The classic movie is set in the Wild West. There is a bank robbery, an arson attack, repeated gun fights, a posse of townsfolk galloping frenziedly about in the dark, a lynching, a heroine with permanently perfect lipstick and a great deal of sexual jealousy. After the screening I answer a questionnaire from the BFI which asks me to agree or disagree with the statement:
‘The film reflected experiences that are similar to my own.’
The marshal who stands in the pedestrian tunnel trying to make cyclists dismount, being sworn at by e-scooter mavericks, helping distressed travellers, is knocking off for the night. Out of uniform, pushing his bike, he shouts greetings to a colleague as he leaves.
‘I hope you’re not cycling in the tunnel’ I tease him.
He laughs hugely. ‘I’m going home. I’ve been here 12 hours.’
‘Isn’t it boring?’
‘It’s very interesting. People are so nice.’
November 1994. I am 33. At the airport Mother explains how to go down in the lift. Father says ‘They’re big children now.’
I read, in Helen Garner’s Collected Diaries, about an encounter she has with ‘the biographer’, a character who has turned up in earlier entries and who is never benign. On this occasion, in a café, the biographer tells Garner, with a ‘sweet tone’, a disarming smile, that her books are outrageous and should never have been published, that the people she’s written about should have sued her. The biographer moves closer, tells her she’s only saying this ‘because I’m so fond of you’. And Garner remembers a phone call from this woman years earlier, listing her faults, claiming she was a bad mother, that their children shouldn’t play together any more…again motivated by ‘fondness’.
This is horribly familiar to me. It’s been a pattern in my own life. The attack on me, my personality, my work, my significant others, by someone who is only doing it for my own good, because they care so much about me. And, like Garner, I have sucked it up, gone away feeling ‘bad and wrong’, as if my entire way of thinking, of living, was skewed.
Why, I ask myself, did I let this happen, again and again? I know the answers. Because that person had actual power over me, as a parent, as an employer, or because it was so familiar that I fell right into it, willingly. It is easy to look back and beat myself up about being vulnerable, but am I any stronger now, or am I simply more free?
The balance, the salvation, for me has been the people who reflected back a better self, who genuinely cared, who mopped up the tears and offered real affection. I include in that grandparents, teachers, mentors, friends.
In Garner’s diaries the entry after the biographer’s attack is a postcard from another, wiser, kinder character, ‘the old professor’ who points out that ‘”people like [the biographer] are drawn to hurt others to ease the pain in their own hearts…they believe they will get from your response the satisfaction they crave.”‘
The old professor tells Garner to ‘keep out of the way. Never reply.’ And to listen to a particular Bach prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier. ‘It says everything.’
And yes, Bach helps. Like exercise endorphins, buying a new dress, doing a favour for a friend, it makes me feel better. But it doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t get anywhere near that set-in-stone version of the self as no good, whatever it is for each of us. My golden-skinned niece will carry on thinking she is ugly however much we tell her she is beautiful. My clever, thoughtful, generous friend will still believe she is useless, it’s all a fraud.
The only person who can chip away at the story of myself hammered into my psyche is me, and it is hard work. I don’t know how to change the life-long narrative. But I do know that when I behave differently, don’t go back for more, do what seems impossible, act with courage, the outcome is different. Something is lost – a role, or an idea of myself, or even a relationship – something I thought was essential to who I am. It turns out to be empty, a shed skin, and I walk away as you do from a yoga class, stronger, more free.
For Edmund
I’ve already seen the exhibition at the Weston Library but I go back to write in the comments book. The work on show is by photographer Paddy Summerfield (1947–2024) who was a friend, and I feel a kind of, probably misplaced, protectiveness towards him and his legacy. I plan to write something critical of the exhibition, which I don’t feel does him justice. But when I get there Edmund, another photographer friend, is writing in the book. I read his comment, and it says, quite simply, how much he misses Paddy. I am shamed. So I just add: ‘Me too’, and talk to Edmund about the old days, which were at the time just the life we were living, when we all printed in the Photographers’ Workshop, the communal darkroom in East Oxford. It was, then, the place where I felt most at home, the people there my surrogate family, and it is long gone, its members dispersed around the world, or no longer in the world.
‘Write something about Paddy,’ Edmund urges, but what? I don’t want to reminisce about Paddy as the familiar Oxford figure, wandering the streets with his camera, unlit cigarette between his lips long after he quit smoking. I can’t now recall the detail of the conversations we had about photographers we admired, or a great deal about his legendary presence in the darkroom, turning out exquisite prints without any of the tools and calculations the rest of us needed, just a tweak of the filters for contrast, a flutter of the hands to dodge and burn.
