UNKNOWN PERSON ON THE ICE, BAY OF RIGA, LATVIA 2005

This is one of my most treasured photos. Is it a good photo? Of course not. Does that matter? Absolutely not. Why do I love it so? Because it is my - overly personal - story about hope.

So if you are feeling down, or if you are not, or if you are young and dont remember a time before social media, or if you are older and remember why we used to take photos, or if you are interested in the idea of why a physical photographic print represents something different from simply another image, then likewise.

And so

The photo is a tiny piece of physical history, a personal artefact. It is a THING. Tangible. It is physical evidence. Eighteen years ago, digital photography was still expensively disappointing. There was no social media. If you took a photo, you took it for the most part, not for money, likes, praise, social capital, but for the simple pleasure of taking a picture, for a memory, FOR YOURSELF.

Eighteen years ago I volunteered to fill a gap in my company’s workforce and went to Vilnius, Lithuania for three weeks. It was -15 most days, dark and cold, everywhere smelled of potatoes and I had to ask the company for a bridging loan so I could eat properly, because I was keeping a family on one modest income and had all kinds of credit and loan issues at the time. I had messed up my directing career and was depressed at the drop in income, the slightly humiliating working conditions, the terrible neighbours we had back home. I was not in a good place and I was not a nice person. Three weeks in the dark, friendless frozen Baltics was like an act of self harm. Except in the end it wasnt.

I made a friend amidst my co workers there, Katrina Betina, who invited me up to Riga, Latvia. And from there I took a rattling soviet-era train out to the seaside resort of Jurmala, which was an eerie, out-of-season, frozen, pine-tree-shrouded ghost town.

What you are looking at here is the three different kind of whites; the white of the snow on the sand, the white of the ice-covered sea, and the white of the sky. Is the figure walking on the ice of the sea, or the snow on the beach? I don’t know. There is also heavy vignetting because I bought a cheap compact camera with a crappy plastic lens. We didnt have smart phones in 2005. There is the fourth white of the border, because you had to physically print your photo to see it.
You can also see faint brown rings where my wife spilt coffee on the entire pack of photos

What you also see here is my sense of wonder at the edge of nowhere, the 400 000 square miles of frozen Baltic Sea, the history of an obscure country that had been overrun by Nazis and then Communists, where many ordinary people had, and still, suffered pain, fear and poverty unlike anything most of us have ever known.

And you see the sense of being totally alone and a bit lost and thrilled at the prospect of having almost no money and no one in the absolute middle of nowhere. The figure in the picture is like a projection of my loneliness, but also of that determination in all of us to find a way to get through life, and to find whatever joy and beauty and adventure we can.

And I did find a way. A few days after this, lost and bored on a freezing snowy Saturday afternoon back in Lithuania, I wandered into the local art centre in Vilnius and caught a Jonas Mekas film, a piece of 1960s experimentalism where the narrator intoned “Stop trying, stop trying”

I came out of that cinema, looked up to the sky, and from that moment onwards, life was never that bleak again. My career slowly took new twists and turns, I started to get more and more foreign trips and more fuflfilling shoots, my wife’s career also started to flourish, my kids grew up beautifully, life literally got gradually better and better. Stop trying. Look up. Embrace the cold and the dark. It will pass.