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So last week we were in Portugal shooting for the new Inntravel campaign. The concept is Slow: Slow as in the state of mind, rather than a physical notion of speed (though we are talking walking and cycling holidays so there is some degree of travelling slowly)... I have to say I think it was one of the most enjoyable and productive shoots I've ever done. I can think of only one that comes close -- for Martell cognac a decade ago now, which was similar in spirit and substance perhaps. 

I'm a big fan of spontaneity on shoots. As much as I appreciate the need for forward-planning, contingency, and having a shot-list etc etc, I do like having the freedom to stop the car and shoot as and when it feels right to do so. It's a shadow (see what I'm doing here?) of the old Cliff Richard thing -- a "hey let's do the show here!" (prize for the first person who knows which film that came from -- I don't think it's Summer Holiday?) -- (and just to clarify: no, I am no fan of Surcliff at all! but I do remember watching said sad films on supposedly balmy, er, summer holidays...) (displacement theory: watching a film about upright youths having virginal fun in the sun and singing about it in cardigans (perhaps The Housemartins watched these films at the same time in Hull?) whilst I was slouched on a corduroy sofa in front of a telly in a nondescript house on an anywhere housing estate outside York)...where was I? Being spontaneous, yes. That sense of turning left instead of right, seeing what's there. 

Case in point I guess, this shoot in Portugal. We were fortunate (actually I planned it that way: planned spontaneity) to have a small team (four of us) and a clear brief -- to capture the moments of delight, those instances when Stuff Makes Sense. 

Wow. From somewhere I am reminded just now of a poem by, I think it was, Robert Browning that we studied at school --- about seeing things anew. Never much cared for Browning to be honest but will try and find it.

What is interesting about the idea of advertising photography is that most of it is completely false of course. There was a hoo-hah about (I think) L'Oreal airbrushing the cheeks of such and such an A-lister to make the product look more effective. I think you'll find most of advertising is based on trying to make the product look more effective than the next. Shinier. Happier. Whiter. Faster. Clearer. Bigger. Better.

Well I like to step away from that kind of thing -- I like to find out the truth about something and make it the hero, the focus of the idea, rather than a claim. Call me old fashioned.

The truth in Inntravel's case was the authentic experience -- which sounds a clumsy way of referring to that moment which makes something a memory as against any one of the millions of moments that pass us by and are forgotten. 

Why does some stuff in life "stick" and some not?

It's a theme I keep coming back to: the moment after the shutter went click. We take photographs (too many I think sometimes: do all those tourists snapping away at EVERYTHING and NOTHING really ever take the time to look at their shots? Does all that home video in the clearest most vivid HD ever truly ever get watched?), but why? As a keepsake. A proof of Being There? Being Here? Being?

We took an awful lot of photographs in Portugal. And shot an awful lot of clearest most vivid HD video too. I've just spent the past hour reviewing the shots -- some of them at any rate -- and already it feels like an age ago.

A different time. A different place.

But there I am. Camera in hand, striding across the wastelands of some olive grove in some place I shall never in all likelihood ever return to, footprints left in the sand/dirt. A photograph proof I was there. Me and my shadow. Walking slowly looking for the next shot. The next memory. After the shutter went click.

 

I have a line for the beginning of the book I am writing, I say a line rather than the line because these things are forever changing in the process of creation until they fix in a shape that feels comfortable, which is "We all of us have our totems. Hers was the windmill." The windmill in question is not far from the village of Appleton Roebuck (Lat: 53:52:31.59N, Long: 1:10:33.36W)  which sits just off the A64 between Tadcaster and York. It's the area I grew up in: a wide flat plain of agricultural land, the kind Millet painted, with only the taller groups of beech, birch and lime trees and church spires breaking the skyline under such immense rolling clouds. Grey roads line across the fields in straight directions linking farm to village, and looping strings of telegraph poles seem to bind the place together loosely.

You can, if you're quick enough and know when to look, see the windmill from the window of a train, to the right hand side in the direction of York. It rises from a field, above a small pond, beside the road that leads to Appleton. Blink and you'd miss it. It's a derelict brick built windmill in a wheatfield. But it is a point of gravity around which the story I am writing slowly swirls, the events and characters unaware of its magnetic pull, its position at the centre of the loosely bound events that occur over a number of years.

I say the windmill was her totem, in truth I suppose, it is mine also. Not having lived in the Vale of York for something like 30 years, it has been a peculiar mix of nostalgia and objectivity to be a relatively frequent visitor to those parts once more. We have a client based near Castle Howard, and meetings usually necessitate an overnight stay in York. OK, they probably don't actually, but I will seize the opportunity to be in the place I called home while I was between the ages of seven and 18.

The view of the windmill from the train carriage is a sign I am back. A marker. The fact that it has remained unchanged over the years while I have aged disproportinately against it provides a rule -- a measure -- of invisible change, against which the past seems, as with the characters in the long-promsied book, to be among the present. 

This was brought home in a rather alarming way last year when I stopped off at the windmill on my way back down from a shoot up in Newcastle. 

