LANDSCAPES AND LOOKING: Reflections on Eric & James Ravilious. by Penny Dolan

This week, I am sorting through the too-many books here at home. I am culling some, and collecting others into “families”: shelves of books inspired by the same theme.
 
One bookcase is now home to a family of books about aspects of the English landscape, from Alison Utley’s A Country Childhood through to Oliver Rackham’s books about trees to George Ewart Evans Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay and more. Some we bought and some were given as gifts. Others, often the hardest to discard, were inherited.
 
Standing within the waves of scattered volumes, I start wondering what other titles should join this family: those by Robert Macfarlane, perhaps, or Roger Deakin? Or large-format books about landscape art or painting or photography? Where does the family of "landscape" end?

All at once I remember landscapes by a favourite artist: Eric Ravilious, painter, wood-engraver and designer. I went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s retrospective Ravilious exhibition in 2015, and in the video below you can see James Russell, the curator, talking about Ravilious and his pictures and the “scratch” technique that gives the artists pieces such luminosity.

Entry was for strictly limited periods but, once inside, I avoided the exit. I wove my way up and back though the exhibition, living with the Ravilious paintings throughout a wonderful afternoon. His work seems full of rolling downs, of chalk cliffs overlooking the sea and of lanes winding through peaceful fields: an essentially English rural landscape. 

For some time, Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood (also an artist and wood engraver) were part of an influential group of figurative artists living around Great Bardfield in Essex, although the landscapes of the South Downs dominate many of his most popular images.

In 1939, Eric Ravilious signed up as a war artist with the Royal Marines, moving from one posting to another. He painted on land and from the moving decks of warships, watching the planes overhead. Ravilious brought the same sense of enigmatic light to all these harsher subjects: the airfields, the waiting planes and broken machinery, the men walking across wet sand to defuse a beached mine. 

He learned to fly and was sent to Iceland. On the first day of September 1942, he joined one of three planes sent out to search for a lost aircraft. Ravilious’s aircraft never returned and, four days later, he and the crew were reported lost at sea.

I am often intrigued by how the making of art can run in families, both through what could be called the genes and also through the family culture: those families where the possibility of making art is acknowledged and celebrated. So, very recently, hearing the same surname again, I was immediately interested.  

This “new” name was James Ravilious, Eric’s middle child. Born in 1939, James's only memory of Eric was running down the lane to hug his father as he left for war, and being given a threepenny coin from father's coat pocket. Sadly, after Eric's death, Tirzah’s already poor health worsened. She died, leaving her children orphans. James was only eleven. Growing up, he studied at St Martin’s School of Art, and afterwards taught painting and drawing in London. He fell in love and married a kindred spirit, Robin, in 1970. She was the daughter of the glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler, and she also shared a sorrowful childhood.

During 1972, James and Robin left London for the countryside, and around that same time, James abandoned drawing and painting and took up photography. They settled by the village of Beaford, in what was then a largely unspoilt area of North Devon. James started taking photographs to record the landscape, the seasons, community, customs and people, but what began as a short project grew into a seventeen-year archive covering the changing rural life of the area. James added to it as well, copying earlier photographs of the same area. All the collected images now form the Beaford historical archive, whose images have been exhibited around the world.

Whether James’ talent was inherited though the genes, or learned through the artistic culture of his parents and family friends, one thing stands out for me. James Ravilious’s black and white photographs seem to share the same quality of quiet observation and love of the light visible in his father’s work. They both seem filled with a quiet but real passion for the English landscape.

James Ravilious died too, in 1999, but his wife Robin has published an account of his life in 2017.  Here, also is a clip about an influential film that James Ravilious made about photography:

So how does this post link with History Girls and writing? 
James Ravilious met the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and was very influenced by him, adopting Cartier-Bresson's approach in his own photography, even down to using the same model of camera, a LeicaM3. James followed Cartier Bresson’s approach, including the rule about never posing a subject or cropping an image, so his subjects display a natural grace.

Additionally, James also took to heart Cartier-Bresson’s most fervent mantra:

There is such a thing as The Moment. 
It is mysterious, but if you look at several shots of the one scene, 
there is one that has it – as if there were a little poem there.