I remember his generosity with his time. I remember him insisting, on every occasion I met him, that I must exhibit my photos. I remember his ruthless criticism, and his kindness to those he thought couldn’t take it. I once saw Paddy spend an afternoon in the darkroom teaching a young woman who was convinced she could create a portfolio from one roll of film, even though everyone in the room knew this was impossible.
The little I know, or witnessed, about Paddy’s personal life does not fit with what has already, a year after his death, become the official story. It’s not my place to debunk that story, and anyway it doesn’t matter. What counts, and what remains, is, as Paddy would have said, the work.
1
On the wall of my dining room is a print Paddy sent me maybe 15 years ago. It arrived out of the blue in a floppy A4 manila envelope, which somehow survived the Royal Mail treatment unscathed and uncreased. It’s a picture of his mother in the garden, old, frail, bent, viewed from behind as she leans to tend, or maybe just to touch, a plant. You can’t see her face, or her head, just a slice of white hair above her bent back, her long skirt and cardigan, and yet you feel you know something of this woman, her unreachable frailty in old age. The garden, in contrast to the old lady, is lush with flowers and vegetation.
The picture is full of love, and of hopeless distance. His mother seems oblivious of Paddy’s presence, he is shut out, as he is in the whole series of images he made of his parents in the garden, Mother and Father.
A recent visitor to our house, a young neighbour who grew up in Assam, India, spent some time looking at this photo. ‘It made me think about my Nani’, he wrote later, ‘and some of the photographs I had taken of her place’. It’s intensely personal, and it is universal.
2
If I admit that I am, or have been, a photographer, people ask ‘What do you photograph?’ This question always stumps me. I photograph what I see, what I like, what I feel the need to photograph. But I guess if I had to say what that is, the answer is ‘life’. And this is what Paddy did, a great deal better than me. His photographs are about being alive in the world, in all its mess and strangeness and wonder.
At the top of my stairs hangs a small print of Paddy’s, the image just 3 x 4 inches, from an exhibition he had at the Photographers’ Workshop in 1996. My diary at the time describes ‘going to the darkroom last night and finding Paddy’s exhibition – it made me so happy… Tiny prints full of feeling – pictures of nothing – little bits of life … we don’t deserve him.’ His partner at the time told me Paddy was so unsure about the show that he wouldn’t come in to the building but was waiting outside in the street. When he took down the show Paddy asked me to choose a print.
The image I chose is taken from a moving car, probably from the back seat. Out of focus in the foreground is part of the steering wheel, the driver’s hand. Ahead, through the windscreen, are two trees, some scrub, a vertical line that might be a wire. It’s a snatched moment, and it is perfectly composed, with a contained energy – the relationship between the two trees, the vertical line holding the whole thing together. And a huge sadness. The landscape – as in great Victorian novels – embodying what I imagine to be the mood of the photographer.
3
In his last few years Paddy only left the house to go to the hospital for treatment. But on these journeys he photographed from the car window. On the noticeboard in my study is a photo sent to me by Paddy’s partner a few years ago. It’s a colour print, taken with an old compact camera from the 1990s. It shows an overgrown grass verge, with tall grasses, ox-eye daisies, fading umbellifers, and behind them a lamp post. It is in effect a snap, but it is masterful. Everything is perfectly placed, but in such an understated way that the framing seems almost random, and yet right, at the same time. And this quiet innocuous scene is full of a kind of grief, even menace, like the scene from a horror film before the horror leaps out.
***
I have other pictures of Paddy’s, of course. A whole collection of prints, notes, cards, postcards. I have several of the books he and his partner produced in the last 10 years, from his vast collection of negatives. I have photos he took of me, always snatched in passing, with comments written on the back, usually encouraging me to do more with my photography.
Writing this, I come to feel that my protectiveness of Paddy, my dislike of the way his story is being told by others, is a sort of jealousy, and a sort of grief. I knew this man at a formative time of my life, and he was kind to me, and infuriating, and challenging. I don’t want him to become a myth. I don’t want his story to be told by others. But of course it will be, that is what happens. And what I have written here doesn’t do him justice either. How do you even scratch the surface of a man, his life, his work?
But, despite my misgivings, the fact that we have this show in the Bodleian is a great achievement. It includes the holiday pictures, very much in the Cartier-Bresson decisive-moment mode, some of them quite extraordinary. Look for the man reading the newspaper on the beach – how did Paddy choose the perfect moment when the newspaper is just right, that combination of stillness and motion? Or the family at the water’s edge engaged in who knows what activity, the arrangement of their bodies forming a perfect triangle, balanced by a tiny sailing boat on the horizon. I am not a big fan of the Oxford photos, slightly disturbing images of undergraduate life observed by an outsider, but I love the Mother and Father series, again photographed as an observer.
