This is a new feature on my Substack and the idea - I’m calling it Unframed - came to me on a big, sturdy stride out over the South Downs this afternoon. I think it’s a grand idea and I hope you’ll agree that it’s a reasonably interesting idea too. I made a swanky graphic for it just now too, humble brag.
Here’s where I had my idea.
What I want is for Unframed to become a monthly written word practice on my Sub and one based on a visual photographic prompt.
So what exactly is the idea? Well, there are a dozen brown shoeboxes shelved in my front room. And each is squashed chock full of small and dog-eared rectangles of Fuji, Kodak and Ilford paper. All of them photographs.
I work as a photographer so, naturally enough, there are oodles of prints of various sizes kicking about the place here. Some framed on the wall, some stuck on the fridge, a few propped up loose on table tops and then some in the shoeboxes.
For context, they’re so precious to me that, when I moved with my family to the US to live in DC for a time, I was so horrified at the idea of all these photographs being left behind locked in a damp garage or shipping in a container across the Atlantic that I made my Dad drive them all up to their home in Cumbria for safe-keeping.
The preservation of the photographs preoccupied me quite a bit and it is this aspect of resettling stateside and what is left behind and forcibly parted from in the process which drew me to the generous writing of
. Clover is living a DC life currently. I know she took her Mother’s farmhouse table and I often wonder whether all her photos came along too.Photographs which date back 40+ years and cover, well, pretty much the whole four decades of living in between. Or, perhaps more accurately, they document the moments within these years that a finger on a shutter chose to define them.
Each month, I’m going to rifle through a box and pick a picture. And once I’ve picked just the one photograph (just one?!) to examine, I’m going to set a timer for 30 minutes and write around the picture and see what comes up.
Photographs are steeped in clues as to what was going on for us at the time the lens was pointed. The emotion presented to camera is not always what we observe, though, when we much later cast our older eyes down and take a fresh look into a printed, pixellated past. Sometimes what we picture in mind is not present in the frame at all.
I pledge to be bold and open with Unframed and so am choosing to put this writing behind a paywall because it will be personal in nature.
I’ve already picked my first print for Unframed #01
Here it is.
Taken a few hours after returning home to a full house of children and cheer and just before Christmas 2005. Returning home from a hospital. With a new life and into a new life.
A life which resembled the previous one in lots of ways yet was also immediately different and suddenly a dramatically new and unfamiliar shape. Everything on autopilot, everything leaking. Milk, blood, tears and every drop of my known life with it, so it seemed to me.
Almost two decades in the past is what this moment is now and writing these number words two decades feels just plain ridiculous and implausible. Clock time and psychological time may well be cousins but they don’t share the same gait and pace.
Like I said, the idea to do this came whilst stomping over chalky downland and staggering up a hill. I often have creative ideas whilst moving and thinking in combination. And when an idea comes to me I’m prompted to stop, stand still and record a voiced message on the Notes app of my phone. Which I’ll then read back minutes later with my eyes and find has been translated into utter unintelligible nonsense.
I’m never sure whether it’s the wind distorting the audio before it gets to the mic or my Northern accent baffling the dictation genie who lives in my phone and clearly understands RP and RP alone?
Either way, I’ve learnt that if I don’t check the dictated words there and then, by the time I’ve taken my oxygenated mind and hauled my invigorated legs back home to tuck them back under my desk where they are now, the words which have sync’ed from phone to Mac screen will be entirely and completely undecipherable.
So, what do you think? Will you join me? Not for the big stomps up hills part though these are bracing and brilliant and you’d likely love the views out over the water to the Isle of Wight.
No, join me for Unframed #01 ? The idea! It’s going to publish mid May.
New month, new feature. And to receive it you’ll need to subscribe by clicking the button below and selecting any of the three plans which are not marked ‘free’.
Paid because it’s personal. You can always pause or cancel the subscription later. Substack makes this really easy to do, which I find is a reassuring feature on this platform and sometimes have to use myself when circumstances call for it.
I’m excited. Not least about rooting around in all those treasured shoeboxes that have been lovingly stacked, organised (loosely by year) and cherished for so long.
Lovely idea and a chance for reflection on the process of becoming that your pictures over the decades will represent in 'snapshot'.
I think I might do the same, while trying VERY hard not to spend hours chasing the perfect image! Thanks for sharing this lovely idea.