“Blow up” in Parc Montsouris, Paris.

“Blow up” in Parc Montsouris, Paris.

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I have been thinking again about images and photography at lot over the last few weeks, not in the least driven by my decision to purchase a new camera. After carefully reading “Digital photography review” once again, just to see how things have evolved since my last camera purchase around 4 years ago, I decided on the Olympus OMD-EM10. This is the first camera I have bought which has an interchangeable lens. For years I had wanted to buy an SLR-type camera but was always put off by the size and the weight: I wanted something I could take with me on my many trips and which wouldn’t add much to the overall weight of my bags. So a big heavy SLR with lenses was out of the question, even if they supposedly produced better images (which was not always the case, if you chose carefully). But this new camera is wonderful: it is very small, only slightly heavier than my old canon compact  (G11), but it produces fantastic images. There is also a very large large selection of lenses. Yesterday afternoon I went down to Parc Montsouris with my old and new cameras  and took photographs of bushes across the lake, as one does. Comparing the two photographs I realised in the olympus image I could see a man lying down next to the statue, unresolved in the canon image (okay, so the focal lengths are not exactly the same). Wasn’t that just like a film from a certain Italian director? And you know the best hing? When you press the shutter button, *it takes a photograph instantly*, not like digital cameras of even a few years ago.

This is not the first time I have used a camera with interchangeable lenses however. In one of the numerous cardboard boxes here I found an old Pentax K1000 camera that my parents gave to me for my first trip to Europe. They had bought this camera for taking pictures of headstones (yes,really), and they had allowed me to take it with me, that summer where I worked at the ETH in Zurich. I took maybe six rolls of film on that trip. Looking at the lens again yesterday I see that it was a fixed 50mm lens, radically different from the lenses on the cameras I had used since then all of which had zoom lenses with focal lengths of around 35mm at the wide end: most of the photographs I ended up taking, through laziness more than anything else, was with this wide end of the zoom, a view of the world completely different from the 50mm lens on the Pentax.  I used this camera from 1988-2002, right up to the digital epoch in 2002 when I bought my canon power-shot S40 in Bologna for the horrendously expensive price of ~1000 euro.  Now, once again, I am in the habit of using wide-angle lenses, so the first fixed-focus lens I bought for the olympus was the f1.8 17mm M.Zuiko lens — a 35mm equivalent lens. It’s an interesting experience trying to decide what fixed focal length to choose — like a lot of things today, zoom lenses I think have made people lazy.

Growing up, I remember that at first photography was expensive. We had a Polaroid camera and my mother and I would go to the graveyard to take pictures of headstones with it (this was not meant to be the third instalment of “a life in stone” but it is turning into it). There was no “catalogue”, of course, in my fathers’ business, so the best way for people decide what kind of monument they would like to have was to show them photographs. It was hard to get the polaroid prints to develop in the northern Irish cemeteries, I remember holding them inside my jersey to accelerate the process. Later, I remember pleading with my mother to let me please just take one photograph with the camera please in our garden in Burn road, and she agreed, and I took *my first photograph*, only to discover that half the image was obscured by a blurry blob. First lesson of photography, make sure that your finger is not in front of the camera. Sometime after we got the Pentax, I was eventually assigned gravestone-photographing duties and allowed to take photographs on holiday. The Pentax was a completely manual camera and the possibility of error was significant. I remember one trip we made to the ring of Kerry. Afterwards, when I opened the camera to take out the film, I discovered (with horror) that I had threaded the film incorrectly and not one single image had been exposed (I was terrified to open the box to check, certain that all the film would be lost if I did that, but of course this was not the case).

This camera accompanied me on my voyages to Zurich, New Mexico, Canada, Durham and Marseille but by the time I arrived in Bologna in 2002 I wasn’t taking that many photographs. But by 2002 it became possible to switch to digital. Now, I have around 23,000 photographs on disk. Have to organise them somehow…

In the ancient city of Tallinn, after a long day travelling.

In the ancient city of Tallinn, after a long day travelling.

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(Just to take a break from all that Tyrone soul-searching, here is a little travelogue interlude. I can assure you that I will return to a “Life in Stone” before too long.)

I left our apartment this morning sometime after seven. It was a beautiful summer morning in Paris, bright sunshine, warm. Taking the train to the airport was challenging, thanks to the residual effects of a week-long SNCF strike. But I got there in the end and I got to my terminal and gate (after realising that no, I don’t have to queue as I had a  boarding pass already printed). Bizzarely, the aeroplane was full of folk travelling to Japan and China. And then a phase change, state change, a change of country: I found myself in Helsinki. The miracle of modern transportation.