Today, revising a piece of fiction, I paused and pondered about this concept of that one essential mysterious “Moment”. Although painting and photography are visual art forms, I think that writers, too, try to choose that one specific “Moment”, try to write the one specific, telling scene, try to capture that one perfectly imagined visualisation in the hope that the magic (and poetry) will make the words live?

Oh, and then the scene after? And then the scene after that . . .?

I’m going back to sorting out my book families: it’s easier than art.

Penny Dolan

ps. A travelling exhibition, “Ravilious and Co”, about Eric and his contemporaries opens at Compton Verney Gallery, Warwickshire, in March 2018.

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Victorian Photographs and Women Reading by Joan Lennon

This is a post in two parts.

Part the first:  There is a wonderful exhibition on at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, running till the 22nd November, titled Photography: A Victorian Sensation.  I highly recommend it if you find yourself within striking distance - but beware - we were there for 1 1/2 hours and only got half way round before being politely booted out at closing time.  (I'll try to go again.)

It was dimly lit and the photographs were small in their beautiful cases, but the curators had cunningly provided electronic display thingies where you could enlarge each portrait to your heart's content.  And that was where the time went.  Being able to look closely at the faces, read the stories behind the lines and the expressions.  The majority were full face and because they had to hold their poses for so long, it wasn't possible to hide behind created persona smirks or "Everything's fine!" animation.  They were vulnerable and open.

Now, a good number of the men's portraits had them with a finger in a book, but very few of the women were shown this way.  As we weren't allowed to take photographs of the photographs, I found this one of the fabulous Julia Margaret Cameron elsewhere in that pose (she is a heroine of mine and, irritatingly, in the part of the exhibition I got "encouraged" out of.  It was my own fault, of course.)

But what those images made me think of was ...

Part the second - paintings of women reading.  There is a similar stillness and lack of defence - the viewer sees the reader's face in repose, but this time without making eye contact.  You will not be surprised to learn I've never been an artist's model, but if I were, I've always thought the best pose to go for would be reading.  With all my clothes on.  This would help with the boredom and goosebumps.  And here are some that I like a lot -

Woman reading a letter by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675)

Reading “Le Figaro” by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)

Woman Reading by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)

La Lecture by George Croegaert (1848-1923)

Elisabeth Allan Fraser by Patrick Allan Fraser (1812-1890) 

(She is reading in the dining room at Hospitalfield House, just up the coast from where I live - an amazing place.) 

Do you have a favourite portrait of a woman reading?  If so, I'd love to see it - share a link to it in the comments.  Thank you!  (And go to that exhibition if you possibly can - )

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

'Intervene in the field of the imagination' by Lydia Syson

The idea that the Spanish Civil War was primarily a ‘poets’ war’, as Stephen Spender suggested, has often been questioned in the 75 years since it ended.  In terms of numbers, it was a workers’ war.  Now a remarkable exhibition and book explore for the first time the many different ways in which it was also an artists’ war.  In the process, Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, powerfully demonstrates that this is because it was, in fact, everybody’s war. 

The juxtaposition of images in the first few pages of Simon Martin’s accompanying book makes this point particularly well. First there’s a semi-abstract Henry Moore lithograph of 1939 called ‘Spanish Prisoner’ - eyes, bars, barbed wire, monumental despair – which was imprisoned itself in Camberwell School of Art when WW2 broke out, so couldn’t be printed to raise funds for Spanish refugees in French detention camps as Moore intended.  Then this eye-catching and anonymous poster in yellow, red and purple with the simple plea: ‘Help Spain’. 

Courtesy of the People's History Museum

Turning the page, I was struck by a 1936 photograph by Edith Tudor-Hart of the ‘Aid for Spain’ fundraiding shop in my own London Borough, Southwark, an image which documents the sheer scale of support for Republic Spain in Britain.  This shop was open till ten at night.  Its windows and door are plastered with exhortatory appeals: ‘Buy a tin of food! We will send it to Spain’, ‘Buy a milk token’, ‘Please step inside and see what Spain means to you’, and, in largest letters of all, ‘SPAIN IS FIGHTING FOR YOU’.

‘Unless he is prepared to see all thought pressed into one reactionary mould, by tyrannical dictatorships – to see the beginning of another set of dark ages – the artist is left with no choice but to help in the fight for the real establishment of Democracy against the menace of Dictatorships,’ wrote Moore, expressing the commitment of a generation.

