The scene is one of my favourite places to take photographs, the time is around 6.30 am, and I’m sitting on a moss-covered rock, having a panic attack.  When I say panic attack, I’m not talking the kind of anxiety we experience when anticipating something uncomfortable like public speaking or being interviewed.  This panic was a more primal confusion than anything else.  My brain couldn’t comprehend what had just happened, couldn’t determine a rational explanation could be processed then either accepted or rejected.  As it careered about from irrational thought to irrational thought, the only thing I could do was panic, breathe rapidly and feel my heart racing in my chest.  What had reduced me to this state of gibbering imbecile?  Well, in some quarters it would be called a paranormal event but, knowing the scepticism with which these lines may be met, let me just give you the facts.   I’d been stood in the middle of the river just down from the Cauldron Falls in the village of West Burton in Wensleydale which, as I said, is one of my favourite locations.  The reason is that the falls are on the outskirts of the village, where the Waldon Beck passes through a gorge lined with trees as it makes its way toward the River Ure.  It’s easy to access and, at the right time of the day, completely private if you want to take some photographs.  Did I mention that the falls themselves are also very beautiful?  I’ve photographed them many times over the years, with a variety of cameras and even if I feel that there is little new to capture, I still loved visiting when I’m in the area.   This particular morning, I’d taken my ONDU pinhole camera with me and wanted to get into the perfect position to make use of its vast field of view and depth of focus (having no lens and a very tiny aperture of f/128).  Using a pinhole is a liberating experience in itself, because the lack of viewfinder makes composition more luck than judgement. We only have control over the film’s ISO and shutter speed, the former being determined by the choice of film and the latter usually being measured in seconds or minutes, owing to that tiny hole that lets in the light.  With this simplicity comes an emphasis on how to best meter the scene, and it was while doing this that I had my encounter.  I was looking through the light meter’s eyeglass when a female voice no more than a couple of feet from my right ear said “hello”.   I thought there was unusual about being noticed by someone, being a man knee deep in water with a strange wooden camera, so I turned to say hello back.  There was nobody there and I was completely alone. Here’s the thing, I have excellent hearing and have always been able to pinpoint where a sound is coming from.  The voice had no echo, so I quickly ruled out a distant voice reflected off the walls of the river gorge.  The sound of the waterfall itself was being reflected around me, so the voice had to have been loud and close for me to hear it.  What happened next was the panic.  I had to move to the nearest rock in the river, sit down and try to regulate my rapid breathing.  It wasn’t long before I packed up my gear and went back to the cottage we were renting.  Ever since then, the memory of that experience still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.  

Cauldron Falls at West Burton (2021), by Richard Fletcher

The sceptics among you will undoubtedly have some theories that might explain the event and believe me I’ve tried over the years to come up with my own.  This need to be able to explain the unexplainable is part of human nature, driven by our history of exploration and shaped by our life experiences.  However, there was a period in Britain where people were apparently happy to believe in the paranormal with only their senses or feelings as persuasive evidence.  That period was the Victorian age, between 1837 and 1901, which happened to also be the golden era of the emerging medium of photography.  Here was this new technology, where whatever object was placed in front of the lens was faithfully represented on the photosensitive plate in the camera.  Photography would play its part in the people’s desire to believe in the paranormal, and its reputation as a form of evidential documentary would conversely take and a bit of a beating in doing so. I refer, of course, to ghost photography.

