Where I Find Myself

In a room in West Cumbria, writing blog entries to distract myself from waiting to find out if I was successful in a job interview on Monday.
– How did I get here?
Well, I woke up here.
– And why was that?

If you’re someone who actually reads this blog, you’ll probably already know the answer. After eleven and a half years in Spain, I have returned to the UK and am currently seeking employment here.

For most of my first ten years there, I hardly even considered the possibility of coming back here, and often dismissed the idea with the notion that there was no ‘back’ as one can’t simply hit rewind and return to where things were left. In any case, whether it was the initial excitement, later dogged determination to make things work, or some occasionally ill-directed ire at the politics of my country of birth, I had rarely if ever had any serious thoughts about leaving my life in Spain to start anew in the UK.

I had, however, been growing steadily more frustrated with my career situation in Spain. I had identified that private language schools were a road to nowhere somewhen in late 2016, and had since 2017 been seeking to make my way cross country to the high-speed (gravy) train tracks of the public sector. I finished my Master’s in Education in 2018 and sent my undergraduate degree away to be validated in 2023 … and about three years later it came back in a rather unceremonious email. This email arrived about three days after I had decided to stop ‘tripping over the same rock’ and look for other paths … ones with fewer rocks … or at least different rocks.

Or possibly the same rocks, just looked at with fresh eyes after many years away. For the summer of 2022, I ended up returning to where my Spanish adventure ultimately all started … Edinburgh, in events already chronicled, or at least alluded to, here. As is always the case at ZOO/the Fringe, I had an intense but incredibly brilliant time and felt so much more alive than I had done in the last few years of teaching.

I had become resigned, frustrated and dull. At times I had remembered a younger, more carefree, more spontaneous and exciting self, and feared this person to be lost. That summer, I realised that person was still in here somewhere, he just hadn’t been seen in a while. I had also feared that there was no way I’d be able to handle the intensity of the Edinburgh Fringe after about a decade away. That summer, I realised I was capable of so much more than I had been doing. I also felt like a bit of a fool for being away from the Fringe for so long.

I did of course return to my life in Spain, and a short while later did return to the classroom as a language teacher. I knew that I wanted to find alternative work but I also needed a source of income, and at least it wouldn’t impede me from returning to Edinburgh for the Fringe again this year. It was clear immediately, though, that I felt differently about my work and myself while teaching compared to working at ZOO. My time away in Edinburgh, but also my years of tumultuous travails regarding my employment, how I felt about it and consequently how I felt about myself, had also taken their toll on the relationship with my partner at the time, which didn’t end but … changed significantly before the end of 2022.

New Year, New Room as I obviously (or not that obviously perhaps … who can tell?) had to move to alternative accommodation. I resisted the urge to make other major changes at that stage, though I did consider and indeed applied (unsuccessfully) for some jobs as a Photography Tutor or Lecturer in the UK, evidently still struggling with the Limits of Vision of conceiving of jobs outside of either teaching or that other constant throughout my crises of identity, Photography. I ultimately decided that it was probably best to avoid making any more major life alterations at that point, and to let things settle a little, and by around Spring time I was actually fairly set on the idea of staying in Spain, after all, I already lived there and had made many friends, learned the language and ultimately felt that it was my home.

I had, however, also decided that I wouldn’t be returning to my job after the summer holidays because … well, I didn’t want to, and I definitely didn’t want to still be in that same job, or indeed profession, another year later. This felt fine as I knew what I was going to do in the summer, namely go to Edinburgh and therefore September felt safely shaded by the promise of fulfilment and enjoyment in Edinburgh … until it suddenly felt really quite impending and threatening, along with the major life decisions that loomed along with it. Contemplating these big questions in the middle of an intense arts festival was definitely sub-optimal and led to the formation of both a WhatsApp group called ‘Blood Pact’ for similarly profoundly doubt-ridden individuals, and the ironic-slogan-come-meme «The Fringe, where all your best life decisions are made.»

