James's World

I've mentioned Rachel Wright before HERE … She’s a photography-friend who talks quietly but passionately about an idea or technique and, for a few days, nothing seems to happen – I don’t apparently register it or act on it. Then suddenly it bursts into my mind, encouraging me to be adventurous, to approach things differently, to try something new. Rachel’s mad-ninja skills I call them. And this time it was her reference to reverse-lens macro photography and the ‘other-worldly’ images she’d taken of lichen and algae that was exciting me.

Other-worldly? Could I become an explorer in the magical kingdom she’d found, I wondered?

Would it be like Narnia, with a mysterious portal?

Meeting James

So I was out in the front garden examining the wall, half-hoping to find a secret doorway when I met ‘James’ – a tiny snail, less than half an inch from head to tail – and I watched him on his laborious trek, progressing down the shrub towards … towards where exactly?

Why James?

Well, I named him after the snail in the poem by A.A. Milne, ‘The Four Friends’. Do you know it? It’s a favourite of mine – resonant of childhood and the very first book I owned (When We Were Very Young), a gift from my godmother on my fourth birthday in 1956.

But there’s also a resonance of now – with maybe a tinge of loss and sadness – as I adjust to my new, smaller, more limited world, coping with the aftermath of vertebral fractures

The Four Friends

Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow,
Leonard was a lion with a six foot tail,
George was a goat, and his beard was yellow,
And James was a very small snail.

Leonard had a stall, and a great big strong one,
Ernest had a manger, and its walls were thick,
George found a pen, but I think it was the wrong one,
And James sat down on a brick

Ernest started trumpeting, and cracked his manger,
Leonard started roaring, and shivered his stall,
James gave a huffle of a snail in danger
And nobody heard him at all.

Ernest started trumpeting and raised such a rumpus,
Leonard started roaring and trying to kick,
James went on a journey with the goat’s new compass
And he reached the end of his brick.

Ernest was an elephant and very well intentioned,
Leonard was a lion with a brave new tail,
George was a goat, as I think I have mentioned,
but James was only a snail.

A.A. Milne

Soon I was examining brickwork and peering into shrubs, and there was something in this attention to detail that reminded me of an online course I’d taken back in 2020 (on ‘Mindfulness Photography for Mental Health and Resilience’ run by Ruth Davey HERE …)  Or, more accurately, it was an assignment I remembered, encouraging me to take curiosity/noticing/wellbeing walks looking for colours and textures etc. – a calming and comforting activity that I continued to enjoy long after the course had finished.

So I dived (dove?) into my back catalogue and enjoyed fossicking around to find images that explored and recreated the idea of ‘James’s World’.

James's World

At first, I got a lot of pleasure from this retrospective approach, but it came to feel contrary. That, on one hand, I’d been enduring (and dis-eased by) the invisibility that one can encounter with ageing and with un-ability. And yet, on the other, I was willing to take a remote, disengaged, voice-less approach to the exploration of James’s world. There was nothing remotely engaged or ‘present’ about fossicking around in my back catalogue – it felt more like hiding.

So I conflated the two ideas – of Ruth’s curiosity walks and of James’s World – and did a Ruth-like curiosity walk in the small, James-like world of our modest urban garden, meeting James and his cousins (the first image below).

Meeting James's Cousin

Then, more Ruth-like, I started looking for textures, then colours, then …

Ian talks about ‘takeaways’ in teaching (at some length, I might add!!) – where ‘takeaways’ are the understandings he wants a student to remember – and I feel there’s a valuable takeaway from my encounter with James.

In the past, a photo-shoot would take several hours – I’d capture several hundred images and walk several miles – whilst this was the polar opposite. The first ‘outing’ lasted barely 15 minutes, the second scarcely longer; I was never more than 20 yards from the back door; and my photography ‘bag’ can be counted in tens not hundreds. But there was no difference (past or present) in the way the activity absorbed me – in my level of engagement, pleasure, rapture almost. I was ‘in the zone’ – in a state of ‘flow’ as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi defines it, the “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”.

Post-processing was the same experience too (past and present). And creating the triptychs. And wanting to write about my adventure – to give it a voice. And wanting to share it with you.

There’s no Government Heath Warning subliminally attached to these photographs from James’s World. Nothing that says, you can't enjoy these images because I was only 20 yards from the back door.

And that’s my takeaway – my note-to-self – it’s about taking a leaf from James’s book (a very small leaf, obviously) about scale and opportunity. It’s about using “the goat’s new compass” and enjoying every chance to explore my strange, small world – right to the very ends of my “brick”.

James has shown me it can be rewarding, absorbing, enjoyable, enriching. And fun.

Thank you, James, for such a wonderful outcome.

Stay safe.

Paddy xxxx

January 2023

P.S. I did find the mysterious doorway into Narnia – the portal to reverse-lens macro photography.
But that, as they say, is another story.