Picasso’s Guernica, painted in the wake of the bombing of the Basque town in April 1937, has undoubtedly overshadowed the efforts of every other artist in this respect, including his own magnificent Weeping Woman, a highlight of this exhibition. But instead of attempting the impossible – unearthing British works of art to compete with Picasso’s – Conscience and Conflict takes a better path.  Both book and exhibition tell an exceptionally moving story of the vast, varied and often collective response both to events in Spain and to the arrival of the painting Guernica in Britain - it was seen by 3,000 people in the New Burlington Galleries and over 15,000 in Whitechapel. One of many sub-plots to this narrative is the democratising effect Spain had on British art in the 1930s.  

 

Artistic engagement in this war took multiple forms.  Some turned their talents to propaganda images, making banners, hoardings, cartoons, book covers, posters.  Others sold their work to raise money and awareness, largely through the Artists International Association, whose history is particularly well told, and later the Spanish Artists Refugee Committee.  And like writers, artists took sides, in similar proportions. Pro-Francoist and more ambivalent artists are represented here too – works by Edward Burra and Wyndham Lewis stand out.

Edward Burra, The Watcher, c. 1937,
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
© Estate of the Artist, c/o Lefevre Fine Art, London

A few British artists chose to go to Spain to fight for the cause. Felicia Browne was the only British woman in combat, and the first British volunteer to die in battle. Her sketchbook, though not her body, was recovered and her work exhibited soon after her death to raise funds for the war effort.  I’ve never seen any work by sculptor Jason Gurney, whose posthumously published memoir Crusade in Spain was a very valuable source for A World Between Us: Gurney was wounded in the hand, and apparently unable to sculpt again.  Clive Branson returned, but only after imprisonment in the notorious Francoist camp of San Pedro de Cardeñ.  Branson’s colourful, realist paintings are well represented in this show, along with sketches he made in Spain of fellow prisoners. I thought of these when I was writing the Ebro scenes in my novel: Nat determines to take his drawings of his dead friend Bernie back to his wife in Mile End if he survives the battle. Branson was killed in action in Burma in 1944, where a disporportionate number of Communists and former International Brigaders seem to have been sent during World War Two. (My grandfather, a friend and comrade of Branson’s, broke his arm very badly in a training exercise the night before he was due to fly there himself, which probably saved his life.)

A photograph in the book from the International Brigade Archive at the Marx Memorial Library shows artist-turned-ambulance-driver Wogan Philips standing in front of the vehicle which inspired the opening of my chapter 10:

‘Felix stood on the dusty road, rereading the writing on the front of the ambulance and wishing she didn’t have to get back into it quite so soon.  She rolled the words round her tongue.

‘Medicamentos para los obreros de España.’

The letters were hand painted in white capitals, bold against dark green paintwork.  They got bigger and bigger until they reached the huge final ‘A’ of España. . .This was what she’d undertaken.  Medicine for the workers of Spain.’

Walter Nessler, Premonition, 1937
Courtesy of the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon

Looking at Walter Nessler’s dark oil painting of London contorted by bombing, painted three years before the Blitz, I thought of Felix's letter home, defending her departure:

'We’re all involved.  We can’t let the Blackshirts win in England, and we can’t let the Nationalists force their way into power here either.  It’s a fight for the only things really worth fighting for – everything I always used to take for granted, I suppose…like freedom, and elections, and being able to say what you think.  I can’t just close my eyes and pretend it’s not happning.  Fighting here is the only thing we can do right now to stop Fascist bombers flying over Lawrie Park Road next year, or the year after.'

When I started writing A World Between Us, I hadn’t quite realised how heavily involved in the Aid Spain movement my grandparents and other relatives had been.  Soon familiar names cropped up everywhere I looked.  I discovered a portrait of my mother, aged four, by Edith Tudor-Hart, whose genius for photographing children can be seen in this exhibition in images of ‘los niños’ – the young Basque refugee children who came to Britain on the Habaña in 1937.  In her hands, a camera was a political weapon.  According to Tudor-Hart, photography had ‘ceased to be an instrument for recording events and became a means for influencing and stimulating events.’ I have another picture of my mother by Ramsey and Muspratt, who took the extraordinary picture of John Cornford (with Ray Peters), also in Conscience and Conflict, that led so many to describe him as the ‘poster-boy’ of the International Brigades.