There were some low moments, but I’ve often found that when I’m sinking down into the dark depths, I need to let myself find the bottom to push back off of towards the surface. In this case, the bottom was probably drinking four fifths of a bottle of whiskey from a mug on the carpeted floor of a community centre, leading to a hangover that will go down in the annals of ZOO history. I have felt physically worse, just very rarely, however mentally I was very much improved and actually haven’t had a dark day since, for whatever that’s worth to those in the marketing department at the Arran Distillery.

After one final appearance from the dynamic duo I had come to think of as my Front of House Sisters, something of a heat wave arrived in Edinburgh (and the UK as a whole) as I had also felt those clouds of «what on earth am I going to do with my life?» steadily but surely disperse and found myself basking in the sunlit clarity of some sort of direction … I want to live in Edinburgh and work in the Arts.

I actually hadn’t even booked my return flight to Valencia until about two thirds of the way through the festival, and generally speaking, wasn’t at all excited by the thought of going back, it was simply something that I’d have to do eventually as all of my stuff was there, and I supposedly «lived there» … whatever that means. That said, the decision wasn’t fully made as I was aware that I might feel differently when I did get back to Valencia, which had indeed been my home for the previous seven years.

I really didn’t, though, and within a day of landing I had fully made up my mind as to what I wanted to do … so the only thing left to do was put the wheels in motion to make it happen. The wheels, in this case, belonged to an international removals company who would be hired to transport my amassed books, clothes, bicycles and trinkets to the UK. There were also some wheels on a few trains to different parts of the country to say farewell to friends on my extended Goodbye Tour which had a fairly full run of dates across September and October.

And so, here I am, waiting to hear from a job I interviewed for in Edinburgh on Monday. They did say I’d hear something by the end of the week, and it’s now 5pm on Friday. They say no news is good news. It’s really the absence of bad news. People say lots of things.

A limbo-like state within a limbo-like state. I’ve left my previous stage of life behind but am waiting to start the next stage. I might have got the job, I might not. Schrödinger’s Job.

On Photography

As this is nominally a Photography related blog … although it is on my website, more’s the pity … I should probably dedicate quite literally ‘some’ words to that particular subject.

As per my recent post about my trip to Estonia, I haven’t really been very engaged with Photography over the past … it might even be two years ago now that it started, but … year or so. That situation ultimately continues to the time of writing, although hasn’t been helped recently by the one camera I did bring over with me on the plane being struck down by a faulty battery (but fortunately nothing more serious than that) while the other cameras were still to arrive here to be able to substitute it. Honestly, though, that wouldn’t really have made a big difference. I might have made a few more pictures on some of the sunnier days with longer walks that I went on, but those wouldn’t have swung the balance significantly in terms of what, and how much I’m producing, and how I feel about this creative output.

This certainly isn’t my first photographic slump, it’s just the most recent, and in order to analyse its origins and trajectory to this point, I’ll go back to the end of the previous one, which I’ll identify as ending in late 2018. From late-2017 to mid-2018 I was doing my Master’s in Education, which I put a lot of effort into and did really well in. While I didn’t entirely switch off from Photography during that time, in fact I made it the focus of my dissertation, I certainly didn’t do a lot of picture making myself.

Following the conclusion of my Master’s, though, I had booked onto a two-day seminar with Magnum in London that coincided nicely with someone’s wedding weekend. I had booked the seminar much earlier in the year but suddenly found myself wondering what work I was going to show to all of the other participants … and some photographers from perhaps the world’s most well-known photography agency. I didn’t really have anything, but I cobbled together two sets of images that at least vaguely showed what I could do, and what I was about – these sets of images were the first photographs I had made around the area known as La Huerta Valenciana, and the first photographs I had made on trips to Segorbe. I also showed up with a lot of Imposter Syndrome.

I reverted to my old undergraduate trick of not volunteering to show my work, hoping to go unnoticed and/or be left until the very end when half the seminar had made their excuses to leave after getting their own feedback. I hadn’t played that game in a few years but I clearly still had it, or so I thought, as people started to pack away their things and stand up from the table … unfortunately, nothing gets past these eagle-eyed Magnum documentary photographers, and my group leader realised that I hadn’t had my turn. It wasn’t all that bad, and similar to my undergraduate degree, since we had all paid, the feedback we received was generally quite forgiving, kind and generous. There was some honest truth in the feedback, too, and I would later come back to those thoughts as I eventually developed those two fledgling projects into the more-fully-formed versions you can see on this website today. Not that they’re exceptional projects now, but they’re better than they were then, and certainly in once case, that’s because of the feedback I received over the course of that weekend.

