Film: Single Use Only by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

This piece started with the music, composed and produced by Patrick Wray at the start of 2023. It seemed a little sci-fi to me. Also it conjured for me a sense of Elsewhere, coincidentally the name of this journal, a place other than here. I thought about the places which evoked the early series Star Trek technicolour aesthetic and for me and these were definitely fairgrounds and seaside resorts. These spaces do have out-of-season periods too where the atmosphere changes.

The photographs are from Blackpool, Llandudno, and Sheffield and were all taken by me during the summer and autumn of 2022.

Last year I posted a picture of a sock I was knitting on Twitter and someone asked if I would photograph the sock turned inside out so they could see how I had constructed it. I felt like that was a really personal request, unseemly almost, like being asked to undress, and I resisted. Here I wanted to show some of these images inside out, from behind, as a kind of concession to the potential curiosity about the process, even though you never asked for it.

This is a companion piece to Surprise View.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Film: Surprise View by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

By Sarah Alwin:

When I come here it is not the quiet of the landscape that I experience but the residual resonances of the city which unsettle my head and my heart. It is a place of outlandishness and of natural and stinging beauty. Its impertinence is overwhelming. This space is full of busyness and clarity and colour. 

My friend Patrick Wray made the music for this piece, knowing that there was noise and strangeness in this. His music glues this work together.

I took these photographs from the end of 2019 to the start of 2023 at Surprise View, a ten minute drive from my home in Sheffield. I filtered the digital images with my printer and scanner and by stitching into them. What used to be a source of frustration (my beleaguered printer running out of ink) has become, for me, a new way of seeing this beloved place.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Photo Essay: A Portrait of the Yonne, by Rafael Quesada

By Rafael Quesada:

In the north of France, the Yonne river flows west of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region. For over 8 years I made the journey to a small village that sits upon its river bank, Villiers-sur-Yonne.

Villiers is a commune in the Nièvre department and is home to no more than 270 inhabitants. Within the village, you will find no shops, no bars, and not even a doctor. You’ll be surrounded only by silence and the local church, of course. It’s one of many small time-capsuled oases that follows the river along its way.

This series is not about the river, but about what surrounds it. It looks at the beauty of abandonment, the magic of solitude, and the scars that time leaves on nature and human life. A collection of postcards remembering the Yonne.

Rafael Quesada is a Spanish self-taught photographer and professional designer currently living and working in The Netherlands. Moved by the urban environments and forms of landscapes, his photography is mainly focus on personal topics and explorations of the relationship with his surroundings.

Photo Essay: Fancy Hill, by Rob McDonald

by Rob McDonald:

Though I have lived here thirty years, I have never felt settled in Southwest Virginia. It’s a dramatically beautiful place, the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but my home, where my sensibilities were formed, will always be the sandy coastal plains of South Carolina. Winding roads and deep-green hollows may appear picturesque in some light, but for someone like me, they mostly feel claustrophobic, isolating, unsettling. Whenever my wife, driving to the store in our first months living here, would round a curve and mistake a distant mountain range for a looming storm, I understood.

There’s one spot nearby that has always felt different, however. I noticed it when I visited for the job interview that brought me to the area in 1992, and I have indulged something close to an obsession with it ever since.  Fancy Hill, as it is known, is listed on the Register of Historic Places because of its inclusion in a group of important 19th-century farms known collectively the “Seven Hills of Rockbridge County.” A roadside marker noting its prominence focuses on the main house, a three-story treasure of 18th-century Federal architecture. But what I love is the field: a 21-acre parcel that rolls beautifully down from the house, then up and off toward a high horizon.

Records suggest the topography is virtually unchanged from when Fancy Hill was claimed, mapped, and cleared by Anglo settlers of the region more than two hundred years ago. In this otherwise craggy valley, it’s an especially open and stirring expanse.  From various points outside the post-and-wire boundary fence, the entire landscape is visible, swelling, stretching and dipping, displaying itself. It undulates, almost musically. I have studied it in different seasons and times of day. I believe I could sketch its contours with my eyes closed.  

One day, I looked up the name of the farm’s current owner and called to explain that I wanted to walk out into the field with my camera, to explore a place I’d thought about and imagined for so long. He was receptive, even understanding. He’d inherited the land and decided to protect it with a conservation easement so, unlike adjacent farms of similar beauty that have been subdivided into mini-estates for the new country gentry, it can never be developed. The whole parcel was leased for hay-making, keeping it arable, but I had permission to come and go as I wished.

