Even the Poorest Thing Shines: On Convalescence and the Transfiguring Power of Light
Taken with a Fuji X100V (with a Viltrox WCL Conversion Lens) using the recipe below
As regular readers of this blog will know, I returned from hospital after an operation a few days ago. Although I’m definitely now improving, it’s been a time to stay at home, rest, and recover.
Alas, there have been no English translations of his works (except one of his sermons that you can find on this blog HERE), and so this chunk of enforced downtime has given me the opportunity to set to work on that. I’m really glad I have; it has certainly kept my mind off the pain! It’s a splendid book: very accessible, informed, and often gently ironic and funny. I don’t know what I’ll do with the translation once it’s finished (I’m about halfway through as I write this), but I certainly expect to see a few Sunday “thoughts for the day” emerge from my encounter with it.
The second thing I’ve been up to since coming home is taking a somewhat deeper dive into the work of the photographer William Eggleston, whose work was once described as “totally boring and perfectly banal”. From my point of view, that’s always been nonsense. His genius is found in his “miraculous power” to take pictures of the everyday—things that usually get dismissed as tedious or commonplace. As far as I’m concerned, his photos have often served to draw me into a contemplation of the world in a fashion that reminds me of the famous poem by the eighth-century Chinese Zen poet, Layman P’ang (740–808):
My daily affairs are quite ordinary;
but I’m in total harmony with them.
I don’t hold onto anything, don’t reject anything;
Nowhere an obstacle or conflict.
Who cares about wealth and honour?
Even the poorest thing shines.
My miraculous power and spiritual activity:
Drawing water and carrying wood.
So, stuck at home—and needing to visit the loo frequently—I found myself constantly looking out at the back of a singularly boring and banal building: Reston House on Fitzroy Street. I’ve previously written about this building in a Sunday Address from 2018 called “An après dérive—being a devout meditation in memory of John Reston (d. 1551), Doctor of Divinity—the subversive and transformative act of drifting”. Back then, I didn’t live hard by the building, let alone right up against its even more boring and banal rear, but for the past three years I have.
It is, without doubt, dull and commonplace, but this very fact has served to alert me in a new way to what is obviously the most important thing about photography: LIGHT!
I have slowly come to appreciate how this banal wall daily overlooking me is a place where one’s eye is drawn again and again simply to the quality of light at any given moment of the day. Given that during my recovery, every hour or so meant a trip upstairs to the loo, I found myself looking at that wall repeatedly. It made me wonder: would Eggleston have photographed it, and if he had, how might he have done it?
The answer to the first question is, I think, yes. But the answer to the second is much harder to pin down. Whilst I contemplated this—all the while keeping my eye on the wall and taking shot after shot on my Fujifilm X100V—I decided it would help if I could work out a film simulation recipe that at least got me close to the look Eggleston achieved using the now well-known, but incredibly expensive, commercial dye-transfer print process.
I’ll spare you the technical minutiae, but the recipe that emerged was as follows:
Film Simulation: Classic Chrome
Dynamic Range: DR400 (Min. ISO 640)
Highlight Tone: +1
Shadow Tone: +2
Colour +3
White Balance: Daylight (5500K)
White Balance Shift: R: +3, B: -4
Color Chrome Effect: Strong
Color Chrome FX Blue: Strong
Grain Effect: Strong, Small
Sharpening: -1
Noise Reduction: -4
Clarity: 0
With the recipe set, I started to take a photo pretty much every time I went upstairs for a pee. To be honest, almost every shot I took simply added (were this even possible!) to the boring nature of the building. To use a colloquial phrase in a completely accurate way, I simply wasn’t showing it in the best light.
I was close to giving up when, at a quarter to seven in the evening, I went upstairs and the light hit the brickwork exactly as you see it in the photo at the head of this post. Experience has taught me that light can change incredibly fast, so I snapped it immediately. I didn’t worry about “framing” the shot as it was the light at THAT moment, on THAT building that I needed to capture.
Click. (And the image is straight out of camera with no editing at all.)
Sure enough, a cloud then quickly obscured the sun, and downstairs I slowly and painfully went, and I didn’t even look at that day’s photos until this morning. All were as boring and banal as my earlier attempts... except this one. It stood out.
Now, you may disagree, but I do think there is an Eggleston-like feel to the image. But whether or not that’s the case, it’s an image I like, so I am publishing it here. The building remains as uninteresting as it ever was to my normal eye, but the light has served to transfigured it—I have seen this building differently—and in this image it doesn’t feel boring and banal to my Eggleston-inspired eye. But here’s the rub: there were many, and still are many people, who think Eggleston’s work (and therefore, surely, my amateurish attempt here) still remains “totally boring and perfectly banal”.
So, is my image boring and banal? I’ll leave you to decide. But I, for one, have come away with a greater appreciation of Eggleston’s miraculous power as a photographer than I had at the beginning of the week—and, amazingly, I now have a greater appreciation of the boring, banal building upon which I continue to look every day of my life.
Right, I now need to go upstairs again, and I’ll take my camera just in case . . .
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