djnorwood - Tumblr blog

djnorwood · 2 years

Text

Izzy and Indie

5 minute read I was later than usual collecting my daughter from school. It was quiet after the cacophony of kids and their voices had ceased reverberating around walls and through picture covered corridors. The calm gave us a chance to chat without the distractions of other parents and children that accompany the melee that marks the end of the school day. The other reason why it was unusual…

View On WordPress

#Care Worker #children #covid-19 #Izzy and Indie #Nursing Home #pandemic #playground #PPE #school pick-up #shift-work #Silk Mill #small stories #Social care #strangers passing #wasting away #winter lights

0 notes

djnorwood · 2 years

Text

Soho Foto Werkshop

I had great pleasure leading a street photography workshop for City Academy in London recently. While not committing wholeheartedly to making work during the two days (my eyes were never far away from my charges), I did nevertheless make use of the opportunity of using a little gem of a camera – a Rollei 35. It is unobtrusive, small and discrete allowing discretion not normally afforded someone…

View On WordPress

#analogue #City Academy #London #short courses #street photography #street photography course #Teaching

0 notes

djnorwood · 4 years

Text

21

Potocari War Graves, Srebrenica, March 2019

5 minute read.

Having been surrounded by death in my working life, I found myself habitually immune to the historic tragedy of the Srebrenica Genocide. I was about to embark on a memorial walk with thousands of others, towards the place where this tragedy happened, but realised that all those years had made me emotionally detached, immune to the…

View On WordPress

#black and white photography #Bosnia Herzegovina #Forensic Photography #Genocide #history #Mars Mira #Mars Mira 2019 #photography #Remembering Srebrenica #Srebrenica #Theory #trauma

0 notes

djnorwood · 4 years

Text

Yew

Nine Yews photographed in isolation, Winter 2017, with a poem written in isolation, Spring 2020.

Taxus Baccata

These silhouettes ruling over their kin – Voluminous shadows breaking through the mist, Like abandoned ships cruising a woody sea. In solitude, defining their surroundings – Interstellar black holes, consuming light, From a bleached-out sky.

Near immortality lends to the exit door of a church, A spirit more real than any Christian myth. The chapel is orientated around it, Deferring…

View On WordPress

0 notes

djnorwood · 4 years

Text

Photobook Publishing(2/3)

Photobook Publishing(2/3) In this second segment of a three part post I chat with another first time bookmaker for his behind the scenes experiences of the process.

7 minute read.

In this second segment of a three part post I chat with another first time bookmaker for his behind the scenes experiences of the process.

Kevin Percival‘s quietly insistent work documents the landscapes and communities on the remote Scottish Island of Tanera (Ar Dùthaich), charting the symbiotic relationship between landscapes and communities and the traces left in places by…

View On WordPress

#analogue #Ar Duthaich #black and white photography #community #documentary #Kevin Percival #Landscape #place #portraits #Rural Life #Scotland #Tanera #Western Isles

1 note · View note

djnorwood · 4 years

Text

Photobook Publishing (1/3)

Photobook Publishing (1/3) I interview photographer Steve Meyler about his project '66 hours' and his thoughts on publishing his first photobook.

4 minute read

In a this three-parter, I interview photographers venturing out for the first time into the sometimes intimidating world of book publishing. Each has their own take on the process, and speak with refreshing candour about their experiences.

First up, my former boss, and gifted photographer Steve Meyler. His latest project, 66 hours, employs the landscape as metaphor to talk about a…

View On WordPress

#66 hours #black and white photography #Book Making #Fethard #Ireland #Landscape #Landscape photography #Lifeboat #photobooks #Steve Meyler #Tragedy

1 note · View note

djnorwood · 4 years

Text

A Timeline and a Leap (Bosnia Pt.3)

‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hands? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.’ – Macbeth, II, ii

Every 40 years there is a war.

Every year there is a peace march.

Every 30 minutes a man plunges 20 meters into the Neretva River.

(On the morning of July 16, 1995, five days after the fall of Srebrenica,…

View On WordPress

#Bosnia #conflict #Forensic Photography #Forensics #history #photography #Remembering Srebrenica #Slow Journalism #Srebrenica #Time #War

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Equilibrium (Ecocide)

5 minute read.

In honour of the extinction rebels.

‘In the Chinese cosmological order, things that belong to the same class affect each other. The process, however, is not one of mechanical causation but rather one of “resonance.” For example, the categories east, wood, green, wind and spring are associated with each other. Change one phenomenon – green, say – and all the others will be affected…

View On WordPress

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Mak Muranovic (Bosnia pt.2)

Mak Muranovic (Bosnia pt.2) 'With a lack of education, democracy, freedom, can be easily abused.'