With that opening, I spent whole mornings and afternoons traipsing up, down, and across Fancy Hill, making photographs in an attempt to represent the experience.  In the process, I learned some things that had been imperceptible from the periphery.

I found very quickly, for example, that the lay of the land at Fancy Hill is neither as gentle nor as comprehensible as it appears. There are demanding grades and dramatic drops. You walk a distance and grow breathless. There are spots where the rest of the world disappears and you’re upright in a cradle of earth, with only the sky for orientation.  

Also, the ground is surprisingly rocky, sheer stone in spots. The vegetation, a uniform and mesmerizing seasonal green or gold from the fence line, is often a frustrating tangle of grasses, weeds, and briars underfoot.  Walking unsettles all manner of flying, hopping, and crawling creatures, some seen, some heard and reasonably surmised. Droppings and tracks suggest regular visitors to a stream that originates in a cinderblock well-house, runs a bit, then disappears.

Another note:  There’s a stand of trees along the high north boundary that I’d not taken into account in all my years of looking from the fence. My eye had always stopped where the grasses end, but right there stands a broad thicket with impressive oaks that must have been seedlings when Fancy Hill was established.  

I discovered that the finest view of the property is under that tree line. Each peak and trough of the landscape is visible, where it originates and how it plays out.  Mirroring the view from below, the wide field appears to flow outward and down toward the enormous main house, which from that spot looks for all the world like a miniature version of itself.

The perspective is clarifying, like the view from a watch tower.

Fancy Hill, it turns out, is most beautiful in context of this whole place, encircled, defined, and clarified by a dark line running in the distance—not a storm, but the ancient rambling range of the Blue Ridge.

***

Rob McDonald is a native of South Carolina and lived in both Tennessee and Texas before moving to Virginia in 1992. He was awarded a Professional Fellowship (Photography) from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2019-2020 and was a residential fellow in the Visual Arts at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2013. Find him online at robmcdonaldphotography.com. Connect with him on Twitter at @RobMcDonaldVA.

A Plot of Land

By Dermot O’Sullivan:

In a suburb somewhere in Dublin, swarms of pebble-dashed houses clamour silently about the fringes of an oblong patch of land. Long ago, this plot was just one of the countless green fields that mantled the foothills of the mountains. Then it was the last one, lost among the new grey sprawl. Finally, it was flooded with cement and cinder blocks. 

For many years after this, a dairy and the HB factory coexisted here in convenient symbiosis. Their combined workforce was sufficiently large to make driveway blockage an issue for the locals, even though most of the employees walked to work from the nearby council estates. After bouts of letter writing and public representation, an overflow car park was built and peace returned to the cul-de-sacs.    

Then the dairy was shut down and demolished. The rubble was piled in heaps at one end of the flat wasteland and, within a week, the travellers had moved in. Bikes were stolen. Litter and faeces accumulated. Somebody’s son was struck on the cheek with a broken hula-hoop. In short, havoc was unleashed. Letters were written, words were exchanged and the inaugural residents’ association meeting was conducted in the school sports hall. Relief and disappointment mingled when the travellers left without warning one rainy Tuesday morning.

To prevent a repeat, the council constructed a pathetically low wall all around the site and so facilitated its transformation into a hang-out spot for local teenagers. The emerging generation drunk, smoked and fucked themselves through adolescence amid the tangled weeds and shattered masonry. Slugs nested in the slowly rusting cider cans. Cracks in the concrete of the former dairy floor collected a bedding of stained cigarettes butts. Within a couple of years, parts were totally overgrown and the drone of insects in the summer was loud enough to drown out the endless hum of suburban traffic. The overflow car park was decommissioned: its entrance was bricked up and the painted white lines began to dissolve slowly into the tarmac.

During these few years, the HB factory limped on partnerless until it too was shut and flattened. The whole site was levelled and the weeds and beer cans were swept away. The walls were raised and a security guard was appointed, fully equipped with a Beware of Dogs sign though not with any actual dogs. Baked teenagers gazing at headless dolls or rusted bicycles left by the travellers, and drunken ones rolling on the ground blocking orifices, were no longer tolerated. The land was worth something now and something was going to happen.  Then it happened: a block of retail units was built. Then a block of stylish apartments. A giant electrical goods store opened. A second block of apartments was planned. Then the calendar rolled on and hit 2—0—0—8.

The other retail units are still vacant: their big bellies of glass hold gloomy interiors strewn with pallets and plastic sheeting. The cement dust has settled in deep undisturbed drifts. Not one of the apartments has sold. Their silent rooms are full of unconnected bathtubs and unused floor tiles. Their unpainted grey windowsills are speckled with pigeon droppings. Beads of damp sweat gather in the high corners.

