Photography

A to Z 2025 Reflections Post

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This year my A to Z theme was to construct a memoir heading each post with a photograph of something significant from my life and tacling the memoir thematically rather than chronologically. You can find the complete list of links to the 26 posts at the end of the post.

Each time I have participated in the A to Z since my first outing in 2020, my posts have grown longer and more layered, for example, last year, I was tackling Commodities which I was afraid might be a little dry as a subject, so I decided to add a poem in an alphabetically matching poetry form. This year I was afraid that my Memoir, would not be sufficiently rivetting in itself and so I decided to lead each post with a photo of a significant object for the topic of the day. I included 10 pictures that were “Knolling” style and of course, nobody likes to be overfaced by swathes of text, and as there were several topics on some posts, that meant a lot of pictures to break it up – 169 in all! Since even my phone camera takes large pictures, each one had to be opened in Photoshop and tweaked and resized – a rod for my own back. At the time of the Theme Reveal, I only had five or six posts finished and on April 1st I had two weeks worth “in the can” but by the final weekend, I managed to complete the last 3 posts so technically, no “pantsing” it!

A “Knolling” picture from Carol, Cars and Cooking

Since adding poetry had worked well last year, I added nine poems this year (C, E, J, L, M, O, P, T & V) too, as well as a few videos, one of me working in 1995 and a number of music videos. All of this seems to have worked and I attracted a number of regular readers to whom I am most grateful for their encouraging comments.
In no particular order:-
A shoutout to Csenge (Tarkabarka) The Multicolored Diary who was first to comment on day one and also an A to Z committee member and consummate, epic storyteller.
Anne M. Bray of Pattern Recognition an old A to Z friend – everything you ever wanted to know about Fluevog Shoes…
Tamara of Part-time Working Hockey Mom another old friend since 2020 who this year guides around the cities of Switzerland with her cutomary aplomb!
Ronel is another Comittee member and supplied the colourful graphics for the A to Z – you can find her at Ronel the Mythmaker…
Deborah A Logophile’s Ludic Musings continued her exploration of unusual and interesting words and hardly missed a post
Lisa of Tao Talk, is a friend from my other habitual haunt – dVerse Poets Pub…
Donna McNichol was another frequent flyer and her own offerings are at Just call me Froggi
Kristin Kleage has been sharing her family history with the A to Z since 2013 at Finding Eliza…
Anne E.G. Nydam is a fabulous printmaker at Black and White: Words and Pictures
Holly J. of A More Positive Perspective
Samantha of Balancing Act
Linda Curry of The Curry Apple Orchard

And so, how was the writing itself – what did I learn from doing this year’s A to Z?

Firstly, I quickly realised how much material my life contained so that for almost any given subject, I had to be very selective about which stories I included. After writing about why I didn’t become a fine-artist or an architect, and why I haven’t been very successful as a businessman, I covered my family, my late sister Carol, my Dad, my mother Elsie and shortly after, my sister Helen and particularly in these posts, there was so much more that could have been said. I was trying to stick to those points that had a bearing on me – it was my memoir after all and not theirs – still, there could be a book rather than 26 posts! But as far as it went, I feel like I have made a memoir of sorts and I am not sure I would want to go as far as a book, even if it retained and expanded on the thematic approach rather than the chronological.

Secondly, it would be disingenuous of me to think that I have had an “ordinary” life, I am well aware of the priveleges I was fortunate to be born into, by being born into a “First” World country, to middle-class parents, parents who were both extraodinary in their different ways and who did their very best to offer my sisters and I the best opportunities they could, not least of all a trip round the world and the chance to experience life in a different country at an early age. Were there any flies in the ointment, along the way, of course there were but a life without some adversity would be a life less lived and adversity makes us stronger. Would I do things differently, some I guess, but hindsight is a fine thing…

My daily routine during April, was to start the day by checking that the scheduled post was up, read it through one more time for mistakes before going over to the Official A to Z blog to answer their daily question(s) and leave a link. Because of geography and time zones, there was usually one or two posts ahead of me, with posts from the Americas coming in much later in the day and so I sometimes had the mistaken inmpression that hardly anyone else commented there so I was very touched, when after losing the run of myself and forgetting to follow my routine, I received a comment from Barbie of Crackerberries