Paddy identified with outsiders. He spent time talking to and photographing the people he met on the street. Out of one of these relationships comes the little sequence ‘Tony lights up’, which I have as a book but is also in the show. In a dozen photos it shows Tony, an old bloke in shirt and jacket, lighting (with some difficulty) his roll up, trying to get some tobacco off his tongue, coughing and finally grinning cheerfully into the camera. It is touching, humorous, gentle, affectionate.
But the work of Paddy’s that I like best is those photos of nothing, which seem to contain everything. A truck wheel as it drives past – the slightly blurred fragment of vehicle, the shadows on the road, a drain cover – all falling perfectly into place. A wasp trapped under an empty glass. Two young girls dancing through a meadow, their arms and legs forming a strangely geometrical pattern. Pictures that are magically more than just a framed moment from life.
Paddy’s work has never been recognised enough. He was a generous, complicated, damaged man who was no good at selling himself or his pictures to the arts establishment. But he had the two things it takes to make a great artist – a complete obsession with his process to the cost of all else, and the ability to create apparently effortless work that contains worlds of feeling.
Paddy Summerfield: The Camera Helps, is at the Weston Library until 30 November. Ronapainting gallery in Walton Street is showing his late digital work until 15 November.
At the end of the performance, the chair of the contemporary music society gets up to speak. As he walks to the stage he removes the foam earplugs he has been wearing.
The booking page for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has the warning: ‘Contains language of violence, misogyny and racism, and scenes of a sexual nature.’
While her husband sleeps, the Chinese woman on the 14:00 to London Paddington uses Google to translate the back of her empty crisp packet.
Simon comes home from a visit to his father with a packet of letters written to his parents when he was an undergraduate. ‘I’ve read a few of them,’ his dad said as he handed them over, ‘and they aren’t as bad as I thought.’
What do we do to our parents? I feel as if I’ve spent my entire life trying to escape the values of my own parents – to be less responsible, less judgemental, less driven by practicality, more open, sensitive, straightforward. Only now, when they are no longer around to tell me what I should be doing, feeling, thinking, am I more charitable towards them. Now I realise that they too were the product of their past, that they did the best they could to recreate themselves, and in the most obvious, visible ways, they succeeded.
It’s unfair to compare them to the family friend who learnt Russian when her son was studying in Leningrad (as was), and visited him there in the 1970s, when it was only slightly less popular and possible a holiday destination than it is now. My relationship with my parents was more like a tug of war in which they tried to keep me in their world and I tried to pull them just a little way into mine. Eventually I let go of the rope, and went my own way. Or did I?
Last week I came across a diary entry from my thirties in which I mention that my parents want me to join them for a family weekend at CenterParcs, but I am going to see a Hans Werner Henze opera in London. I won that one, but several decades on I still struggle to sit in the garden and read without jumping up to deadhead the roses, to write to a friend when I could be washing the kitchen floor, to allow myself to think, dream, do nothing without nagging guilt that I am somehow stealing that time from someone else.
As I emerge from a fairly unpleasant few months this summer I find myself determined, as so many times before, to seize the day, to clear my diary of ‘oughts’, to do only what I want to do, to somehow feel more alive. But how? What exactly does that look like?
In Katherine Rundell’s brilliant biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite, she quotes him later in life, as Dean of St Paul’s, describing his inability to focus his whole mind on prayer, continually distracted by wayward thoughts or physical discomforts. It’s like the desire to be absolutely in the moment that is in his love poetry, now transformed into the desire that religion, or God, provide utter certainty and purpose. ‘It is his lifelong quest’ Rundell writes ‘and lifelong disappointment, that we cannot be struck daily by lightning.’ Oh yes.
Simon’s letters to his parents turn out, or so he tells me, to hold no secrets, no horrors, no lightning strikes. If anything they are rather dull. There are some nihilistic moments, some wild enthusiasm for music, books, politics – anything he is learning – and some banal details of everyday life.
The day after Thatcher’s 1979 election victory, there is a letter ranting about the values she and Keith Joseph are about to inflict on us. Simon’s parents almost certainly voted Tory in that election. I was just too young to vote. But I do remember what clothes I put on that morning for school, as our new PM’s voice on the kitchen radio drifted up the stairs along with my mother’s bellowed time checks. A long black cotton skirt, printed with tiny flowers, around the hem of which I had stitched a row of broderie anglaise to look like a petticoat. This was, after all, the late 70s. I wore it with a starched white blouse. ‘Of course,’ Simon says. ‘You always remember what you were wearing.’
While we wait for the photography lecture to start, the women sitting behind me discuss the size, cost and number of the cameras they own. The photographer takes a selfie of the room using his phone.
janebuekett 