From the earliest experiments with fixing photosensitive glass, tin, and paper to retain the image, photographers have noticed the effects of accidental leaking of light into the camera during exposure, motion blur caused by having a very slow shutter speed, and in the cases of basic human error, the dreaded double exposure.  It’s a familiar problem where older cameras are capable of accidentally exposing two different scenes onto the same negative frame.  The result is a strange combination of a clean image with a translucent second one caused by the non-linear behaviour of the emulsion as it is exposed to light over time.  The two images occupy the same frame which, to the uninitiated, looks like it was a single photograph all along.  To the photographer, this was a costly mistake both in wasting money, but also ruining a picture that could have special meaning to them.   As photographers and camera manufacturers became more experienced, measures were taken to avoid these sorts of problems through better design meaning that modern cameras can make double exposures, but it is something that cannot happen by accident.  Very early on, the camera built a reputation for being honest and truthful, so it’s no surprise that light leaks and the creepy effect of double exposure were used by unscrupulous photographers of the day to tap into the Victorian obsession with the notion of life after death.  Ghost photographs popped up all over the place, heralded by a narrative from the photographer about the shocking experience they’d had when developing the picture and seeing the phantom emerge from the gloom of the darkroom.  It would be easy to think that only the gullible or vulnerable in society were taken in by ghost photography, but this was not the case.  Many learned people such as the legendary authors Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens had a fascination with ghosts and the paranormal, the former being a spiritualist who would later be drawn into the elaborate Cottingley Fairies hoax in 1917.   Dickens was said to be a ‘fascinated sceptic’, who desperately wanted to witness a ghost for himself, but settled for using the ideas of the paranormal to thrill his readers instead.  It was this tantalising of the already susceptible public that led to the creation of one of the most famous pieces of visual trickery of the time, the Pepper’s Ghost.  Although the illusion can be traced back to the 16th Century, the ‘inventor’ of the theatrical version is credited as English scientist Dr John Pepper in 1862.  He first demonstrated the technique in the production of a play called based on a Dickens short story called The Haunted Man.  The effect was genius in its simplicity, using a large pane of glass angled toward the audience at around 45 degrees.  The ‘ghost’ actor would be concealed beneath the front of the stage and brightly lit so that their image could be seen by the audience in the surface of the glass facing them.  As the stages were generally dimly lit at the time, the glass was effectively invisible to the audience, who could see the rest of the play’s action through it. What they saw was a translucent ghost on stage that was interacting with the rest of the cast, because the actor offstage was receiving his or her own direction. 

It’s fair to say that the audiences loved it, and Pepper’s Ghost has remained popular ever since, with uses including Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, Coachella’s famous appearance by late rapper Tupac Shakur, and more recently Yoko Sayema’s performance art collaboration with Fernando Melo in 2017.   But what is the point of all this?  To thrill?  To deceive?  Well, we know that art provokes an emotional response that says something about what it means to be human.  In the case of the paranormal, it doesn’t matter if the audience believes or is sceptical, they still imagine the ‘what if…?’ because of the lack of physical evidence to the contrary.  The drama of seeing a ‘real’ see-through ghost floating around the stage, interacting with living actors must have been thrilling before the audience cottoned on to the way it was achieved.  I doubt somehow that it converted sceptics into believers, though, as what were the chances of seeing an actual ghost during a performance of a play?  When we feel we need proof of something in order to believe it, we say that we see something “with our own eyes”, as if our eyesight gives us that truth.  This connection between seeing and believing is almost unbreakable, so it is no surprise that a good illusion of trick makes us think twice.   With unexplained ghost sightings, that link becomes more problematic, because we believe we’ve seen something visible so it must be translatable onto a piece of film or sensor, right?  Even though there is no tangible evidence that ghosts are purely visual or emit light that could be captured by a camera, the urge to believe that it does is very strong indeed.  Sceptics point back to those technical tricks that the Victorian photographers did their best to eradicate, and so the arguments about authenticity rage on, often for decades. 

Perhaps the most famous of ghost photographs is The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, taken in 1936.  The photographers were shooting for a piece about the house in Country Life magazine and had just completed a shot of the grand staircase, when one man spotted the ghost of a woman in a long brown dress, floating down the stairs towards them.  He hastily took a picture, which has intrigued paranormal investigators, photographers, and scientists ever since. 