Andrew, this is the first time I didn’t see your name above mine on the A-Z page… I had to come see if you were here because that was so odd that you were not there, even when I went back this afternoon. Thanks for sharing the X-Rays and it’s really comical to me that the new hip bone kinda looks like a serrated knife. (ahhh the imagination of writers). Anyways, I’m glad you are here and maybe just didn’t get over to the page yet. Funny how we take people for granted. See ya tomorrow and I bet you will be first with Z post.
Cheers,
Barbie

It does surprise me how few of the 172 bloggers who signed up, do comment both to respond to the day’s post as well as to see this as their firsl line of promotion. My comment made, I would post a link and a photograph from the post on my Facebook which would bring in a few friends and family. I will put this post on a button at the top of my blog in the hope that future readers will find their way to my story…

Which post did I like writing best, we are asked on the A to Z blog? Frewin, Fossils and Film covered some of my favourite things but it was also fun choosing photographs and poems to showcase for Photography and Poetry – so a toss-up there…

Lastly, it has been gratifying to find that not only was I wrong to wonder if other people would find my story interesting, but it has renewed, once again, my faith in my telling of the story, in my writing. As every one of my A to Zs has been from 2020 to 2025, it has been a marathon and I am glad to have reached the finish line, somewhat exhausted, but I am hoping that, as I am told about giving birth, the memory of the pain of labour disappears (else no woman would do it again) and that at some point in the next year, another idea for A to Z 2026, will pop into my mind, though goodness knows what…

Now that all the writing is done, I am off to catch up on some of my favourite blogs and hopefully find some new ones! You can peruse the whole A to Z list and find some for yourself here.

A to Z 2025 – Theme Reveal

Art and Architecture

Business, Books and Barbara…

Carol, Cars and Cooking

Dad, Draughtsman/Designer

Elsie/Jill, Mum, Upward Mobility v. Imposter Syndrome…

Frewin,Fossils and Film…

Gadgets, Gardening, Geography and Geology…

Helen, the House, Health and Humanism

Ireland (They order these things differently in France!)

Jam plus…

Knitting (and Crochet)

Love…

Music, Murals, Memories, oh, and Marmite!

Novel-writing…

Objects of Desire…

Photography and Poetry

Qualifications

Restaurateur

Signwriting and Squidgy Things…

Travel, Tapestry and Tear-ing Up…

U is for Ukulele…

Vintage Clothing

Work, War, Words…

X-Rays

Yoghurt (frozen)

Zoom…

A to Z 2025 – Photography and Poetry

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I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace, but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

My camera setup – my Canon SLR, telephoto/macro lens, mini tripods, cable to connect to computer, a pen to record details and my camera bag which has three sections that can be joined together, middle row:- charger, my Samsung phone whose camera I now use far more than all the rest you see here, a phone to tripod mount, a clockwork camera turner (never yet used in anger. Bootom row:- Flash, with batteries, flash/camera controller, lens filter set.
One area of photography I don’t often do is Street Photography, mainly because I don’t want to intrude on people’s privacy – even if, as some photographers assert, if it is in the public domain, it’s fair game. This lady agreed to be photographed on Clacton promenade, and the result is what I think of as my Diane Arbus moment… As a teenager, I kept articles from the Sunday Times colour supplement on art and photography and an article on Diane Arbus obviously had a great effect on me…

Photography and Poetry

If you like either poetry or pictures, then this might be a feast day! I suppose there was no avoiding the fact that the two most frequent creative acts I practice would fall in the same post of this A to Z memoir – there will be photos aplenty, and poems and poems which are illustrated with my own photos – not ekphrastic poems – poems based on a photo, though I do write those from prompts by dVerse Poets Pub. There are also a couple of poems illustrated by Genrative AI – but more of that later.

It is so easy to take photographs these days compared to my first efforts with an 828 film (35mm wide with no sprocket holes so big negative/slide images) and it was cheaper to take slides than colour prints back then, so my pocket money for several weeks (I got 1 penny for each year of my age per week) went to send a film of 12 slides off for development.

