Merry Christmas* Linear Photography from the Early Carboniferous to Early Dinner

Towards the close of a summer of sketching on Hampstead Heath, at around one o’clock in the afternoon of the 13th September, 1821, John Constable painted his first oil study devoted entirely to the sky. On the painting’s reverse was later inscribed the conditions it recorded: ‘Septr 13th. one o’clock. Slight wind at North West, which became tempestuous in the afternoon, With Rain all the night following.’ Constable only painted two or three more pure cloud studies in 1821, but the following year he painted about fifty.

I think that I return to Constable’s cloud studies because of their confused relationship with time. Clouds have long symbolised instability and, as such, can be understood as ideal subjects for an artist who sought to arrest the transitory; to render permanent ‘one brief moment caught from fleeting time’.1 In this the cloud studies have been understood to be congruous with contemporary desires driving the development of photography.2 Yet, during these years, Constable expressed a desire that viewers appreciate the brushstrokes that animated his paintings, brushstrokes that evoked the duration of making.3 The paintings wed two very different times, being both traces of accumulated bodily movements and potent evocations of observed moments. In highlighting the time of making whilst presenting an image that is emblematically of a fleeting moment, the cloud studies make clear not only that the subject would have greatly altered between the artist starting and finishing the work, but that even as a brushstroke moved from left to right the clouds may have perceptibly moved from right to left.

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Damian Taylor, Hampstead Heath 20/05/2017, 11.55–12.03, 2017, digital image.

On 20th May, 2017, between 11.55 and 12.03 on Hampstead Heath, looking south, I made a photograph of clouds. Each pixel has an exposure time of a fraction of a second. The image is formed from left to right, building into a linear record of eight minutes. At about 11.57 the Tupperware box on which I had propped the front of the camera slipped. I put it back.

Damian Taylor, Dunbar 20/02/2017, 15.41–15.44, 2017, digital image.

I made the camera in January and at first photographed clouds. Other subjects soon proved equally or more compelling. On 20th February, 2017, on a very windy day in Dunbar, East Lothian, between 15.41 and 15.44, I took a picture of the sea. What appear to be waves moving from left to right is actually the record of waves moving directly towards the lens over several minutes, recorded from left to right. Three months later I returned to the East Lothian coast to photograph the sea again, but I ended up photographing some rock.

Damian Taylor, North Berwick 11/05/2017, 14.00–14.06, 2017, digital image.

On 11th May, 2017, between 13.59 and 14.07, I took a photograph of a cliff face in North Berwick. I later trimmed a minute from each end. In the image, the vertical tonal banding results from the sun’s passage behind clouds – after half a minute it came out for about five seconds, between about one minute and three it was behind thin cloud, then bright sunlight prevailed until four minutes in, when the sun hid more successfully. The register of six minutes from left to right overlaps with the stratigraphic record of millions of years running from bottom to top, in which – crushed and mutated under its own weight – the strata slip, time buckles. This elision of fleeting light and the seemingly intransigent fabric of the earth remind me of their shared transience, operating in vastly different temporal registers. And of their shared indifference to me.

* It is unlikely that I would have made the photographs had I not spent a long time researching and writing about Constable. Equally, I would not have started thinking about Constable if I hadn’t been making photographs. Perhaps some reflection on how these strands interacted would be of interest. If not – unless you want the endnotes – I suggest reading something else or looking at the pictures again.

On the shortest night of 2013, from an hour after sunset until an hour before sunrise, I sat in a field a few miles outside Oxford. For nearly four hours I exposed a single 35mm photograph of a bung from a whisky cask, into which lines had been burnt by focusing sunlight through a lens. A drawing made with light. A photograph. More precisely a heliograph, to appropriate Nicéphore Niépce’s term for the earliest photographic process of which examples survive. Sunlight from eight minutes and 93 million miles away, condensed through a lens to darken a receptive surface, now re-lit by sunlight reflected from a full moon and recorded through the lens of a camera. Inconceivable vastness compressed into the palm of a hand. Not my art.