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall (1936) by Hubert C. Provand & Indra Shira, perhaps the most famous ghost photograph of them all
 

The picture looks authentic enough and the story that they told to go with it was indeed convincing.  Historical accounts of sightings of the ghost of Lady Dorothy Walpole support the belief that the image is indeed of her walking the corridors of her old home.  On the rare days every year that Raynham Hall is open to the public, many flock to the house to see if, while touring the grand building, they might catch a glimpse of the famous phantom.   Even though our desire to believe is still strong, we have moved away from the Victorian attitude that believes everything they see in an image like this one, instead favouring the approach to prove that it’s all a fake.  As recently as 2006, people claiming to be specialists in this field (whatever that means) were asserting that the Brown Lady image was a fabrication, by either the photographers or magazine, to increase interest in the article about the house.  

My recreation of The Brown Lady using the Pepper's Ghost illusion.  

How it was done (1) - A sheet of transparent plastic angled in front of my tablet, which displays the background.  My phone is set off-axis to provide the 'ghost'

How it was done (2) - the arrangement adjusted to that she appears floating on the staircase

For me, I feel that in the absence of malicious hoax, deliberate double exposure, or optical illusion, there are still things we cannot explain.  I love the Pepper’s Ghost illusion as a way of entertaining, and The Brown Lady is a provocative story and accompanying photograph, but wouldn’t say I was a firm ‘believer’.  What I do know is that I most definitely heard a woman’s voice, one that was not familiar to me, say “hello” during that early morning shoot.  It frightened me at the time and thrills me to this day because it remains a mystery. Perhaps I don’t want or need it to be solved in case it loses that thrill.  Make of it what you will.

“How long has it been?” asked my friend.  The question was followed by some rapid calculations, after which we realised that it had been around 25 years since we’d last seen each other, and it would have been more if our wives hadn’t shared a passion for competing in multi-sport events.  Our chance meeting, a few years ago now, led to a chat that took us right back to when we first met as teenage apprentices at the beginning of our engineering careers. What we quickly realised was that we didn’t really have any of the usual questions one asks on these ‘bumping into’ occasions, not because we were somehow socially awkward, but because we’ve been connected to each other on social media for many of the intervening years.  It’s very much a 21st Century thing to share many details of our daily lives, families, even our dinner on these online platforms, and it is this familiarity that left my old friend and I making small talk instead of finding out more about that past quarter of a century.   Now, I’ve talked about this sort of thing before, and I am not against social media at all (I am on a few of them myself, of course).  However, social media has become so ingrained in our lives that it is entirely possible to use it as our sole form of communication, and not really engage with people in a physical way if we don’t want to.   While that might suit someone who is severely introverted, for most the need for actual human contact is a strong one.  It was great to see my friend, and I’m happy to say we’ve caught up a few times since.  

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, and another opportunity to meet friends who I have previously only ever seen in a small on-screen window, came along.  As you know, my degree studies are what is known as ‘distance learning’, a term that often feels like a more than adequate description of it.  Unlike a traditional university, the students are all at different stages of the course, have limited access to their tutors beyond marking assignments and while they have access to many resources, are left to follow a course schedule by themselves.  It is often a lonely experience, particularly when a project brief is difficult to understand, or an area of research doesn’t make sense. A few years ago, some of the students formed a group aimed at supporting each other through these tricky times, to inspire each other’s creative work, and have the odd laugh along the way.  We’ve regularly met on Zoom ever since, and our meeting has become an important part of our study schedule.  One of our number announced that he was heading to London to an exhibition related to his Self-directed Project, so a meetup was arranged for those who could easily get there.  We are an international group with members in Germany and New Zealand so unfortunately, we weren’t all able to make it.  When we gathered in the café at The Photographers’ Gallery near Soho, I had a similar experience to that encounter with my apprentice friend.  We all know each other from our extensive contact online, so we could dispense with the usual ‘getting to know you’ chit chat.  Instead, we filled in the blanks by talking about our lives away from our studies, what we did for a living etc.  Two of our number brought their partners, so we had their perspective on our study experiences, which was also fascinating.  What we were really in town for though, was to see some exhibitions.  As part of our shared knowledge, we were also aware of where we each drew artistic inspiration from, and that was brought into focus (pardon the pun) with the first exhibition we saw.  The Photographers’ Gallery was showing a collection of Evelyn Hofer’s works from across her 40-year career and seeing this exhibition really brought home the idea of familiarity and influence.  Her work covers a wide range of subjects from architecture to street photography, but it’s for her portraiture that she is perhaps best known.  Shot predominantly using a Linhoff 4x5 camera, her photographs have a quiet sensitivity to them, which reveals the person but avoids the kind of staged direction that one might normally associate with using complex large format cameras, which are not exactly point-and-shoots.  There was something about the way she engaged with her subjects that made them comfortable being photographed and kept them from becoming impatient. 

