The John Griff Column: Pictures and Words - or Words and Pictures?

I have enjoyed photography for a long time - the bug bit me during my school days. The school had a proper wet darkroom within which I used to spend hours cloistered away, carefully developing my amateurly shot 35mm films in Paterson tanks filled with D-76 developer, before carefully fixing, washing and drying the resulting negatives. Later, I would pore over an enlarger to create pictures which emerged from trays filled with exotic smelling chemicals. The discipline of it, the dogma of respecting time and temperature and the magic of seeing my work appear before my eyes in the gloom of my safe-light haven intrigued me. From many boxes of photographic paper I developed a small collection of my own work - which I rarely showed anyone. My godfather was a semi-professional photographer who would sometimes take me to buildings, where you could take interesting shots. ‘Use as much film as you can,’ he used to say ‘it’s the cheapest part of the process’. It was a fair point – but film, for most at least – has all but ceased to be part of the process now and you don’t need a sophisticated camera to make considered, crafted pieces of work. In some ways I miss the more painstaking path - having tried it I think I’m a better photographer for it and can usually see a photograph before I commit to taking it. Strangely, that foresight of an image has helped me shape a piece in sound on countless occasions, helping me to visualise the structure of a start, middle and end of my story long before pressing the record button or shutter release.

Reportage photography is what tends to turn up in newspapers and magazines – I was brought up with the National Geographic magazine usually to hand and I marvelled at how the lensmen and women of my teen years managed to get so much narrative encompassed into just a few images. Then, my own world was a limited one, but photography gave me a different perspective on it from behind the lens. Repeated experimentation taught me to see things anew and how a story could come through an image if taken or edited in a certain way. In sound I have always worked with the understanding of a certain maxim – ‘Everyone has A Story That Somebody Would Like To Hear’. The same is true of photography I think and when you consider the number of pictures we each consume every day through social media alone, I’m certain of it - but it is for us to decide whether we believe the story that is being told, however that is. Photography can tell a story of centuries in a fraction of a second. It can also pose questions of the viewer – What are you looking at? Why are you looking at it? How does it make you feel? Questions asked of us, by us, without there necessarily being answers unless we go in search of them, or they are provided for us.

Earlier this year Lois and I went on holiday to Dubrovnik. It featured heavily as a location for filming the TV franchise Game of Thrones and almost every shop within Dubrovnik’s walls proudly hawks GoT merchandise. It is a beautiful town which changes its face through the hours of the day and night – but it also has a dark past. A strategically important seaport, it’s been besieged on more than one occasion, and most recently during the Croation War of Independence between 1991 and 1992. Take the cable car to the fort at the top of the hills immediately behind the town walls and you’ll find photography documenting the bombardments that took place – they tell a different story to the tourism which now fuels the peacetime economy of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Life through the lens of a camera here is what you can take in by visiting V and B in St Giles Square from today. ‘Place Where We Dwell - Chapter 2’ is the work of local photographer Gavin Wallace, continuing his view of the county town through some of the change makers who live in it. Chapter Two picks up where Chapter One ended – incorporating a tone of both hope and optimism for a place which, like so many others, has seen good and less good times alike. ‘I felt it necessary to showcase those people that are making a difference, so over the last 2 years I have photographed many more of the towns people from charity workers, writers, poets, musicians, council members, artists, shoe makers, and more, all calling Northampton their home and all succeeding in making Northampton a better place to live and work.’ A socially aware, non-conformist Northamptonian himself, Wallace fuses an anti-establishment perspective with classical portraiture. I’m fascinated by his work, which includes a wealth of detail that you really have to get close to to be able to take it all in. The image here comes from his previous exhibition – and the questions I posed earlier apply to it:

Why is Aasen Stephenson carving at a leaf with a scalpel?

What is his interest in John Lydon and the international cannabis smuggler Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks?

Why is there a tin of boot polish on the table, but boots apparently not for wearing high on the shelf behind him?

Which came first – the bookcase from Abington Library or the grimy but exuberant bust of a bust?

I once went to the Guggenheim Museum just off Central Park and wrestled with understanding the art there – it, in turn, taught me that I shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. Gavin Wallace’s work draws the viewer in but does so in a candid, refreshingly entertaining way. If you visit and he’s there, ask him some searchingly detailed questions – talking points prompted by graphic art.

You’ll both enjoy the exercise.

‘Place Where We Dwell’ by Gavin Wallace is open to visitors Tuesdays – Sundays at V and B, St Giles Street Northampton. www.gavinwallacephotography.co.uk