For obvious reasons, I loved the posters in this exhibition, many of which I knew already, but even more I loved the surprises: the terrifying Neville Chamberlain mask worn by Roland Penrose and others at the May Day procession to Hyde Park in 1938, and a papier-mâché horse's head from the Surrealist float; the haunting ruins and empty streets painted by John Armstrong (see book cover), who went on to become an official war artist  – scraps of paper blowing in the wind mimic human beings swept from their homes by war.  Perhaps most startling of all is the astonishing series of pictures of refugees on the road by Ursula McCannell, which she started painting when she was only thirteen.  As the Daily Mail pronounced after her first solo show, they ‘seem to typify all suffering in Spain.’ 

Ursula McCannell (b. 1923)
Family of Beggars, 1939,
Marcus Rees Roberts

Conscience and Conflict, a Pallant House Gallery exhibition which ran in Chichester from 8 November 2014 to 15 February 2015, opens tomorrow at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and runs until 7 June 2015.  Simon Martin’s book, published by Pallant House Gallery in association with Lund Humphries, is equally strongly recommended.

Lydia Syson's Liberty's Fire will be published on May 7th.  From October 2015, she will be an RLF Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  

Succumbing to Psychogeography by Lydia Syson

Sometimes research can seem to go frustratingly, time-wastingly wrong.  Last month I went to Paris to do some final (ha!) research for my new book Liberty’s Fire, which is set in the ‘terrible year’ of 1871 when Paris, under the Commune, found itself besieged for the second time in a few months – not by the Prussians, but by France’s own army.  Among other things, I planned to fill a hole by getting myself to the National Museum of Photography, recently reopened at Bièvres.

  

The museum boasts 30,000 different cameras and accessories dating back to the earliest years of photography.  I’d checked the website numerous times.  I knew I had a fairly short window of opportunity, as the museum only opened a few afternoons a week.   On my previous research trip to Paris last March, I’d been fantastically efficient about communicating with certain museums and archives in advance to make sure I’d definitely be able to see the material I needed.  This time I was in a more relaxed, end-of-project, flâneury sort of mood.  It simply didn’t occur to me to phone the museum in advance.  

Bièvres, which claims to be the ‘capital of photography’, styles itself ‘un village aux portes de Paris’ – a village at the gates of Paris.  I was coming from St Germain-en-Laye and the journey took hours: three complicated train changes, each one involving a long wait between trains, culminating in a decent walk from a deserted station.  Plenty of time in which to fantasise about all the wonderful material I was going to find when I finally arrived, all those telling details that would bring key moments in my book to life.  I convinced myself that I would stumble on exactly the camera my photographer character would have used, and get a real sense of the scale and design of the developing equipment.  I could already practically see the reconstruction of a mobile darkroom which the curators of this museum would naturally have lovingly installed, for how could any visitor truly understand the curious processes of wet collodion photography without such a thing? I was prepared to be granted insights that could be acquired nowhere else.

Remembering the photograph on the website, I walked on, expecting at any moment to come upon a grandish stucco’d house in landscaped gardens, and a warm welcome.  Instead, I found scaffolding, an abandoned marquee and some silent prefabs.  Also an unapologetic sign saying that the museum would be closed until late November for ‘works’.  Works which showed absolutely no sign of being in progress.  I almost wept.  In fact, I think I probably did, because stomping furiously back to the station, I skidded on one of those white plastic bumpy things on the pavement which marks a crossing, and tore up my hand and elbow so badly I had to call at the Mairie to wash off the blood.  (The receptionist there had no idea the museum was shut for months, and told me helpfully that ‘It does have certain opening hours, you know…”)

All that precious time wasted.  It was unbearable.  Back at the deserted station, waiting another aeon in the first leg of another complicated multi-suburban-trained journey into the centre of Paris to visit the National Army Museum, whose website had assured me that the collections covering the years from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the Commune were now on display, I gnawed at a pear and despaired.  

And then the train arrived. I got on, and nearly burst out laughing.  It had grubby orange vinyl seats and smelled like a pissoir, but every wall and ceiling was lavishly decorated with photographs from the Château de Versailles. 