Squinting in the sun on top of Table Mountain, Capetown S.A. 1968 from my other blog on photography

Nowadays most children’s first photos are taken on a mobile phone and cost nothing to take and often little to print if they have access to an ink-jet printer but it is not the same as the thrill of getting a carton of slides or an envelope of prints and negatives back from the pharmacy/ photo company. When I got those 12 slides or, later, prints, back, there were rarely wasted shots (though accidents could happen) because each shot had been carefully considered and framed before pressing the shutter. Digital pictures, and even professional photographers on a shoot, will acknowledge this, you can, and must, take hundreds of shots to get “just the right one”, and even then, it’s not guaranteed…

People are rediscovering the joy of real film photography and here are two girls so excited to see the results that they literally sat on the kerb outside the only shop in Bradford, Yorkshire, that develops film – ironically snapped by me on my mobile phone.

I have another blog on which I occasionally post where I explore my relation to photography – Photography & Me – A History, if you want to read more but for now here are just some of my favourites and the reasons why – because one of the problems with the plethora of pictures I now have, is what to do with them, how to exhibit them – even for oneself. For my recent 70th birthday, my daughter bought me a digital picture frame – so a growing number of treasures (more of sentimental than aesthetic value) are now on rotation…

With a background in painting landscapes, landscape photography remains key to me – this was taken on a day trip to Blackpool where taking into the sun (a thing you are told not to do) has washed out much of the colour around the iconic pier.
I used to travel to work across the moors, taking backroads to avoid being stuck in traffic. At the top of the moors, you can see for miles without seeing a single human habitation – empty or, as in this early Summer shot, filled with Buttercups and Bog Cotton…
Just a little further along the road, descending once more into civilisation, a large old farmhouse on a misty morning…
Modern camera phones excel at what I like to call Plant Portraits, especially close ups and the camera is always in your pocket – I did not know that the jade tree (see also my “C” post) had flowers as I never saw them in England but over the Winter of 2020, locked down in Crete, I watched these flower buds open into tiny flower on big bushes of Jade Tree…
I don’t have many photos of me because I am usually the one taking the photos at family events but here, in one of the last of my era of slide taking, I am simultaneously the joint subject and the photographer with two lovely friends with whom I shared a squat in Brixton, London and who have sadly disappeared from my life… BTW – check out my full head of 70’s hair!
Often photography is about being in the right place at the right time and seizing the moment – this picture was taken from a lorry/car ferry to Ireland as it set sail from the docks in Liverpool, next to the container port and no other vantage point would have captured it. The colour is slightly abnormal because it was taken with an HDR setting…
Sometimes the bizarre just has to be captured – I found this mutilated Barbie on a pavement in Blackheath, London and placed it on a wall, partly as a setting but also in the vain hope that somebody might reclaim her…
Another right place, right time, and this one, which looks like it might have been HDR, is not…
An abstract shot – snow on our Velux skylight…
A simple abstract snap until you know that these staples and thumbtacks mark the place where death notices are posted announcing the funeral details on the walk into Elounda, Crete, to do shopping in lockdown – ghosts of the community…
On the same walk as the previous shot. tiny Olive flowers…
Although I lugged my camera bag to Crete, where we spent 6 months during covid, I hardly used my SLR camera, taking so many photographs on my excellent phone camera, but this was one subject that the phone camera couldn’t cope with – panning and zooming simultaneously to follow the kite-boarders. They came from all over Crete despite lockdown to the bay at Elounda where at the southern end of the bay, a causeway blocks waves whilst allowing strong winds to provide perfect conditions for the sport – the SLR triumphs!
A wind sculpted rock formation from the Sahara? No! All that’s left of a rotted piece of wood from our bathroom which I had to replace. The wood around the screws had survived and I photographed it on top of our blue car…

Poetry

It was the A to Z that connected me to a couple of poets who are also attendees at dVerse Poets Pub, which drew me into writing more poetry – 208 poems in two years at the last count. dVerse post prompts 3-4 times a week, which can be subject or poetry method-based. – I highly recommend it… I also belong to an Amherst Writers writing group where we start by looking at a poem and then write in the shadow of it. The group facilitator, a retired doctor, Deborah Bayer, combines Amherst methodology with Healing Journey concepts so the poems that come from the group are often introspective or memoir in content.

