Brass & Mahogany

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I'm trying to ignore the minor tempest battering Fairview Heights currently [Storm Amy: a bit of an anodyne moniker, if you ask me], and so have contented myself with digging out some leftovers from the freezer - a couple of curries, in fact - plopping them on a low heat to defrost, and satisfy myself with some excellent slow TV from just over fifty years ago. A time when we had but three TV channels; two of them state-run. The piece I've been watching is a short documentary about the long-established English camera maker, Gandolfi [Brothers]. When I was at art school during the seventies, in particular after I had decided finally to throw in my lot with photography as a work medium, the name Gandolfi was held in awe, nay reverence, by my peers. A small London manufacture based in Peckham Rye, Louis Gandolfi started making fine cameras in 1885. They continued producing these works of functional art and craftsmanship until 2017, although the last of the Gandolfis themselves died in 1993. Watch this BBC documentary from 1974, not only to gain insight into a lost world of hand-crafted tools, but also to take linear time over a piece of slow TV, the likes of which is sadly unknown to the vast majority of us today. Everything about this is about taking time: from the making of the cameras themselves, to the slow methodology of large-format film photography, to the style of documentary recording it all. Time to think. Time to absorb. Time to reflect: just time...

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