I had my iPhone with me and, as I tend to these days, snapped off a series of shots using the wonderful Hipstamatic app. Here are a few of them:

 

I love the way the Hipsta filters replicate the instamatic camera I used ot carry round with me as a boy, as I cycled the back lanes of the Vale of York mapping out the village forms for my Geography A level assignment.

We're using the Hipsta thing for the shoot in Portugal next week -- amazing how one used to have to hire photographers and expenisve cameras, now we can travel with nothing more than an iPhone and an HD GoPro and will be able to get good enough quality imagery for the entire campaign (in theory). But I shall save my rant on the pros and cons of the democratisation of technology for another post sometime. Bet you can't wait.

Back to the windmill. I moved house last February. Decided to have a clear out of boxes that had been in the loft for years. Boxes that had been in numerous lofts over numerous years and never once opened or explored. What could possibly be in them that I felt I must drag around with me all my life? Nothing that important or needed as I hadn't used or looked at these things for something like 20 years.

In one such box I found a pile of old letters to friends, girlfriends and bad sixthform poetry, news clippings that must have meant something at the time. And a plastic bag full of photo-wallets -- from the days when you had to send your films away for two to three weeks to get them developed. Among these wallets I found pictures taken on the old instamtic of the Geography field trip to Kettlewell, shots of Castle Howard, friends who have long since lost their names... and these: from 1981.

The fact that I took the exact same photographs, unknowingly, un-selfconsciously, magnetically, yet 30 years apart is quite startling. Or proof that one's sense of aesthetic never changes. We all have our totems.

 

Perhaps it was, truly (if I am to be honest with myself), more of the case that I would continue to have lessons with a certain girl who shall remain nameless, rather than any academic prowess, but Geography was always my favourite class: through both O (yes, that dates me) and A levels. And always, the lure of The Field Trip.

From odd afternoons scrutinising the local landscapes of North Yorkshire -- oh! the hanging valleys, glacial erratics, and alluvial flood plains -- to tracing the people and maths mash-up of Christaller's Central Place Theory in and around the Leeds conurbation... the sneaky pint at a back-street pub and potted-meat sandwiches eaten out of tin foil on Brimham Rocks... there was nothing quite like the Geography Field Trip. The expectation and anticipation. The butterflies.

The reward for several terms worth of map-referencing and endless study of the Australian coal industry was the week-long trip to Kettlewell, which took place -- for me -- in March 1982. For many of us it was the first full week away from our parents, and if you add in the heady cocktail of hormones and cheap cider, it's not too much of a push to recognise it as one of defining moments of my adolescence. Aside form all the bum-fluff stuff about Growing Up however, some other, equally important, memories remain which, over the rather rambling course of the past thirty years, have wound themselves into my DNA to the extent I cannot now recall a time when these truths which I hold to be self-evident, were not "me".

Kettlewell sits plum in the Yorkshire Dales. I haven't been there since, so I have no idea if it has changed much -- probably a few more coffee shops and outdoorsy/bike rentals places I'd guess -- but I assume it hasn't. We were camped in the Outward Bounds centre -- "the out of bounds" we oh so amusingly labelled it -- and were ferried hither and thither by mini-bus. Up a hill to study the watershed one day, following the old lime industry's boom and decay the next. We were taken pot-holing -- which has left an indelible mark upon my soul -- and were allowed to swim in the river on one surprisingly warm afternoon, it was March don't forget. Even thinking about that now it feels, sounds, like a different life. 

But there is one photograph I have -- mentally and physically -- that left its mark in more ways than one. It's nothing spectacular, but somehow quite important to me. We were on a mountain-side, I cannot recall eactly why now, digging down a small cross-section of earth... through the moss and sod, mud and scree... until we found the remains of some trees which couldn't, shouldn't, possibly have existed on that desolate hillside. But the suggestion was clear: there was a time when the landscape, the environment and climate, were very different froom that we were experiencing in our present. I think it was the first time I ever had a sense of vertigo -- in the sense of Time, rather than physical.

This little experience led me into studying archaeology at university (until I realised the cool kids did English, and changed) -- and that sense of vertigo has never left me. It's a feeling I get from time to time from the smallest things. That Proustian madeleine moment. Old watches and coins. Worn steps. Hand-rails. The unseen witnesses of time, memory and people. Rooms.

But back to the field trip. That thrill and excitement continues, too. No more so than when I am preparing for a shoot, as I am now. Next week, our Art Director and myself are flying out to Portugal (surprise, surprise it's the Alentejo) to shoot material for our new campaign for Inntravel. It's a consciously lo-fi shoot. A bit old school you could say. We're shooting on film using a Holga, and yesterday I had to re-learn how to load a camera), but in these HD times we're also taking a GoPro Hero and an Olympus PEN, as well as using our iPhones for Hispstamatics...

We have an itinerary. We have a fixer. We have our potted-meat sandwiches.

And I have those little butterflies. 

The other thing I remember very clearly about that field trip to Kettlewell: we were on our way back to Tadcaster when the news came on the radio that the Argentinian army had invaded somewhere called The Falklands. 

That's in Scotland isn't it? said the girl who shall remain nameless.