Today I am going to give links to poems that I published here on the blog and illustrated with photos of my own plus a couple which I used Midjourney to illustrate. First however, this poem. It is written in the Duplex form, which I particularly like because each couplet passes on the baton of theme to the next couplet, giving a fast-moving, eclectic exploration of an idea that almost seems to write itself…

An Ode to Food Moments

Food was always the focus of family
always sitting down to eat all meals together

We did not go about separate lives
or help ourselves to leftovers from the fridge

Our mother refused to let my father cook
though he well could, and would have enjoyed to

Christmas morning was the exception – proved the rule
carving the ham, drop scones, grapefruit halves

Picnics were a chance for creative sandwiches
grated apple and chopped date, cream cheese and grape

Dinner parties brought forth beef olives from a magazine
my first beer next day – awful dregs at the bottom of a bottle

My Granny’s seventieth cake – a Dresden firestorm
with seventy candle power of heat melting inward

A picnic by Victoria’s Murray River
whilst fishing for who knows what with yabbies…

University evoked family meals
where we JCR sat down together for evening meals

Then, food on film – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
always about to eat but coitus interruptus

And the winner for Best Conflict Resolution Through Food –
Babbette dissolves all community feuds with a Christmas feast!

Are not all remembered meals filmic moments
salted away in the memory and aged to perfection

To be brought out on special occasions of family reminiscence
or encountered in the random, channel-hopping of life…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Five Photos Leading Me Home
Shelved
Casserole Dish Gardens
Memento Mori
Moss
Though it looks like a photograph, the image illustrating this poem is in fact the result of a period of experimenting with Generative AI (see the button at the top of the page) and I include it here because arriving at a good prompt turns out to be an art all of its own…
Narcissi Dreams
This poem is in the same vein, and I include it for the sheer beauty of the image which when it emerged from Midjourney – took my breath away… I have stopped using Midjourney to illustrate poems, partly because I feel they can overshadow the poem and partly because of the debate over the fairness to artists whose work may have been used to train LLM’s (Large Language Models).

Adornment of a Butterfly

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Meadow Argus / Photographed in Solomon Islands / Michael Sammut

Adornment to attract an amour
Sets of eyes bigger than a bird’s belly
To scare off avian appetites
And what sex is this butterfly beauty
Flamboyant female like those of our species
Or Cock of the Walk like most birds do
Or did a Creationist God get carried away
With his paintbrush in an inspired moment…

Andrew Wilson, 2025

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics celebrates the photographs of Michael Sammut and invites us to write ekphrastcally using one of his photos for inspiration…

Moss

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My mind is pot-bound, it’s soil once fertile, exhausted and moss-covered, but in my heyday, I was sought out by women who wanted a sharp wit as well as a handsome body beside them in bed – though I say it myself.
A photographer, I charted my voyages of love, capturing moments from first landfall through exploration and charting to the encirclement of each new island, and then shallowly, I moved on, recording last looks of disappointment.
Island-hopping became a habit, the search for a permanent home for the heart ever elusive till looks went and reputation warded off new discoveries.
I maundered into old age holed up in a rural backwater, photographing literal landscapes instead of those glorious, metaphorical islands of love. My days are nearly done and I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss…

Image by Midjourney

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Over at dVerse Poets Pub,  kim881 in Prosery challenges us to write a story with a beginning, middle and end in exactly 144 words using two lines from the Leonard Cohen poem Take This Waltz “And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, – with the photographs there and the moss.”