The first one sees as one approaches Helsinki airport are trees, trees. There are forests everywhere around, together with shining blue lakes and bays. Through the windows of the airport one can see the stands of trees  beyond the tarmac. Low clouds hung in the sky, it looked like had rained recently. I took the bus to the train station through streets silvery with rain. The city seemed strangely empty … where is everyone? I found myself in front of the Helsinki train station, just in time to take a tram to the ferry terminal to catch my catamaran to Tallinn. I had seen this train station in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on earth many years ago and thought to myself I really would like to visit this city one day … On the bus to the port, I thought of a Finnish friend I had made in in that distant summer I first visited Europe, 1991. I promised to come and see him in Helsinki. I remember talking to my mother on the telephone about my proposed trip to Helsinki. But, she said to me, if you look at a map, won’t you have to go through Russia to get there? No, I assured her, I could simply take a ferry from Poland. Right? I got as far as Prague before I turned back.  Too far.

The crossing was extremely rough. We were warned about the bad weather and cautioned not to leave our seats. The catamaran pitched and rolled violently. Strange, because the sun shined brightly and there were no clouds in the sky. There must have been strong offshore winds.  Then, after one and a half hours, of zipping over the waves, Tallinn. I caught a taxi to the hotel, the palatial “Nordic Forum” and here I am, after having walked around the city for an an hour or two and eaten in a nice Indian restaurant (I’m not quite ready for Estonian cuisine).  It is half-past midnight and there is still sunlight in the sky.

There is a strange feeling to this city. To start with there is a sharp edge in the air. I am glad to have my cap. The temperature can’t be more than 10 or 11 degrees, but it is not so cold, at least not yet, because there is abundant sunshine. The streets seem are almost empty. Like in Helsinki, it feels as if there is no-one here. This is an after-effect of living in an overcrowded city like Paris? The old town of Tallinn is remarkable: it seems unchanged since hundreds of years (that photo up there is the Tallinn town hall). The streets are filled with tall narrow old hanseatic buildings. The city’s buildings have been wonderfully restored but if one looks carefully edges of the old unrestored past are visible…

 Perhaps everyone has left for the midsummer’s night vacation, Monday and Tuesday of next week. I’ll report back.

(On the aeroplane I began to read “The Czar’s Madman’, from the Estonian Jan Kross. A suggestion from Mr. Seagull. It is set in Estonia in the 19th century. It is indeed interesting to read it here.)

A life in stone, part II

A life in stone, part II

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(For part one, please go here)

My father worked in the yard, in a draughty courrugated iron shed (terribly hard to heat in winter, even the powerful space heaters he had couldn’t help much). There was a lot of chiselling and grinding and polishing, hard work involving a lot of water and noise and grit. This work had changed even in his lifetime. In the back yard there was a big block of marble which he said was his fathers’. In those days, you really did start from the block of marble. Today, he told me, you couldn’t pay someone to do this kind of work, it would just take too long.

It was his job to cut and polish the kerbs, chisel the incriptions on the uheadstones, transport all the pieces to the cemetery and assemble it. To load and unload his lorry he had just a small yellow folding hydralic crane and a few planks and rollers. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, multiple opportunies to crush a finger or two. Of course, some headstones were more challenging than others. The tall celtic crosses in particular with their heavy plinths and marble crosses were very heavy. Kerbs in particular seem to be an Irish or British concern: the gravestones are never a simple monument but have long stone bars on each of the four sides. Depending on your budget, you could have simple limestone kerbs, or, if you had the money, some nice black granite. The black granite, he told me, came from South Africa, and remember this was the 1980s, which certainly created some contradictions when you consider it was used for some of the more controversial monuments you could find in a northern Irish cemetary.

Most of his monuments were supplied by Feely Stone, just over the border in Athlone, in the “prarie” part of Ireland which no tourists go. Often the big lorries from Feely stone would arrive in our yard, inching slowly through the front gate with only few a millimeters clearance either side, heavily laden with headstones, gravel, kerbs. It would take the good part of a day to unload. Once, the driver was an Italian from Carrera: when I lived in Italy, I once drove through Carrera myself. They have been extracting marble for centuries, from Roman times I think. Michelangelo himself lived there for a while near the quarries to be sure to find exactly the right piece of stone. Driving slowly along the road, I saw monuments and sculptures were lined along both sides. I thought of my father, who had never been to Italy, and never visited Carrera.

I remember one trip to Feely with my mother, after we moved to Stewartstown, to pick up a statue of the Virgin Mary. Well, a man explained to me when we visited, today there is now a new cheap way to make a statues, you just needed marble dust and resin and you can bond everything together in a mold. No need to sit with a chisel for hours in the cold. The talismanic properties our resin-bonded Virgin Mary were minimal, however: on the way back from Feely stone, our car broke down and some students working nearby in the country on an EU-funded project drove us to a nearby garage where the car was repaired.

I went with my father a few times to the cemetary, I helped him out as best I could. He drove with his monuments all over Tyrone, up into the mountains near Gortin even. The days would be long, in the summer he would return to the house often well after seven. He was not a tall man, but he was very solidly built with big hands and strong arms. He almost never used gloves and his hands were thickly callused. At the end of those long days in the cemetary I was completely exhausted, I had never worked like that before or since.  I appreciated what real work was: I can’t imagine what this must have been like for my father: even then, he was no longer a young man.

