AI Generative “photos”

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).