There was still a little more slump to go, though. From London we flew to Oslo, a city so expensive that photography is actually one of the cheaper things you can do there, and I did make some pictures on that trip including a few that I liked at the time and still do now, but ultimately these fall into the same category as my pictures from Tartu in that they’re semi-decent, semi-interesting travel pictures that aren’t really connected to anything larger than that. Do photographs need to be connected to something larger? Not really. Certainly not for most people. Certainly not for a lot of photographers. I’ve spent a lot of time labouring under the idea that mine do, or at least should, though.

After returning from Oslo, I spent the rest of the (very typically very hot) summer working on some intensive courses for University students, which generally saw my photographic output dip each year that I did those as a combination of the heat and the workload left me very much with Cayman Island Banking Guy vibes. In September I started a new job, and the summer heat slowly started to wane, but my photographic output didn’t start to pick up at all until early November.

Things started to come good when we went to stay at a friend’s farm inland from Castellón de la Plana. I was definitely aware of this slump at the time, because I decided to use an old manual focus lens I had adapted for my digital SLR instead of either of the autofocus lenses I owned. Using this lens always seemed to enliven photography for me and make me feel more ‘creative’ between the act of manual focussing, and the results being perhaps a little soft, somewhat vignetted and with a fair amount of swirling towards the edges of the frame – particularly as I’ve always insisted (to whom, I’m not sure … the lens, I suppose) on using it at its maximum aperture of f/2 which is, of course, in itself an IQ 1000 creative strat.

It seemed to do the job again this time. Come the end of the month, on a trip to Segorbe, I was out and about making more pictures around the town, and by early December I had started making return trips to La Huerta Valenciana. The slump had ended and a really rather productive phase had begun. I used my fairly free Friday mornings to photograph out on La Huerta Valenciana through until about April, with weekends often spent exploring ever-more side streets of the old town in Segorbe, and I amassed fairly large amounts of work that became the two project pages on this website. I had photographed through the winter months when the light is generally softer, and as the harsher light arrived found my returns decreasing, and also felt that in both cases, I had photographed sufficiently to not be leaving much on the table. I could have continued, but I was already starting to feel that I was repeating myself within images, and it just felt like the time to stop.

While I didn’t have the focus of the two projects any longer, I still felt engaged with photography and more inclined to take a camera with me and make some photographs in the style of Shakira, namely whenever and wherever. (This is more commonly attributed to William Eggleston as Democratic Photography.) That summer was also when I started to get back into using film with an initial few rolls through an old 35mm SLR I had somehow inherited, before deciding to go all in on livin’ la vida Leica which is around when this blog started.

As documented at the time, I was using film for my photography until Covid hit all of our lives, when I stopped due to a) not having any and b) not deeming it an essential to either order in or go out and purchase. Once things opened up in June, though, I was able to resume my film habit and generally worked with the medium solidly for the next year, albeit with some infrequent pauses occasioned by larger developing and scanning bills, such as the one that came in September 2021. I had spent a few weeks in the UK having not been able to travel since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and a summer of not earning while also using film for photography warned me off of film for a while … but then I didn’t really replace it with using my digital camera as I had during lockdown.

It was around this time that I really noticed myself being less motivated to photograph, and decided to sign up for a course in Segorbe led by Julián Baron to try and combat this. Julián is a brilliant and enthusiastic teacher of photography, incredibly generous with his knowledge and his spirit, and his course was a wonderful experience that I’d recommend to anyone who has the opportunity to take one. The objective of the course was to find and develop your own photographic project … exactly what I had been looking to do since the conclusion of my two projects in 2019. I learned a lot through the course, which was provided entirely for free through the Segorbe town council but honestly, far more valuable than my entire undergraduate degree. I applied myself, and did try to find projects to get started on but ultimately, all of them felt a little forced … as, to be honest, have all attempts I’ve ever made at project-based photography right the way back to University.