Well, we moved from the Burn road to Stewarstown, where we built our new house and my father had a new shed. It was not much warmer than the one he had had in Cookstown. Our house was built on land that our Uncle peter had bought twenty years previously with the project of starting a pig farm. That project didn’t work out, and a few years later, Peter left for America, never to return. He gave the land to my mother, his sister, for us to build our house on. I remember visiting the site with my parents just before the construction started: there was just an enormous sea of mud with the outhouse for the pigs in the middle. I felt that if I stepped on the wrong piece of ground I would sink to my neck in mud and drown. There were some problems with drainage, obviously.

Along the way, there were a few technical innovations in the stone-masons’ trade: sandblasting meant that one could put a paper mask over a headstone, cut the inscription on the paper with a stanley knife to expose the stone, and then blast it away with special sand forced on the stone by a powerful air compressor. My father even had a portable version to take to the cemetary: the gain in time was considerable.

He and his assistant Ronnie would cut the paper by hand. But he was an enthusiastic subscriber to “Stone” magazine, a black-and-white trade journal from America which was filled with the latest technical innovations. Apparently the Americans were using Apple II computers to cut stencils and my father talked jokingly about buying one to stay abreast of the latest technological developments. You can imagine how much I thought this was a good idea: this was around 1981 and I had just gotten a ZX81 and was spending a lot of time in our front room on the black-and-white TV writing programs in BASIC and playing games which usually involved being attacked by different letters of the alphabet. (The pope’s visit to Ireland saved me from spending as much time in front room: we bought a second portable TV so that my grandmother, who was bedridden, could follow his Jean-Paul on live TV. This second TV was soon used as a monitor.) I would have loved to have a *real* computer, as I am sure we wouldn’t be spending all the time printing stencils with it. But, alas, an Apple II and a stencil-printing machine were well out of the budget of McCracken Monumental Memorials.

A life in stone, part I: Burn Road

A life in stone, part I: Burn Road

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After all that happened over the past few months, I was thinking once again about my father’s profession, and his father’s profession, and our early life with him in Cookstown. I already wrote a little about this, but talking about it to friends I realised that there was a fair amount of things that I remembered that I had never written about. So here is the first installment: my life in Burn road, circa 1970. 
For the first eleven years of my life, we lived in Cookstown, on the Burn road at house number 16. The Burn road is just off Cookstown’s long main street: it is an interesting mixture of terraced residential housing, parking, the town hall. I suppose that yes, at some point there was a small river there, but I never saw any trace of it. Beyond our house, at the end of the street, there was a clothing factory, and we would hear the factory sirens in the morning and evening. The factory is derelict today. 
The house we lived in is still there, but the yard and workshop where my father and his father worked are gone, converted into a supermarket parking lot. I have a photograph of Henry Joy McCracken I, standing in his suit and tie and hat in the back yard of this house at Burn road, under rays of improbable northern-Irish sunshine. It must have been 1950, 1960. He was dead already a decade or two by the time I was born. Next to our house and the yard there was a garage: it is still there today, but it is no longer a garage. For a while after we left, if you looked carefully on the wall of our house, you could see the faint outlines of the sign that had been painted on the wall in red and black letters,  “McCRACKEN”, it read, “Monumental sculptor”. That is gone too, painted over. For the first few years of my life, I slept with my sister in an L-shaped room on the first floor. We had our beds in opposite sides of the room, and we couldn’t see each other, but we could talk, which was reassuring when you were four years old and a bit frightened, as I was. 
We left Burn Road the year of Britain’s military adventure in the south atlantic, to make way for the parking lot: I remember vaguely packing boxes whilst listening to voices transmitted from the other side of the word describing aircraft carriers and remote windswept islands. I suppose, like in “Emperor of ice cream”, we all secretly wished that the other side would win. 
Beyond the yard there was the garden, which was wild and overgrown. I had a lot of fun hiding in the hedges (where I would invariably get badly scratched by brambles and thorns) or climbing the trees. I remember one time climbing high in the trees with a old radio, just to see if I could pick up some stations that were inaccessible at ground level. Alas, I don’t remember there being any. 
In one part of the hedge there was a kind of secret natural corridor, with trees at one end, and I found it fantastically exciting. On the other side of the garden, if you were brave enough, the hedge led through a thick grove with some weird plants (thinking back on it now they seem to have been some kind of Northern Irish bamboo), and, into the neighbours’ garden. Reflecting on it now, I can see why John Wyndham’s killer plant epic “The day of the triffids” had such resonance with me. At the very top of the garden was a steep bank of earth which led to the back of the houses on the street parallel to Burn road. There was the ruins of an old van, hanging upside-down in the bushes at the end of garden. One of my friends assured me that I would get gangrene and have to have my arm amputated if I even touched any of the rusted metal (his father was a doctor, so I knew he must be right). Between the garden and the house was the yard where my father worked. 
So, in the next installement: how to make a cheap Virgin Mary.