Hello everyone, my name’s Ed Worthington, I’m originally from Caerphilly, which if you don’t know where that is, it’s a relatively average sized town just outside Cardiff with a big castle in the middle of it. For those of you that know the area, I’ve probably just described the majority of places in South Wales. I was actually born in Cardiff, went to University here at 18 and as I’m now a little over 36 years old can officially say that for the majority of my life, like 51% or something, I have lived here.
I’m a, well I’d like to call myself an amateur photographer but I guess being part of Ffocws means I’m not really able to say that anymore. I make images using the medium of photographic film, in a mixture of 120 and 35mm, the project I’ll be talking about today for example was entirely shot on medium format square film using a Yashica TLR manufactured in the early 60’s.
I’m sure like me you’ve seen the frankly quite boring debate’s online about the merits of using analogue processes versus digital processes so I won't get into that here, all I will say is what I always say, that is all art is art, no matter how it is created and no matter what influences you, if it works for you then that is good enough. Capturing photographs using older technology and creating a physical record of everything that I create is a purposeful choice of mine, the number one reason being; because I enjoy doing it that way.
I like the feel of the metal in my hand, the smell of the old leather, the mechanics and clockwork machinations of the equipment I am using fascinates me, but also the knowledge that it’s much older than me and has passed through many previous owners, that it has seen a multitude of things that I haven’t and if it could speak it would have a whole host of memories to share. As I’ll get into; memory and the idea of normality magically hiding secrets beneath the surface of everyday objects and places is an important theme within my work.
I’ve always been fascinated from a young age by images of the past, not just those of famous events and people but of the ordinary, the meaningless, Documenting is important to me, documenting regular, everyday occurrences so that future generations can look back and see what the world was like before they were born. I’ll paraphrase some lyrics by my favourite band Touche Amore that “Every moment can’t remain, and every life won’t stay the same, with time we’ll all be gone, but how you lived can live on.”
This is the tangible result that using this medium gives me. Things I can hold in my hand, that I can show to family, friends, anyone who shows an interest and importantly, that remain behind long after I or any of us here are gone. Technology can fail, a physical object stored correctly, and maybe sometimes not so correctly, is much more difficult to destroy. So everything I have photographed exists as a physical print somewhere in my house, boxes upon boxes of negatives as well as prints, and now some of them in Ffotogallery as well
Of course I am well aware I could just use a digital camera and print off a computer but I’ll track back to my original point, I don’t enjoy that. I have a full time day job working in an office, spending hours a day looking at a computer screen, the last thing I want to be doing after that is straining my eyes further by going through digital images. I’ll also admit, I am terrible at editing and I have a serious flaw in my character that if I’m not good at something I get very frustrated. The aesthetic that I like to present I have never been able to successfully create digitally, thankfully it can be, chemically, using photographic film.
So onto my project that was selected to be part of the FFocws exhibition; “it’s Allright Around Here, Isn’t it?”.
One thing I’ve always found when you meet new people is the inevitable question of where you’re from and the follow up of what that place is like. Although I identify this place as my hometown, I have always struggled to give a definitive answer to that question.
At that beginning of 2020 when Covid reared its ugly head and lockdown restrictions began to come in to force, with the world shutting down and millions only leaving the house for specific reasons or for an hour's worth of daily exercise, I found myself suddenly having the free time to begin something I’d wanted to do for a while. My photography for a number of years previously was pretty heavily concentrated on a body of work I had been making during various trips to Italy, but without being able to go very far this obviously changed. I imagine a lot of people are in a similar situation to myself, with hundreds of ideas running through their head at all times and dreams of projects they’d like to do but have never had the time or the inclination. Now I was forced to concentrate my photography on a much narrower and local field of view and maybe search for an answer to that initial question that I could feel comfortable giving.
As I’ve already said I’ve lived in or around the city for pretty much the entirety of my life and although I’m not quite old enough to remember when Cardiff Bay wasn’t called Cardiff Bay, I do remember doing work experience in a building that no longer exists on The Hayes or visiting a cinema with my Grandparents in Rhiwbina that is now a block of flats. The writer and poet Cesare Pavese once said that “we do not remember days, we remember moments.” and I’m inclined to agree, I can tell you that I went to watch James and The Giant Peach in that cinema that no longer exists and that I attempted to see the Nutty Professor 2 but was denied entry as I was 11 and the movie had a 12 rating. There is an association with place that means we do not remember whole days of the past but we do see snapshots of frozen time within our minds.
But of course, they’re imperfect, they’re flawed, with pieces of information sometimes missing or misremembered, this is another reason why I’ve gone down the route of using older photographic equipment and techniques.Many of the photographs have a purposeful soft focus, like a dream. How many times have you awoken from something that felt so vivid, so clear, so real, only to be unable to recall half of it mere seconds later? Aren’t our memories like this? Therefore what I'm presenting, if it’s to be truly based on my experience, should also be hazy and distant, just a clue to something else.
The photographer Luigi Ghirri once said that he “always felt that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding or modifying reality” but also went on to say that he viewed photography as “a great adventure in thought and sight, with a magical toy which miraculously manages to marry our adult awareness with the fairy tale world of childhood”. These are two, perhaps slightly contradictory points that I agree with. Both the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen, the truth and fiction, they can all exist as one in the same place and time, all you have to do is look hard enough with the forgotten sight of childhood wonder.
As I said earlier, all art is art and can therefore inspire you, even if the medium is not the same as the one you yourself are creating with, which is why I find myself strongly influenced by the literary concept made famous by Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Magical Realism. The places and scene’s I photograph are real, they exist, but they are also something that you could walk by a thousand times and never give more than a cursory glance to. Just like our memories can be flawed perhaps so can our concept of reality? I want others to be able to see what I see; A record of this World in which we live, the places and situations that can have things about them that appear both normal and abnormal, where memories flow like living organisms, surviving within the cracks of bricks and paving. It’s this desire to document the ordinary that has ultimately shown me that it is important to capture what we see, because it can be taken away in the blink of an eye.
In many ways Cardiff is just a regular, run of the mill, normal mid-sized city with the same kinds of people, architecture and history as other places. It has got its so-called “nice” areas, it has areas that are a bit run down, there’s inequity, there’s parts where you can see where the wealthy live and parts with deprivation and poverty. It’s a place that bears the scars of industry that no longer exists and it’s a place where you can see attempts at regeneration and modernisation. It’s a little like a character that you witness growing and changing as the story progresses, of course some of those changes aren’t always good; for example open green fields converted to over-priced generic uniform housing or areas of historic importance turned over to the whims of capitalism.
Sure progress happens, for better or worse, but we should still hold on to some things, not everything has to be shiny and new all of the time. I’m already finding with some of the images that I’ve made that the locations are different when I’ve returned to them but if we can't physically hold onto these places then maybe, like that cinema, a building that may not exist physically anymore, it can still exist in our memories, our minds, or in a photograph?
Ultimately this place may not be particularly unique or particularly special on the surface but to me it is, it’s my unique, it’s my kind of special, it’s a place where the mundane can be magical and where you can find beauty in banality. Ultimately;
In the end, “It’s Allright Around Here, isn’t It?”
Ed Worthington
Cardiff
Nov 2022