His mother remained silent as he spoke.  Her eyes fixed on the faded patterned plastic table cloth below her that her elbows ruffled as they rested upon.  In contrast, he with head upright and eyes fixed upon the camera; described how his son, and her grandson, had made his choice and had paid for it.  He was shot and killed: and left a teenager forever more.

I, like the reporter, perhaps had expected his pause to be followed by the gradual secretion of tears; but his eyes remained dry and still. The photograph below, is one taken by Vanley Burke in Handsworth, Birmingham in the early 1970’s; and is one of the photographs that etched itself upon my psyche.  This image, as well as a body of work entitled ‘Born to work’ by the photographer Nick Hedges made me want to take photographs seriously.

It would then, be a strange quirk of fate, that a few years ago now I would find myself in a room with Vanley and with the boy from that photograph, who now as a grown man, was being filmed for a news segment by Newsnight as he spoke of how his son had been shot and killed in a gang related murder.

The strange twists of life are not ours to control, which is why perhaps that the photograph affords us with such solace.  As of course, it is so much easier for us to look back at the preserved certainties of our past than at a future beyond the hands of our making.

Boy with flag. Copyright Vanley Burke. Circa 1970

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Life and all its wondrous subtlety, sometimes denies its true presence to me; blinded as I am by the over-riding fact that we are born…that we live….and that we die.

This journey, this life’s journey…as a New Yorker in London once said to me…” is what it is”.  Perhaps not Sartrean in its revelatory proportions - but her stoic sense of determinism - is of course true nonetheless.  It is what is.

Perhaps you’re career arc may not be as you wish…or indeed may have already peaked.  Or that your work may not be appreciated or even appear upon the radars of the glorious and the good….thee O’ gracious gatekeepers.

It is what it is. When publishers turn down your worthy tome of ‘social concern’  and then instead publish one where someone photographs portraits of people wearing photocopied cat masks.

It is what it is. That it is impossible not to judge ourselves against the success of others and that no matter how well things may have been or is going….it is never enough as the unquenched artistic thought that will elevate you…your practice and your esteem…is alas always unquenched.  It is what is.

When you trawl though Google-Analytics and peruse how many people came to your website on a given day.  This is it by the way;  www.writtenbylight.com    writtenby-shite…..(as a friend recently remarked)….and see that only two people… in the whole world wide web could be arsed to have a look at your work - and then only for 20 seconds each.

Perhaps…as another American once said…alas not to me…is that it’s” sons of bitches like me who are the problem”.  The never happy, ‘socially concerned’ melancholy half-empty glassers who look for failure before it’s calling card is presented…and who are never content with anything (or anyone) and who are always a day away from where they want to be.

This meandering journey of certainty of ours comes clothed, as it is, in the multi-coloured robes of loss and of love - and of all of the other chromatic inflections in between from brightness to darkness.

Yet, regardless of the route we take, upon our odyssey through light; within this journey…this certain journey;  it takes us all to the place where Leonard Freed remarked will be a place ultimately feared by us all…

….the place where there are no more photographs.

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Richard & Tumi © A.Jackson 2009

This is just a photograph of two friends I haven’t seen for a while.  Richard and Tumi, somewhere in Cape Town in 2006/7.  At the time I thought the image, for my work,  was too obvious.  Too obvious an image…too much of a cliché for a work that was exploring the subtle ambiguities found within the spaces of the city.

A white man and a black woman embracing in South Africa.  But in hindsight, why should an image of a couple in love be seen as obvious?  A couple unaware of the camera, or indeed the world at that moment?Maybe I didn’t choose it at the time because I didn’t consider it strong enough…and indeed what has made the image work for me has been the distance of time between myself, the image and people who I miss.

I shot 1,500 frames during my stay in the city and only selected 42 to be printed…it makes me wonder what other stories are in the remaining images.

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