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 9

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The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon…
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…

Dear Rachel

Passing the end of this street
I saw these sun-painted shadows
depicting the neighbouring houses
chiaroscuro – light and shade.
Morning sun swinging round
is what we notice both
creating and destroying shadows
but at eventide
it is the shadows winning
steadily reclaiming surfaces
for the night. I started
seeing shadowplay everywhere
best of all – shadows invaded
by reflected sparkles
from third-party windows
Chiaroscuro…

Andrew
© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Rachel fulfilled the PoPo brief perfectly, an epistolary postcard poem that referenced the picture on her card (below), and since she had presumably received my card, also referenced my theme of light and shade – perfect! I only wish I was allowed to show you…

Hold onto your hats! Myrtle and High Street Bellingham WA


R is for Remembrance – Photos for the purpose of –

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Why do we take Photographs?

Every photograph is a “snapshot” of a moment in time but I think we take them for many different reasons – though it can be for several reasons at the same time. Perhaps too, it has to do with the kind of photographer you are – do you make your living from photography, are you like me – a keen amateur or do you just take pictures on your phone (because who needs an actual camera these days). I do have an SLR with a choice of lenses but I too take pictures on my phone because taking out my SLR – in its bag with all the accessories – that makes it a photography trip and the rest of the time I still have my phone camera. So! Right there is an implied difference – when I take my “proper” camera I hope to achieve some more considered? artistic? special? pictures. Yet all of these things, I have achieved on my phone too. So it must be the intention, the sensibility with which I take the shot that matters.

I take pictures when I am surveying buildings to remember things when I am drawing them up on the computer, I take arty shots, funny shots, I take pictures on holiday or days out with my partner in order to remember the day. (Before we all had cameras, we bought Picture Postcards for the same reason…) I have taken pictures as evidence following a car crash and I take pictures of objects such as the brand of coffee I want my grandson to buy for us whilst he is doing our lockdown shopping or to remember them for later – visual notes to self.

Some of these uses are only economically possible because of digital cameras. My first camera – a hand-me-down from my father, I used to, like him, take coloured slides and they were expensive to get processed – even at 12 to a roll, so I composed my pictures very carefully and almost never got a disappointing result. Noe I can pop away like a pro at a fashion suit but the lack of care means I can take a hundred pictures and none of them might be right. But going back to the abstract uses of pictures such as remembrance – how often do we look at the photographs we have taken, we don’t tend to print them out but must look at them on some kind of electronic device and yet that makes it easier to share them with others – you don’t have to invite them round for a slide show of your latest holidays…

If you take a picture – primarily to remember something or somewhere or someone, is it just you the photographer’s memory or can you share it with another as a memory? Even for the one you are with it can have a different connotation. ME: “Smile so I can have a record of you at this charming café in this lovely seaside town.” PARTNER: “OK but you have to let me check it!” ME: Snap “Okay – here it is…” PARTNER: “Oh my God, that sunshine shows up all my wrinkles – no you’ll have to delete that!” ME: “Yes but it’s just for us to remember today by.” PARTNER: “Well if you must – but don’t you dare put it on Facebook!” And if there was a photo deemed fit for Facebook – would it be a memory for the people who saw it – no – it would be something else even though it might trigger memories about the person or place or object featured in the viewer. And if a photo doesn’t trigger memories, it may trigger emotions and perhaps that would then make it Art – but that’s another story.

So to summarise – here is a list of all the things I can think of, that a photograph can be:-
An Aide Memoire
A Record
Reportage
A Note
Evidence
A Work of Art
A Stimulus
Pornography
A Missive

My original idea for this post was to choose three pictures I have taken which I would keep purely for Remembrance and to challenge readers to do the same but then I got thinking about all the multiple roles that a photograph can have but before I present my selection, I can’t resist putting a couple of questions out there…
Selfies! What’s that all about? And Instagramming your meals – who is that for? And so many pictures of pets? Well I guess I know the answer to that one to be fair.
So here are my three pictures and PLEASE choose three of yours which you would keep for the memory (though they may also be beautiful or informative) they don’t have to be the ones that if your house were burning you would grab on the way out – just ones that are full of memories… Post them and send a link in the comments – thanks!

Or you could join my Linkz party (first time I’ve tried it…)
https://fresh.inlinkz.com/p/e9640b6c724d4424b5f4bebe30e6bf78