‘With a lack of education, democracy, freedom, can be easily abused.’

Mak photographed outside ‘Art Tours Sarajevo’ HQ, July 2019 ©djnorwood

https://djnorwood.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/mak-muranovic.mp3

Topics mentioned include:

Tito

PTSD

Democracy/Authoritarianism

The Siege of Sarajevo

‘The land of honey and blood’

‘The tunnel of hope’

Living conditions during the siege

Dobrinja district

‘T…

View On WordPress

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Defaced

'Defaced'. Notes on visual language, memory and the Bosnian war.

(5 minute read)

I felt like I had to go back.

A pledge is something to be honoured and it was gnawing at me. If I went, what could I possibly do? Did I have anything to add to this tragic story? I convinced myself that I did. A forensic angle, perhaps? I wasn’t sure. My researchled me deeper into a mire of meticulously recorded detail and despair. Yet nothing would be resolved in my own mind if I…

View On WordPress

#Bosnia Herzegovina #Bosniaks #crimes against humanity #identity #Muslims #obfuscation #photography #Photojournalism #Radovan Karadzic #religion #Remembering Srebrenica #representation #Serbs #Srebrenica #visual language in photography #war imagery

1 note · View note

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Context: On 11th July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic, systematically massacred 8,372 men and boys. It was the greatest atrocity on European soil since the Second World War. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ruled that the mass executions constituted genocide.

We visit the Potocari war graves and see for ourselves the names of the dead, carved into granite. In alphabetical order the obliteration seems even more acute. The names of the deceased are etched into recumbent flagstones as if even this, the most durable of materials, finds it hard to bare its mute tirade.

Skeletal remains retrieved from mass graves line the walls of an ordinary building on the outskirts of Tuzla. Sometimes these body fragments are found in different sites, many miles apart. How so? In some cases dug up and moved to the frontline. All the better to suggest death in the virtuous of acts of bi-partisan combat rather than the miserable, one-sided slaughter which befell so many.

Contemplating this landscape with all its secrecy and obfuscation, small details suddenly coalesce into something tangible. Concrete pipes line up as if on parade. PVC doors, confined to a lot, dream of the short journey to the nearest half-finished home. Farmers re-attach fallen vines with pliers and wire. Men and women appear like statues, immobile yet fragile, while the world spins, the sun blinds and the real becomes elusive and ephemeral once more.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Remembering Srebrenica - Reflections on barbaric acts of human cruelty. Context: On 11th July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic, systematically massacred 8,372 men and boys.

#Bosnia #Graves #Herzegovina #In Memoriam #Landscape #Memory #photography #Remembering Srebrenica #War

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Everything I ever learnt

Everything I ever learnt...

A proposal…

‘That image reminds me of something. It ignites a small flame that lights my way through the filing system of my mind. It brings me eventually to the hint of a memory, and that memory guides my interpretation of the image, influences my reaction, connects my thoughts and feelings, and threads them together, binding them into a new collection, to be drawn upon the next…

View On WordPress

#analogue #apples #countryside #Evidence #film #garden #history #medium format #Memory #metaphor #re-visiting #religion #rural England #Stories #UK #village life

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Bastard Countryside

A review of the new book 'Bastard Countryside', by Robin Friend published by Loose Joints

‘The city, in its Victorian overcoat, the muck of centuries on its waistcoat, bored Ballard. He promoted this new place, the rim. The ‘local’ was finished as a concept. Go with the drift, with detachment. The watcher on the balcony. Areas around airports were ecumenical. They were the same everywhere: storage units, hangars, satellite hotels, car hire companies, apologetic farmland as a mop-up…

View On WordPress

#Bastard Countryside #capitalism #consumerism #edgelands #Iain Sinclair #Landscape photography #Les Miserables #London Orbital #Moby Dick #nature #Robert Adams #Robert MacFarlane #Robin Friend #UK #Victor Hugo #whale

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

Tend /tend/ v. 1. tr. care for, take care of, look after, look out for, watch over, mind, attend to, see to, keep an eye on, cater for, minister to, nurse, nurture, cherish, protect.

An allotment after its allotted time. Eyed at by prospectors intent on converting to cash. Onions, potatoes, radishes, carrots and leeks vie with burdock and bramble for a stake (literally) in the remains of the fertile ground.