This book by Hofer contains some of her most 'connected' portraits

By all accounts, Hofer wasn’t a warm person, her assistant referring to her attention to detail and perfectionism that could be infuriating.  As a photographer, I find it difficult to square perfectionism with putting a subject at ease, but Hofer definitely achieved it through establishing a strong personal connection.  Her subjects hold the viewer’s attention, before visual context surrounding them draws us into an aspect of their lives. As we are studying ‘representation’ this year, Hofer’s work appeared to resonate with us all, which certainly made the process of viewing a different experience to what it would have been if done alone.

We moved on to the Centre for British Photography and some powerful work by Mandy Barker about the impact of plastic waste on our natural world.  It was particularly poignant as one of our number had recently completed his major project on a similar aspect of pollution in the landscape.  Where he had explored the seemingly normalised proliferation of small pieces of rubbish in the beauty of his local area, Barker’s images make the pollution look, at first glance, beautiful.  Only when looking closely, do the sinister implications of the objects present themselves and that beauty becomes uncomfortable.  Again, familiarity with the subject matter through another artist’s work made the connection for me.  Last stop was the recently reopened National Portrait Gallery, which always has a few photography exhibitions running.  The notable one here was Take a Moment, a series of portraits and self-portraits with the subject’s eyes closed, which was the result of a decade-long project to raise mental health awareness.  This exhibition combined the original series of famous faces with the opportunity to upload our own selfies so that we could become part of the work.  Standing on the designated spot and taking a selfie while not being able to see yourself might seem peculiar, but it was another experience of being physically present before becoming virtual in an online gallery.  I have a long history of taking bad selfies and this one is no exception, so no judgment please.  

Yep, another corker. Selfies of the Take a Moment Project.

“What’s the point of all this?”, I hear you ask.  Surely social media keeps us informed and Zoom and its contemporaries made the Covid lockdowns much more bearable while saving many businesses at the same time?  Well yes, those points are undoubtedly true, but as human beings we need to be physically present in a situation, whether that is meeting friends for the first time or visiting an exhibition to actually see art rather than viewing it on a website.  These engagements help us understand things, which is one of the other challenges in studying outside of the bricks and mortar universities; there is little human connection. The visit to London gave me an insight into my fellow students that I hadn’t noticed before and our discussions throughout the day, along with the works on display, inspired me to explore other avenues with my work.  This idea of being present was further brought home to me in the queue for the shop at The Photographers’ Gallery.  I was standing behind a young man carrying a Pentax 67, who was extolling the virtues of the favourite film stock he was purchasing. Film photography, and in particular film photography with Pentax’s bruiser of a camera, is a serious undertaking that is about as far from the virtual world as it’s possible to be. “I dunno why I like this one… it just feels right, you know?” he said to his friend.  “Good enough for me”, I thought.  So, if anyone wants me, I’ll be Googling ‘cheap flights to New Zealand’ for the next catch-up. 