The security guard still sits in his little box, but soon he too will have to go. Perhaps, at the same time, the apartments will be boarded up or even torn down. Or perhaps not. In any case, it seems likely that one day the empty space will return and sober and stupefied brains alike will stare at the rubble or scaffolding or whatever it is that comes next.        

***

Dermot O'Sullivan is an Irish writer whose work has been published in various journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Causeway/Cabhsair, The Dalhousie Review and Fence. He currently lives in Brazil, where he recently had his first full-length play produced.

Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

Five Questions for… Igor Tereshkov

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

By Sara Bellini 

Igor Tereshkov refers to one of his works as “a visual anthropological exploration”, and no label would fit more suitably. Non-places, surveillance, post-soviet urbanism, the interrelation of natural and built environment are among the themes he delves into in a variety of medium spanning from documentary photography to visual art to performance.. 

His latest project consists of extra large cyanotypes examining our relationship with nature and waste. The idea came to him a few years ago when he was collecting plastic litter near water zones with Greenpeace. “It’s in some way a homage to Anna Atkins’s work about diversity of algae and in another way a documentation and didactic enumeration cataloguing the types and ways of using plastic in our everyday life.” 

The next step in the process consists in exposing the images of the discarded plastic on the leaves from the very bushes and trees where he had found them. “All this in order to convey an idea that plastic is made, not grown [...] This is kind of a remake to the slogan of the famous ketchup, which claims that it is grown, not made, which can’t be said about the plastic bottle in which it’s often packed - as well as many other products”. 

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

Experimental photographic techniques and the anthropocene are recurring elements in Igor’s creative practice. In 2018/2019 he went to Western Siberia to document the environmental destruction caused by petrol extraction from oil companies in the region inhabited by the Kanthy people. 

The result is a collection of beautiful yet eerie black and white shots covered in dark stains, obtained by developing the film in water containing traces of oil he had previously bottled on the spot. The oil randomly corrodes the film gelatin, in the same way it damages the land, endangering the Indigenous People that had been living there for centuries. By mixing water with oil in the development stage, Igor literally allows the subject to become part of the creative process.

To accompany this interview, Elsewhere is publishing previously unseen pictures Igor took on a trip from Poland to Germany two years ago. “I had two rolls of film and a bottle of wine, later I soaked the exposed film in leftovers of wine and called this series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup... Later I lost the film in the lab and all I have is just these forgotten scans.”

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

What does home mean to you?

Home for me is usually a place to regenerate and to find balance so, more often than not, for me it’s more likely not a place but a process. And of course, speaking of home, I always want to mean safety, clarity and love. I have a firm feeling that I haven’t found yet my home at 100%,  rather a place for a respite.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I think it’s Ai-Petri, the peak of Mount St. Peter in Crimea. It’s not so big or world famous but I’ve spent many summers there during my childhood. With the whole family we would ride on a car across the peninsula and the Ai-Petri was always a special place. Every time I watch an old VHS family record it always makes me feel a special connection to that place and my childhood.

What is beyond your front door?

Four stair steps and a blue spruce, after ten footsteps there is a hammock and after twenty more footsteps a large and old spruce that would take three or four people to embrace completely. For the past three years I’ve been living in the Moscow exurb in my old family dacha.

What place would you most like to visit?

I hope one day I’ll have an opportunity to visit California.

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

Right now I’m reading Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience by Alexander Etkind , watching the new season of The Walking Dead and listening mostly to Tycho while running.

From the series Berlin - Bydgoszcz Soup

Photo Essay: Notes from the Mediterranean, by Rafael Quesada

By Rafael Quesada:

In the south of Spain overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a small village by the name of Aguadulce is where I grew up. Much like the neighbouring villages along the coastline it was filled with river beds as dry as the desert, structures long abandoned, exotic palm trees, slow sunsets and late summers of emptiness.

It was 11 years ago when I left home to explore the world. I return yearly to visit my loved ones and I spend my time exploring the neighbouring places of the Mediterranean. Discovering them is hauntingly familiar to me as I feel the time go by, and yet see the places around me staying eerily the same.

Notes from the Mediterranean is a personal exploration of a place that used to be my only home. A return to fond memories and a creation of new ones.

Rafael Quesada is a Spanish self-taught photographer and professional designer currently living and working in The Netherlands. Moved by the urban environments and forms of landscapes, his photography is mainly focus on personal topics and explorations of the relationship with his surroundings.