A "hauntological" look at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden with the Blackie Photo App to hand

Last week I spent a fair amount of time listening to the back catalogue of a very British project called "Belbury Poly" by Jim Jupp. Jupp started and runs the wonderful Ghost Box label and on his roster of artists is the wonderful "The Advisory Circle" whose work I stumbled across a couple of years ago.

In The Wire (No. 276, November 2006) in an article called "Society of the spectral" the music journalist Simon Reynolds coined the genre term hauntology to describe Ghost Box’s particular style which is a strange, imaginary parallel "British" world which mixes up TV soundtracks, 60s and 70s horror movies, vintage electronic music, folk song, English psychedelia, supernatural stories and folklore.

Jupp's work hugely appeals to me and this appeal is clearly related to my own recent thinking about "Ghostly" or "Weak" Communism and my own (still developing) photographic style/preferences—indeed some of you may have seen the link on this blog to a photo-essay I've just contributed to the online magazine Culture Matters called "Ghostly Communism - Provocative Documents for Thought". (NB The process of writing this piece makes me appreciate that I seem to be moving towards a position described as "communalism" or "social ecology.")

Anyway, in the essay for Culture Matters the four photographs I used were taken in urban settings but, as regular readers of this blog will know, many of my photos are taken in the countryside or in parks and gardens. However, I've noticed that there is also often a "ghostly" quality to many of these shots — something very evident today as I walked around the Cambridge University Botanic Garden with my iPhone and the wonderful newly released Blackie iPhone photography app. As always, just click on a photo to enlarge it.

If the hauntological theme appeals you might enjoy spinning over to the Tumblr page of "The Hauntological Society."

And, lastly, at the very end  of this post I've included a Youtube video of a track from Belbury Poly's newest release "The Belbury Tales".

Enjoy!