These are the forgotten remains of careful conservation and cared for cabbages. Beneath the foliage of strange and unfamiliar plants, whose fronds sway elegantly in the dusk’s last breath, rutted earth dug in right angled rows turns the ankle of unsuspecting trespassers. Stumbling, legs follow eyes reluctantly to the next abandoned, skeletal shed.

I wandered down one Sunday summer evening when the upward heat from the earth met the low sun’s last residual rays. I heard the percussive notes of shattering greenhouse glass: a whisper of boys huddled around an air- rifle, taking aim at anything that caught their eye. I wondered whether I should go down and try to negotiate a picture, but thought better of it. I didn’t doubt about my own safety but knew those moments when some random stranger crashes a summer evening with mates were times that shouldn’t be interupted. The suffocating heat was a warning that this was a place where I had no legitimate walk on part.

I had to contend myself to wait at a distance. After seeing them burn up and out of the estate, I eased into the tall grass – a similar sensory experience to ‘wild’ swimming such was the feeling of immersion. I lost a few skin cells to the tips of brambles wading between islands of 2by4 and fetid felt. A few surprising things were left behind: a tool kit never used, still in its box (with receipt); a variety of manual tools in states of distortion – gappy forks with missing tangs; bundles of brittle bamboo gathering dust; garden sieves that reminded me of a recurring childhood dream of panning for gold in the Klondike (aka the seasonal stream at the bottom of the garden).

The sense of industry in this place was palpable. Animal, insect and plant vied with the human to create layers of elaborate existential references. Small pathways or ‘smouts’ in the tall grasses eluded to the nocturnal commute of rodents and small mammals. A beautifully formed abandoned wasps nest suggested ours was not the only reality – that there were other worlds living with us, in parallel. Smaller, yes, but no less beautiful or significant.

So, when the bulldozers move into this vacant lot, another ‘unproductive’ space will be won over by the money men. The direction of travel here is unsurprising. A frictionless future perhaps, but one which marginalises the already under-appreciated moments and significance of and in this abandoned place.

Tend Tend /tend/ v. 1. tr. care for, take care of, look after, look out for, watch over, mind, attend to, see to, keep an eye on, cater for, minister to, nurse, nurture, cherish, protect.

#Analogue photography #black and white photography #edgelands #environmental art #environmental journalism #Landscape #Landscape photography #nature #summer #UK #wreckage

1 note · View note

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

I’ve been returning (when I can) to a practically invisible agricultural feature in the landscape. ‘Pits (dis)’ are extraordinary in their prominence on local OS maps – I’ve noted ten of these things in one square mile. They were used to quarry chalk to apply as fetilizer and acidity regulator before modern farming practices made this process redundant. Quite often they feature as strange wooded outcrops in the middle of ploughed fields, especially noticable in winter.

I decided to return to this particular one (OS ref: 465 528) repeatedly over a period of two years documenting seasonal and climatic change from one viewpoint.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Change I've been returning (when I can) to a practically invisible agricultural feature in the landscape. 'Pits (dis)'

#2018 #Chalk Pits #change #Hampshire #Landscape #photography #Pits

0 notes

djnorwood · 5 years

Text

This post comes part-way through a long term project broadly related to fields. These are places which reflect our connection with the countryside and industrial food production.

They have a pschological hold on us collectively and individually in relation to national identity and our own personal experiences of nature. This perspective is only true in the sense that ‘nature’ is represented by what it is not – it is what is outside the domestic space and outside the control of the home. Fields provide a false idea of nature in the sense that images mask the notion of what ‘industrialisation’ should look like. Fields are as much industrial spaces lacking in biodiversity as any comparable industrialised space. Indeed, few places, in my experience, exhibit such an astonishing lack of plant and animal diversity as a modern field.

Above are 12 views taken from the same position along the River Winterbourne in Wiltshire, UK, which periodically rises and retreats according to the underlying water table.

Observing the periodic rise and retreat of a river in a field in Wiltshire. This post comes part-way through a long term project broadly related to fields. These are places which reflect our connection with the countryside and industrial food production.

0 notes

djnorwood · 6 years

Text

Tribal Meditations

Simon Roberts’ atomised survey of Brexit Britain’s divided soul. A short review.

Merrie Albion, the new monograph by the photographer Simon Roberts is a timely publication delving into the social landscape of England. The work has been ten years in the making and was conceived, as much as these things can be, before the uncertainty of Brexit could taint the sea air or sour the national psyche.…

View On WordPress

0 notes