Hebden, plotted and pieced.

Still pondering the conundrum of on the one hand embracing Hopkins' all-encompassing aesthetic of accepting all the works of man and their trappings and paraphernalia, 'their gear and tackle and trim', all the bits-and-pieces nature of the way things are, and on the other the desire to erase and eliminate all the electricity cables, cars, traffic cones, wheely bins and other lumps of contemporary tat that get in the way of a nice view.

This was never more brought home than in editing these photos of Hebden Bridge.

Hebden is saved form being the Totnes-of-the-North by its industrial heritage, the workaday, sooty-edged grittiness that remains from that. (We lived near Totnes in Devon for a year or so, couldn't stand it, but that's another story...).

It's up-and-down hilliness and old stones,

its vertical stepping and terracing and consequent confounding of the laws of perspective

the ruggedness of the surrounding hills and old farms and parishes,

and the flow of water, natural and channelled, through it, the many and varied structures that span it,

all make it picturesque, for sure. Yet , despite its apparently largely incoming population of more middle class outsiders, artists, professionals, creative and adventurous people seeking a somewhat alternative lifestyle - overused to the point of redundant though that expression is -there are many ways inwhich it retains the appearance of a hard-edged northern town, rather down on its post-industrial luck.


Which is also picturesque, in its own way. Which brings one to the question of retro charm.

I was aware when I put together the first 'gear and tackle' post, that there was a distinction between the preserved and cherished artefacts of former working days, in this case from Sidney's Powerhouse museum or the Star ferries in Hongkong, and the more unconscious patterns and interest found in the conteporary trappings of work and trade. Once something becomes old, or exotic (the stencilled Chinese characters beside the pliers immediately created a strangeness for me which caught the eye and imagination), it is on its way to being a thing of beauty. So in old sepia photos of towns and buildings, as someone pointed out, the untidy old wires and posts are part of the charm. This is at odds, of course, with our equation of youth with beauty in human beings, and our desire for acquisition of ever newer objects of technology. I'm sure there's much more to be said on this subject, and it probably has been, how the past acquires beauty in its passing, while the messy, garish, broken and piecemeal reminder of living, contemporary humanity wearies our spirits.

Part of the problem too seems to lie in not mixng your aesthetics. You could make a good picture of an interlacing cat's cradle of wires, the weathered wood of the post, the blue glass resisters, or of the patterns and motifs and colours of a car park full of cars, or the shiny reflecting surfaces of new cars in a showroom. You could quite possibly find interest in a hypnotic repeating rhythms of an arrangement of traffic cones. (I defy anyone to find beauty, pied or otherwise, in wheely bins; the cylindrical older fashioned plastic bins in the alley picture above are beginning to take on retro charm by comparison, though better if they were galvanised metal, with the heavy lids, that gave the dustmen hernias...) But if you're trying to take pictures of a pretty, quaint or otherwise attractive town or village, replete with a charming consistency of vernacular architecture, those lumps and lines of plastic and metal just jarr.

That's partly why I don't do many postcard pictures. I've no objection at all to the postcard/chocolate box aesthetic, after all, however one chooses to make a picture, one is always framing, selecting, editing, making something artificial, but I think perhaps it works better using paint, where one can colour and soften and delete and rearrange to one's heart's content, or at least the kind of skillful photo-editing software I don't have the brains or patience to master.

Tall Girl and I sometimes recall the time when the Town Architect (the father of another schoolfriend) came to talk to us at school. He exhorted us to look up, above the people and cars, the garish uniformity of the chainstore shop fronts and take in the building line, which should, if it is a good one, above all contain variety, different angles, unevenness, assymetry.

So that's what I've tried to do. I've cropped these pictures quite drastically to pick out the points of interest, and exclude the clutter, as you can see below, though now I look at it, I rather like the old man and the 'no entry' sign...

I rather hope by doing so, by making pictures of odd and uneven shape which ignore all the Golden Means and Rules of Thirds and the rest, I've done something to offset the loss of integrity and denial of truth involved, and made something counter, spare and strange in itself.