Luxury and poverty seemed in violent collision on this train, just as they had been at the end of Second Empire France, when Napoleon III fled to Chislehurst after his defeat at Sedan, and the people of Paris rose up to claim their municipal rights.  At that moment I turned psychogeographer and let myself drift.   I am absolutely no expert on Debord, my acquaintance with the Situationists is passing, and I can only really cope with Iain Sinclair in bite-sized chunks (his London Review of Books articles suit me perfectly).  But Walter Benjamin has been by my side for months, and I suddenly saw a serendipity in this journey becoming the main event.  My expedition ceased to be a failure and became something else.  This kitschest of trains (my photographs don’t do justice to its photographs) then trundled me through places I’d been reading about for the past eighteen months.

Coming from La Defense earlier, I’d already passed through St Cloud.  In 1871, photographers like Adolphe Braun had come there to photograph the devastation caused by the Franco-Prussian war.  The most dramatic of St Cloud's ruins was the vast château where Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie used to hold court in spring and autumn.

No sign of that now, but from the train window, I’d looked at the cranes and a few stray fin de siècle turrets and out across the trees to Paris.  On the far side of the city, I could see the Sacre Coeur hovering whitely over Montmartre.  The basilica was built as a symbol of conservative moral order, a penance for the sins of the Franco-Prussian war, but more significantly, for the ‘crimes’ of the Commune.  It covers the very spot where the revolution of 1871 erupted, when the Government of National Defense (which had ruled the new Republic since the fall of the Empire) tried to remove the cannons bought by public subscription to protect the French capital from Prussian attack.  It was only twenty-three years since the capital’s last bloody uprising.  The Government immediately fled to Versailles, recently vacated by the victorious Prussians, the Commune was duly elected and declared in the capital, and then the fighting began between Paris and ‘Versailles’, between the National Guard militiamen and the Army of France.  It was a civil war in miniature. 

My journey that day took me right over its battlegrounds.  Nearly every station we stopped at, all those names flickering on departure boards, triggered images and memories connected with my research.  Issy, near the Porte de Versailles, had been a key strategic point in the war: as long as the Communards held the Fort, they could block the route of the Army into Paris.  They lost control of it disastrously, on the night of 7^th April, after which the fighting and bombardment became ever more bitter until Paris itself was invaded on the night of May 21st.  No sign of it from the train – I discover now that the wasteland where the fort once stood has recently been turned into an ‘ecoquartier’, a fifth of which is social housing - but I felt an odd (psychogeographical?) frisson when I noticed the office building of Safran, a multinational defense group. 

All these edgelands of Paris - Puteau, Montretout, Mont-Valerian, Boulogne…all had been the sites of significant battles or artillery batteries at a time when French shells were falling on the Arc de Triomphe. 

My gaudy train pulled into Versailles Chantiers and a young woman in front of me revealed a gold-embroidered crown on the pocket of her jeans as she lifted her glittery cardigan to retrieve her ticket.  I looked at the station name again, and felt quite chilled. That morning, it hadn’t struck me. Changing trains here for the second time, I suddenly realised its significance.  During and immediately after the slaughter of Bloody Week, about 43,000 suspected Communards were marched from Paris to prisons in and around Versailles.  Conditions were unbelievable. The women prisoners at Versailles Chantiers were the subject of one of Eugene Appert’s now notorious photomontages: distorted, composite images created to justify the government’s extraordinarily brutal suppression of the Commune. 

At last I reached the Army Museum in its impressive setting at Les Invalides.  How on earth would a museum like this deal with the subject of the slaughter that was carried out by the Army itself that terrible week in May 1871?  I hunted high and low for an answer.  There was indeed a large display that ended in 1870, where I encountered this National Guardsman.  In another part of the building, another section of the museum took visitors from 1871 through to the two world wars.  Of the massacre of approximately 20,000 people on the streets of Paris, there was no mention whatsoever. 

Alfred Stieglitz, I Love You - Joan Lennon

They have a strange and difficult allure, old photographs, don't they.  A power.  A poignancy.  As a writer, you want to write - to tell the story - but at the same time you can feel you're being allowed to be part of something that is complete without language.  Already perfect.  

I stumbled across Alfred Stieglitz's work only recently, and I am smitten.  I am also afraid to find out too much about him, in case he turns out to be a creep.  A supremely talented creep with the eye of an angel.  That sort of thing.  Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise - It's not exactly a professional attitude, but in this case, let's just let the images speak for themselves.  Three from the 1890s -     

"The Terminal" (1893)

"Winter – Fifth Avenue" (1893)

"Venetian Canal" (1894) 

And, as a postscript, one more Alfred Stieglitz photograph from the next century - 

"Dirigible" 1910

The man makes me go weak at the knees.  