By early 2022 I felt my finances had recovered enough to start using film again, but some of the shine had worn off and it no longer felt like an expense I could comfortably either afford or justify. Another expensive developing and scanning bill, which delivered some results I was really quite underwhelmed with, put the writing on the wall for my wholesale use of film. Overall, I’d definitely say I enjoyed my two years mostly working with film, certainly the experience of using the camera(s) and manual focus lenses, but it did also cause me some headaches … or I caused myself some headaches by overthinking and applying too much pressure on myself.

I’ve written here in a specific post, but also alluded to it in other posts, that I was often unsure about whether to lean into Black and White or Colour for my photography. With film this is something of a firm decision, at least if one uses Black and White film, and this didn’t help my uncertainty. If I hadn’t been pressuring myself with the notions of creating consistent photographic projects, and working in a consistent photographic style throughout my work, but had instead been content with enjoying making decent photographs then this wouldn’t have been such an issue, so really, that’s on me rather than the medium of film.

The above linked post on my early struggles on deciding between the two was actually the final post in what could be considered the heyday of regularly posting to this blog. I try to keep negativity away from these pages, and from that point on I found that I didn’t really have a lot of positive messages to communicate related to my photographic experience. I suppose I was also starting to get really quite burnt out on teaching as well. Was this just general burn out after the Covid period? I had certainly used Photography and creativity to keep me going through lockdown, and I’d say it worked really well. I suppose I had then tried to sustain that into the post-lockdown-still-Covid period with more mixed results, until eventually the steam subsided as lockdowns lifted. That might be one interpretation anyway.

I definitely put a lot of pressure on myself. Pressure to come up with my next photographic project after having literally ‘some’ success with the two on La Huerta Valenciana and Segorbe, and to an extent the really good crop of pictures from the Olive Harvest. Associated with this pressure to find my next project was, as mentioned above, self-imposed pressure to define an aesthetic for this project and indeed my wider work going forward forever more … should it be Black and White or Colour? I couldn’t decide on either front, and kept changing between subject and medium, trying to make each choice a definitive one rather than just enjoying making pictures. I’m sure I’m not the first person to do this, and I won’t be the last.

I poured out pages of ink, agonising over these ideas back and forth, round and round without really getting anywhere. These notes are frequently punctuated by attempts to remind myself that Photography is meant to be something I enjoy. These never really seemed to work. I was still going with this at around the time my last relationship ended, and as mentioned above, these downward spirals were certainly a contributing factor in that coming to pass.

The major changes that came with that do seem to have been the point where I had had enough, or was unable to deal with these self-made issues with Photography as well as everything else I needed to sort out in my life. I needed to find a new project for my life rather than a new project for my camera.

This is possibly the most thought I’ve dedicated to Photography all year. It just hasn’t been that important to me. I took the camera on my two trips to Graz and Tartu, and just about managed to avoid putting too much pressure on myself apart from the minor obsession with documenting wooden houses as if this was somehow going to mark a before and after in my work and be a career defining moment.

I didn’t do a huge amount of photography over the summer in Edinburgh, either. I had made some really good pictures in 2022 with some excellent, exciting and visually dramatic shows up in the Main House, and decided that I didn’t feel the need to make any more – both in the sense that I already had enough good material from the year before that the company could use, but also in the sense that I had no personal ambition to do so. I set myself a brief of getting some pictures of performances in our spaces at ZOO Playground, some decent photographs of the bar and our bar events, as well as any others of the venues generally that I found time for.

It was mostly just a skill I had that could be useful to the venue, not a creative urge to make pictures … there was an urge to climb on things that photography facilitated and gave me an excuse to act upon. That was definitely there in the same way that it had been when I first climbed Kilimanjaro … the coffee shop opposite our venue. The only things I did really feel an urge to document at any stage were little amusing aspects of venue life that I wanted to have some kind of record of … Dave defining nonchalance by DJing while rolling a cigarette, the Dick Special, the Mirrorball Special. I probably should have just bought a disposable camera like Zoe did.