“What the hell is she doing?!”, I ask in a strained whisper which, if there had been more distance between us, would have been a scream.  The target of my very British outburst was a woman standing on what a nearby sign informed us was ‘The Needles Observation Point’, which might sound fairly innocuous, but when combined with the rest of the sign, was causing me to get anxious. Beneath the invitation to marvel at the beauty of the Needles rock formation, was the warning ‘Danger! Cliff Edge’.  The woman in question was not only standing on the crudely built platform but was leaning against the only thing between her and a plunge to certain death hundreds of feet below; a flimsy-looking chain-link fence, similar to the ones that surround tennis courts or playing fields.  As anyone who has a severe fear of heights will tell you, one of the worst causes of anxiety is when you see someone else, apparently unbothered or unaware of the danger that you perceive, taking what you see as an unnecessary risk.  Over the years, I’ve seen all manner of this behaviour all around the world, the most anxiety-provoking occasion being a 2-year-old standing on a parapet, holding onto the suicide railings at the top of the Empire State Building.  My palms are getting sweaty just remembering it.  Today, though, I just cannot fathom how someone could miss the obvious, that is, the chain-link fence not being designed to be some makeshift coastal ‘hammock’ for a tourist trying to get that shot of the vista.  I understood the appeal of the view, but not the lengths she was going to to photograph it with her phone.

Eventually, after what seemed like an age, she left the platform and I made the short but harrowing journey to the observation point to take my photograph.  Now, some people subscribe to the idea that in order to overcome our fears, we must confront them head-on.  They see themselves as David Goggins, Wim Hof, or Bear Grylls because they believe they have not let fear hold them back in some way.  Personally, I don’t buy into that idea.  In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s bollocks.   For me, fear is an important emotional response that has done a pretty good job of keeping us safe over many years and, as long as it isn’t so extreme that it becomes completely paralysing, is not something that I see we need ridding of.  I generally choose not to go to high places in order to avoid the unnecessary stress, resolving that if there is something worth doing it for, I might consider making some effort.  On this occasion, the view lured me to the point where I managed to get close enough to see the Needles, while shaking like a leaf and reciting the mantra “Don’t look down” out loud.  My wife pointed out that my knees were literally knocking together like something out of a cartoon.

My incredibly average shot of The Needles.  What can I say, I was scared. 

I should point out at this stage, so that you don’t have to Google ‘The Needles’, that we are on holiday in the camper on the beautiful Isle of Wight.  It’s only the second time I’ve visited here, the first being when I was very young, and the first time my wife has.   It is a stunning place that has so much to see and do, that the 4 day break we’re having isn’t really enough time.  However, on what we think will be the first of many visits, there was one place I desperately wanted to see: Dimbola Lodge, the former home of the great Julia Margaret Cameron.  I’ve talked about Cameron before in a previous post because she is one of the most significant and influential female photographers of all time.  A Victorian wife of a tea plantation owner, she had a passion for the medium right at the beginning of its emergence as a new technology and art form, even though she didn’t really start working with a camera herself until she was middle-aged.  Her approach to photographing people was responsible for the shift away from the classical Victorian portrait, where the subject was stiffly posed, concentrating hard on staying perfectly still (often with the aid of a hidden neck brace) and mostly instructed not to smile.  Cameron represented her subject as she saw them, their personality or in some cases the character she was asking them to play.  She often made photographs that were softly focused rather than sharp, or included motion blur because the subject moved during the exposure, but she always made sure that they were beautifully lit.  Given the significant limitations of the camera and wet plate technology of the time, the latter was a serious technical challenge, which often went unnoticed by her peers, who were almost entirely men, and universally dismissive of her work.  While at Dimbola Lodge, she created the majority of her work and many prints made from her glass plates are in a permanent collection on display there.  Unsurprising then, I was very excited to be surrounded by her pictures, largely because of my ongoing studies in which she has featured several times.   