(Click on the images to see them bigger - it only gets better!)  

Joan's website.

Joan's blog.

CROSSING OVER by Emma Darwin

In Tuesday's post, "Outside the Frame", A L Berridge was saying that while the physical presence that an old photograph records might be rather more historical-physical (smelly, sickly, unglamorous) than either writer or reader really fancy, a photograph can get a writer's mind going as few other things can.

I think one reason that photographs can be such a good jumping-off point for a story is that we know they are the product of a moment. Apart from trickery in the enlarger, on the re-touching table or now on a computer, a photograph is unmediated: the camera can only speak as it finds. And it's not only photographs - images - which get my writerly self dancing and thinking, it's photography itself.

Even if the sitter has carefully chosen to represent themselves in a certain way (and that, in itself, is revealing), another moment might have made them look very different - have you ever seen a handful of snaps of yourself up on someone's Facebook page after a party, and thought you almost looked like different people, depending on angle, light and so on? A portrait is painted in time and so it's a collection, a distillation, of the artist's conception of the sitter. But a photograph is a step out of time, and therefore - paradoxically - it speaks of Time, and how it moves, as few other artefacts can.

If you've ever stood in a church where your historical character stood (as I did with Elizabeth Woodville in A Secret Alchemy) or read a notice that said "George Washington slipped here", you'll know what I mean. There's a shiver you get when you realise that but for the thinnest possible veil of time the past is here with you or you've stepped into the past. And with photographs it does come down to physics. The controlled tarnishing of silver bromide (or silver chloride or one of the other silver halides) is all that actually records the image in the camera, even with colour photographs. Photons from the sun (or now from a flash) touched that real, actual person, and were reflected away to touch the photographic emulsion on the film or glass plate, and blacken it in proportion. Of course, we're most familiar with the negative/positive process, when the print in your hands may have been made any time from the next day, to a century later. But if it's a daguerreotype, or one of its descendants such as the tin-type beloved of fairground photographers in the 19th century, then the plate is the photograph, there, in your hands.
 
In The Mathematics of Love, my 1976 narrator, Anna, begins her story thus: 

It's an early daguerreotype, more than a hundred and fifty years old. That's a positive process, I usually explain, the plate exposed directly so that each is unique... If you tilt it towards the light, the image gleams and shimmers, so exact, so bright and so dark, that the moment of its taking seems to live inside the glass. The sun touches the pillars and chimneys of Kersey Hall and flickers among the dark, late-summer trees. Its light lies on the lawn, strokes the curve of the steps, slips through the half-open door to where a figure in a long dress stands. It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and other times before it was found again. One of those times was mine.

And later in the novel, although much earlier in Anna's life, veteran photographer Theo - who I modelled on Robert Capa - says this:

"...all photographs are about death, really, and time: about preserving a moment in silver and chemicals, when life itself is never preserved, when every cell of everything is already decaying, and being replaced, and decaying again. The subject and the image co-exist for the moment that the shutter opens and closes. And then the subject decays but the image lives on unchanged."

"It makes it sound like a ghost."

He grinned at me. "Oh, Anna, does the idea give you gooseflesh all over?... but a photograph does prevent something - somebody - from being laid to rest."

I moved a little, and felt the slight, hot roughness where my shoulders were newly brown. I looked down and saw that the image of the dark straps of my top was printed pale by the sun.

The Mathematics of Love is all about ghosts, without really being a ghost story. And if I told you what I mean by "not really" it would spoil things, but the more I thought about light and where it falls, the more places I found - such as Anna's sun-tan - where it's part of how we experience time and our selves. I don't believe in ghosts - hence my "not-really". But I think what ghosts embody and express about our sense of the past is endlessly fascinating - and not just the past, but the dead and the still living and the might-have-been. And in that way, a photograph is like a historical novel as much as it's a historical record; it embodies the dead quite literally, in silver halides, in a way which lives absolutely in our moment. As A L Berridge was saying, it therefore embodies the might-have-been, just outside the frame. It's more like holding a letter written by that person, than it's like looking at a portrait painted of them. Writing historical fiction is all about using imagination (rooted in research, of course) to cross over from the present into the past. With a photograph, the past crosses over into our present.