Seeing The New In The Old.

Creative Writing Enrichment.


The Booth.

A broken clock hangs on the neatly varnished wall next to me. It's stuck on 8:46. I can't help but feel a sense of security in this place; enclosure. I can hear distant voices and there is a wooden kind of authentic smell in the air. Patterns have become carved into the woodwork on the walls. My eye is drawn to a piece of torn cloth swaying in the breeze from an open window. To me it reflects the emptiness of this place. It shouldn't be here. Numbers and sequences surround me. Everything has it's place. Everything fits. I am the only thing that doesn't. 

I am clutter in a clean house. I am a hunter in the rainforest. The distant voices have stopped and all there is is silence. I am alone in this foreign place yet I decide to explore. I take a book from the shelf behind me. A little blue book. It has an inscription on the front that appears to be a shield with wings. I wonder what this can mean? I turn the pages carefully. They are flaky and worn. I put it back, trying not to leave my imprint on this delicate synthetic world. The sense of security I had has now turned into a sense of intrusion. I must leave now. But I will return soon.

Eadweard Muybridge @ Tate Britain (8/1/11).

Got lost at Waterloo station. Had my first experience in a London taxi. Took a couple of wrong turns and ended up at Buckingham Palace. Then visited my first ever exhibition at Tate Britain as research for my current photography project. 

Needless to say, my recent trip to London was an eventful one.

'And since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless in some degree command them.'

- The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe, 1764



As well as Gothic Literature (cue Dickens and Doyle), one of the main influences of my work has been photographer Eadweard Muybridge, with his exploration into the concept of movement by capturing what is impossible to see with the naked eye.

"Sir Frederick Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, told me that when he first saw my pictures they made him laugh, so at variance were they with artists' notions of animal motion. Then he said he studied them and stopped laughing." [Eadweard Muybridge, 1885]

My visit to the exhibition gave me valuable insight into the mind of Muybridge and his interpretation of movement, shooting at different viewpoints and presenting them in a range of compositions. I was even privileged enough to be able to view the original negatives. 

THE FACTS:

• Muybridge emerged as a landscape photographer after the American Civil War (1867).
• First experimented with recording movement in 1877 when he was asked by Leland Stanford (horse trainer and breeder) to study whether a horse had all four feet off the ground during a full gallop. The series was entitled 'The Horse in Motion'.
• Invented the Zoopraxiscope which consisted of two rotating discs that recreated movement.
• Published his work under the name of 'Helios' (meaning "God of the Sun"). He branded his products with the logo of a winged camera and a glowing orb of radiating light.

  
  

To see more on this project, check out my Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/amy_moore/.

'My Village' by H M Cobby.

My grandfather introduced me to this poem a while back. It was written by his mother (my great grandmother). She was a gypsy.

I came to this village
When I was ten,
'Tween the downs and
The sea. And then
Who would have thought
It would change so much,
No little cottages
Graced with thatch.
No clear roads
With a horse to catch!
The one village shop
Has long since gone.
Now supermarkets reign
Alright for some.
The fields have all gone
We have houses galore
And by what I hear,
There may be more.
My little green village
Is fading away.
But the pub and the church managed to stay!
Now, the old ones say
Oh! For the days
When life was slower
Before we had this thing
Called power!
Were it to stop
Would the world stop too?
I wonder wouldn't you!

Taken from 'Poems From The South East'. 
Published in 1995. Edited by Glenn Jones.