Bad Photography Made Easier

Something else I felt an urge to photograph, though, was The Nan Mug. Not long after arriving, I got home late one night to find a florally decorated mug which read ‘Nan’ in the sink of our shared, rented flat for the month. It felt like a ready-made pisstake of a Photography degree project on the juxtaposition of this supposedly sentimental object within a rented residence used by transient visitors, and so I made a picture of it for my own amusement. And then the next time I saw it somewhere else in the kitchen, documented it there as well. A couple of days later, for some reason (the reason was probably having had a couple of beers) I decided to show these to a few fellow ZOO Keepers and attempt to explain my amusement and interest in this mug, leading to my Press Office colleague and housemate Tamsin deciding to participate in my new project by endeavouring to move the mug around the kitchen for me to find and photograph. I eventually published an edit of the complete works using modified Elton John lyrics and the title of my Leslie Nielsen inspired Photography Magazine that never was.

When I got back to Valencia I did feel the call to document a piece of graffiti that really amused me while I was out for dinner with a friend one evening, but then I don’t think I made any other pictures before leaving the country. I was busy organising, packing and saying goodbye to people.

Since arriving in West Cumbria, I have taken the camera out on two of my lengthy walks around the lanes, but on the second one it developed the aforementioned battery fault that has only recently been resolved, and now it’s raining. However, similarly to while I was still in Spain, I’ve mostly been dedicating my time to looking and applying for jobs, and that is both more important and more motivating right now than making myself go out with a camera because I’ve attached the label of ‘photographer’ to myself for the last twenty years.

And so, this is Where I Find Myself. In Bad Golf Made Easier, Leslie Nielsen teaches Billy a motto of «I don’t play golf to feel bad, I play bad golf but feel good.» For a long time I was making myself feel bad attempting to make good photography. I may not be producing as much in the way of photography at the moment, or over the last year, but at least I’m no longer feeling bad about that, or what I am producing. I’m not necessarily striving to make bad photographs (though making Bad Photography Made Easier was actually a degree project that I now really regret rejecting at the time) but just accepting my travel and other random pictures for what they are, and not trying to make them what they’re not.

And maybe not trying to make myself what I’m not either. Like my man Billie Joe Armstrong said «You may find out that your self-doubt means nothing was ever there, you can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right.» I tried forcing myself to come up with photography projects for a long old time, and didn’t really come up with anything. There are plenty of issues out there to document, but maybe I’m not the person to do that if I don’t feel a genuine call to do so.

During my Authentic Try Hard Hours phase, I also bought myself the Alec Soth Magnum Learn course with some birthday money, and I don’t regret this at all, it was a really good course with a photographer whose work I really like and outlook I’ve really benefitted from. In the course, Alec mentions some of the religious iconography that comes up in his pictures in his book Sleeping By The Mississippi, well-known photographs such as the portrait of the inmate whose neckline reads Preacher Man for example, but says that he can’t think of anything he’d less like to do than a really serious, involved, detailed documentary project on religion in America. That’s just not him, it’s not the way he works, which is more allegorical and poetic in nature.

I’m pretty sure it isn’t me, either. Nor does working on long-form projects in the way Alec does seem to be. Some people have an unstoppable desire to photograph, to document what’s around them … what if I don’t? I do seem to like observing the world closely, and photography is a means and a motivator for doing that, particularly in new surroundings I’m looking to make sense of or find ways of remembering. I enjoy the act of photographing, but will often forget photographs I’ve made. I rarely go through old folders of photographs on the computer, and when I do I realise that I had forgotten making most of them. At this point, someone might suggest printing my photographs. I’ve done that, and I never look at those either. I also never really display my work for my own enjoyment. I’ve printed and framed pictures for other people, but never for myself. I wouldn’t know which picture to print, or really deem any of them particularly worth framing and displaying … which makes it seem like an even more rubbish gift now, so apologies to friends and family who have received those over the years. Certain friends of mine are probably reading this and rolling their eyes, so, in the interests of fairness … I also own thousands of pounds worth of Photography books that I don’t really look at very often, either, and when I do it’s because I feel like I probably should a) because I spent the money on them and b) because I have again made ‘being into Photography’ a part of my identity for so long. In for a penny, in for a (few thousand) pound.

I’m increasingly unsure of what point I’m trying to make here, and at this stage feel that the only suitable way to end this particular post is … in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrast.

Boutros, Boutros-Ghali,

Owain.