Walking the extra mile!
We are often asked, when we appear on-site at some obscure location, what we are doing? With camera at the ready gripped tightly but lightly, legs akimbo, one eye shut, t’other glued to the viewfinder; the face screwed into a grimace, (which my daughter assures me improves my image no end) it might have been considered to be a trite statement. But then, on reflection, I suppose in some ways it’s a bit like asking a golfer, as he is about to swing the ball, what he is doing. When you get the answer “playing golf”, or in our case “taking photographs”, people tend to look a bit nonplussed. But to be kind, what they are really asking is, “What are you doing that for?.”
So my conscience says in hindsight that a bit more of an answer is needed. Of course you have to be careful when you do this, when you reach the point that their eyes start to glaze over you know that you’ve gone too far.
Our Job? Ok, just for you I will tell all!!
It’s all part of the process of recording some of life’s most beautiful images and publishing them so that others can, from their boring office desk, enjoy them. But it’s not just a case of popping off down the road and banging away with a camera.
The job demands (John insists) that we try to achieve a fair mix of images that most people will enjoy.
To begin. Picking a site to start your photographic session takes a fair amount of planning. Following the previous paragraphs thoughts, it would be to all too easy to follow the local tourist routes and end up at some of the set places that have been designed like pre processed cheese. Places that have been set up and decorated to fit the palate of the people (Not you discerning reader) who expect to see Devon and Cornwall people going, “Oohar!” , chewing straw, or chasing pirates and troughing Oggies! A sort of sanitised Walt Disney mixture that struts between Witchcraft, Pixies, Pirates, Worzels, mud like glue, and Wellies. Stop there. I am beginning to feel sick.
Nothing we do could be further from the truth. Let me explain.
Cornwall and Devon, have some very unique features that make them two of the the most beautiful places in England. (And before every Yorkshire man, Scots man, Welshman, etc, etc, drag their heavy verbal artilleries from their lexicography cupboards, pick up their pens and comes looking. I will add, hastily, in my opinion.
Perhaps part of the truth on this lays in the fact that most of the heavy industry, in the days of the industrial revolution, that could have destroyed the landscape, existed in underground pits and mines, had something to do with it. (Forgive St Austell, that really is the pits.)
Engine Houses, Counting Houses, Lime Kilns and Mine buildings had workings that are today left showing. Fine crafted structures of granite, brick, and steel. They had a sort of poignancy about them. An ageless architecture that in itself was timeless, but very thought provoking. Looking today through a lens, focuses the mind keenly on the history from Iron age to present day life. And, when you research the photographs you have taken, you feel for those people that were trapped in this mind numbing poverty. Because the owners owned all.
If uoi go to Chip Shop in Devon. No, no, not the Chip shop. But Chip shop. Its a mining area where the owners paid the workers in scrip, called chips. Now it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this was not the coin of the realm. You couldn’t nip off to London for a naughty night out evenif you could manage to make a few savings from the pittance that you were paid. It was scrip. The only place you could change it was in the company owned store. And the food that you bought at the company inflated prices had to be taken home to your company owned hovel. Get the idea.
But hey, life has moved on, lets not get too maudling, and the rose coloured glasses have now slipped into place. Aftre all there are many famous books on the subject that will tell you about this, so you don’t need my waffle to add to it. Rainbowjourneymen try to bring you the images that show the area. The true area, not the tinsel and manufactured attractions. So, as said, planning is very important. And we do plan.
You have got to admit that even some of the nasty places. Not nasty by design, but nasty by mans purpose, like Bodmin Gaol, have something about them. But even today when you go and look at this superb structure of the granite block workings that form the main structure of the Gaol, you have to stand back from your admiration of design and have a quiet shudder to yourself when you think of the poor souls that were incarcerated there over the past centuries. Often, locked up for the theft of a few pence and for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Before being chucked aboard some prison ship to be sent on Holiday to the Southern Antipodes. (Australia) Hang about I am wandering again.
Today, Devon and Cornwall have become a sort of hallowed area built of several of these base factions. Ancient visible History, plus hills, valleys, rivers and moors, have come together as a kind of idyllic dream. And History. Yes I know. I said that. But you cannot turn a corner, if you stay off the tourist synthetic routes, without bumping into history.
From Iron Age dwellings just below Dartmoor Prison. The Hurlers stone figures High on the Moor. To stone age workings down a River Valley Cleave, near Par. All examples that excite the photographer. Especially the Rainbow Journeyman.
Then, on the way to these fabulous examples of history, a sunset happens. The sea boils crystalline white, foaming surf leaps into the lenses eye. A surfer digs his toenails into the very edge of his board to ride the experience. Or further up the valley water falls cascade their way down from great heights onto the beach, diamonds of spinning water catching the sun in each prismatic leaping droplet. At Lands End, or to be precise Sennen Cove, on the way to Lands End: Fishermen’s Net, straddle the heathers, its tangled web of threads jumping from clump to clump embroidering the moor with inticate strands of colour.
When you work the moors. Stolidly, the ponies munch on, moving at their will, meandering across the slopes in timeless patterns, dictated by the clumps of edible grasses that exist among the bracken.
Thats all for now. More soon
Mike Tyrrell for Rainbow Journeyman South West.
