Impermanence 7

The theme this week is 'loss' - big losses, small losses, consequential losses, ephemeral losses . . . (for an explanation of this project, see here).

So, first, among 'big losses' there are big 'normal' losses and big highly abnormal losses. In the rich West the death of a child is highly abnormal, not part of life's expected losses. The death of my seven year old niece was one such loss.

A more normal loss was my grandmother - here is a still life of items, previously hers, that she gave to me.

This is a photograph of my grandmother as a young woman in her early twenties, when she was personal maid to Lady Florence Boyle (neé Keppel - sister-in-law to the [in]famous Alice Keppel). In this capacity she travelled widely throughout Europe, the only way at that time that a working-class woman could have the adventurous life that my grandmother craved. The outbreak of WW1 put a stop to the travel and also to my grandmother's position in the Boyle household. The antique camera in the photo above was a gift to my grandmother from Lady Boyle.








Another normal loss, and sadly frequent, is the death of a beloved companion animal. Here are all my cats from 1982-2016. Of course, some of the images pre-date digital photography, so old prints have been scanned to include them here.

I don't have a cat at the moment . . . I discover that, if I contemplate adopting another cat, I find that I am too saddened by the thought of yet another cat dying. I'm not ready for that at the moment . . . and given that I'm approaching 70, it's possible that I may never be ready for it.

And then there are ephemeral losses . . . Week 7 of this project has coincided with this year's Chelsea Flower Show . . . and that signals the moment in the gardening year when my neighbour's oriental poppies, and my peonies, are both in flower. Each year I try to get good photographs of them . . . they are both extraordinarily difficult to photograph well. Both plants produce flowers with very glossy petals and there is something about the way light reflects off the surface, and bounces around within the surface layer, that produces colour flares . . . I console myself that the professional camera crew covering the Chelsea show for TV also have the same problem.

The peonies are not an ephemeral flower if the weather stays dry . . . but this is England. If it rains, the heavy flowers fill up with water and fall over. Immediately below is an image of flowers that opened in dry sunshine and enjoyed a week of the same; underneath, 24 hours later, after 12 hours of continuous heavy rain.

The oriental poppies, though, are inherently ephemeral - the bud opens, the flower goes over and drops its petals, the seed pod starts to form . . . all in 48 hours. And the whole patch lasts only a week, or ten days at most. Then it's another year before I can try again to get photographs.