As a last-minute thought I had brought with me a four-foot-wide roll of photographic paper, some scissors, and a couple of paintings that I had made more than two years earlier using a raking mist of enamel paint on 9 gsm abaca tissue paper, each about five-foot by seven and drawn from a series of approximately twenty works that had developed from the previous year’s Christmas cards. At around midnight I rolled out two overlapping eight-foot lengths of photographic paper and placed one of the paintings on top, leaving this to expose by moonlight for about twenty minutes. I then removed the painting and rolled up the sheets of paper, developing them the next morning in a makeshift darkroom. Despite my initial disappointment, the resulting photograph grew upon me. During the next half year, on still, moonlit nights, I produced about five more (alongside many failures). Throughout this process I wrote on the reverse of each work the location, time, date, and sometimes the weather conditions of its exposure. That winter, without evident prompting, I recalled that Constable had written similar annotations on his cloud studies. From this emerged an interest in how these early nineteenth-century paintings might relate to photography. I shall not dwell upon what led me to spend the night of the summer solstice sitting alone in a field. Rather, I will outline the dialogue between Constable and my studio practice from the moment that I noted the similarity between the inscriptions on my photographs and those on Constable’s sketches.

As key examples of Constable’s sketches are in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, I found a plausible and subsidised pretext to spend time in an environment that turned out to be better suited to nurturing over-reaching aspirations than to sustaining research-related holidays: having left England with the intention of developing an oblique aside on Medardo Rosso, I returned three months later with a long and excitingly under-researched manuscript. Having been adamant that my engagement with Constable was to be limited to America, I put the draft to one side. However, unwilling to leave behind a subject that I was finding engrossing, I appropriated Constable’s Hadleigh Castle as the overt subject matter of a video work that I took to be more fundamentally concerned with other matters, not least with the quasi-agential quality of reproduced images. Yet from working with the shimmering insub- stantiality of video there arose a growing interest in the relationship between Constable’s works and contemporaneous understandings of electricity, which reinforced my desire to return to Constable more comprehensively.

I don’t know whether my writing would have engaged with electricity had I not made the video – the connections now seem self-evident, but they did not always. Would I have returned to the draft at all had I not made the video? Probably, I’m bad at letting go. Either way, given that it developed from an initial interest in the parallels between the Hampstead sketches and photography, the draft already paid considerable attention to the relationship between Constable’s artistic practice and contemporary scientific research (which really should have led to electricity in time). Humphry Davy already featured prominently in my interest in Constable, due to his essay of 1802, which outlined his and Tom Wedgwood’s attempts to fix the image of the camera obscura using solutions of silver nitrate applied to paper or leather. I had some silver nitrate in my studio, residuum from a series of works that involved using a mid-nineteenth century mirroring technique to precipitate a layer of silver onto epoxy resin casts (a process that was incorporated in the video mentioned above). Having repeated Davy’s experiments on paper, I wanted to try them on parchment. As a cheaper source of vellum than a bookbinder’s supplies, I spent £5 buying an old legal document on eBay. The terms of a £300 loan arrived, wax-stamped and ‘dated 14th day of July 1821’ – signed within a few hours and a few miles of Constable painting the first of his 1821 sketches, a work that had become central to interest in the artist after my return to England. I ended up not using the parchment, yet I can well imagine that thinking about it heightened my awareness of how an inscription that asserts the singularity of a temporally and spatially discrete event can also strengthen that moment’s ties with other times. How assigning a time and date to an image that seemingly captures a specific, unrepeatable instant can re-inscribe it within the calendar, thus conflating linear and cyclical conceptions of time.

A few months later, on the 195th anniversary of each sketch that Constable painted and inscribed in 1821 – whether at noon or 5.30 am, in 34 ̊C swelter or in driving rain – I revisited the Heath, exposing for an hour an abstract cyanotype that recorded the intensity of light, the fall of rain, the slither of snails, and so forth. I am not sure that making this body of work especially affected my thinking about Constable. That said, I can well imagine that the process deepened my appreciation of the complexity of the term ‘exposure’ (it poured with rain on the anniversary of the only occasion that Constable painted back-to-back studies) and sustained my interest in the different senses of time that can inhere in a simple image, such as the tension between the linear application of paint and the all-over quality of the image’s address. Such a tension seems to underscore the above photographs.

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If far from comprehensive, I trust the above is not misleading in highlighting both the historical back-and-forth that underscored this research alongside the contingencies and complexities that sustained it and from which it arose – I would not have spent three years engaged with Constable had I not made Christmas cards in 2010.

1 Ronald Brymer Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Discourses, (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 9–10. The line is borrowed from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Upon The Sight Of A Beautiful Picture Painted By Sir G. H. Beaumont, Bart’, Beaumont being a mutual supporter of Constable and Wordsworth.
2 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 99–100.
3 Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence, Volume 6 (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1978), 185.