and agenda – neither of which are necessarily bad things in themselves. While documentary style photographs can display a truth, they do not contain the full objective truth – things and people are cropped out, they don’t always convey the emotions of photographer or subject (which can be utterly at odds with each other).

There is a photo at the start of this entry. Again, not a particularly great image, but a self-portrait which for me is laden with meaning and resonance. I know the full context of date taken, location, and everything else. One can’t help but wonder what other viewers would deduce from it and suggest it says (if indeed it says anything).