Looking back at Cameron's famous portrait of Charles Darwin.  You can see Sir John Herschel in the background. Both men were in her social circle

We use the word ‘inspiring’ a great deal these days to describe actors, directors, painters, etc. but it’s a generalisation in many cases.  In a similar way to ‘iconic’, which I talked about previously, our glib throwing around of the word almost devalues its meaning and masks the people who really do help us improve.  For example, I am inspired by my photographer friends every time we share work with each other, but we don’t go around declaring that we are inspirational to each other.  Inspiration is a personal thing that forms a connection between people, resulting in some change, however small, to how they go about something in their lives.  Cameron does inspire me to look more closely at what I’m trying to represent in the subject, and her work fits very neatly into the idea of collaborative portraiture, again something that I’m currently learning about.  During this visit, however, I was struck by something else that on reflection should have been really obvious to me.  Cameron frequently took her inspiration from literature related to a variety of subjects.  Her famous work, Idylls of the King, which was described as an ‘illustration’ of her friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry of the same name, represents her visual appreciation and interpretation of the written word.  When we think about it, how we interpret a poem or fictional novel is based upon what we personally bring to the reading culturally and experientially, which is an area described at great length by post structuralist philosophers like Barthes and linguists like de Saussure.  Our cultural identity defines our understanding of the meanings of words and their place within contexts, so that a Westerner would see something different to someone from the Far East if reading the same book.  The story would be the same, but their visualisation of the characters, the situations and key plot points would have to be managed by, say, the language translation to achieve some kind of balance.  How many times have you read a novel and subconsciously imagined a character being played by a favourite actor?   When a film screenplay is made from a text we are familiar with, the writer focuses on the key plot points or character arcs to create something that is ‘based on’ the book.  We see the subsequent movie and sometimes the result doesn’t seem good enough, doesn’t connect with our appreciation of the source text.  If all that weren’t enough, sometimes we see issues surrounding some books and film adaptations where they are banned in certain regions of the world because of a specific connotation of some element of plot that causes offence.  In some cases, their titles have to be changed because the intended meaning may not be the same in another language or culture. If interpretation is in the eye of the viewer, then it’s reasonable to assume that a photograph inspired by a text includes a significant level of the photographer’s interpretation before it reaches its audience.  This was what struck me about Cameron’s photographs of Tennyson’s poetry.  They are her representations of what the poems meant to her, collaboratively shaped by Tennyson and his publishing editor, but unique all the same.  When we see the images from Idylls amongst her other work, we can see Cameron’s creative style come through in those interpretations.  This was my moment of the penny dropping, which caused me to question, as I did with the woman at The Needles, “how did I not see this in front of me?”  The answer was that I was aware, of course, but that it just didn’t register with me as important until I was confronted with the work in a gallery space.  Exhibitions are curated to present the viewer with a flow that takes them through an artist’s body of work, in this case Cameron’s entire career.  The sequencing is carefully planned so that the viewer can see connections between frames, and the pictures are captioned with the additional context to aid the creation of the viewer’s own narrative.  Here, I was seeing the images, recognising Cameron’s ‘voice’ and thinking about how I might incorporate literature into my own work in a way that represents a story and how I feel about it.  I’m currently working on this year’s Self-Directed Project (SDP), which is about the importance of the Pride movement in the modern era, in particular within my local community, and in the context of an ever-changing, increasingly intolerant society.  There series will comprise many portraits of people in the LGBTQ+ community as collaborative representations, some images from the event, and still life photographs, other media etc.  However, I’m now also considering how they could visually include more about the many written stories about the community, both positive and negative, without being riddled with plain old metaphors.  This might help to reveal more of the emotions within the community and set an historical anchor in terms of the quest for rights.  In essence, can Cameron’s work inspire my own?

I’m not going my experience at Dimbola as an epiphany, but more a recognition of something that might appear to be the obvious to everyone, but had gone unnoticed by me. Photography is such a vast medium with may different strands of creativity within.  Navigating them can often be a little overwhelming, which keeps us firmly in what we see as ‘our lane’. Perhaps once in a while we need a big sign that reminds us of this as an obvious hazard as well as indicating the potential gold we can find if we take a step outside of our fears.  I’m keeping this firmly in photography though.  Just don’t ask me to go up a ladder to clean anyone’s guttering anytime soon.

For more on Julia Margaret Cameron, check out this The Julia Margaret Cameron Trust.