- Michael Cole: Credit Due

I used to be a sports photographer. In those days in order to ‘protect’ the profession you needed not only to be a member of the NUJ (which to qualify for this membership, you needed to prove that you earner over 70 odd per cent of your income form journalism) you also needed to join the PSPA, the Professional Sports Photographers’ Association, where you had to prove that 90 per cent of your income derived from sports photography. Once these criteria were met you could be sure that though we were wide-ranging in the kinds of work we did and markets we served, and certainly in terms of personality all human-kind was represented, we were nonetheless conjoined and initiated in similar arts and practices which meant that we actually had quite a bit in common. So there was that mixture of sharing similar tools and setting about similar tasks with the richness which came from the variety of personalities who were involved.

I don’t know how all this works or fits together today, but a leading luminary in the PSPA and an elder statesman in the sports photographic world, George Herringshaw seems to trying to pull together a notion of this brother-(and some sister-)hood. So many practitioners have come and gone over the decades and many more have retired, just as much as many newbies have entered the fray. Merely by sending out block emails to all current and past members, George has been keeping us up to date with some of the passing of past personnel and what has been going on for others.

It was in this spirit that I leapt at the idea of doing an interview with a very dear friend of mine and stalwart tennis photographer, Michael Cole, who had notched up his 40^th consecutive Wimbledon last year. Although Michael has been a constant on the tennis circuit over the years, not just at Wimbledon but also as a regular at the French Open, the US Open, the Lipton (now Sony Ericsson) Florida and the occasional Italian Open amongst others, many of the younger generation may not have clocked who he is and just what he has achieved. What a great excuse to pop down to Beckenham and spend some time with him, mess around with a camera body he adores and which I had never previously got on with - the Canon 5D - and take a snap of him with it. Here is the result of that encounter...

Last year Michael Cole notched up his 40th consecutive Wimbledon. In May he will add the French Open to that formidable achievement – and he doesn’t look a day over 41. He can also add 20 Miamis and 20 New Yorks to that tally too, but he is very much synonymous with Wimbledon an inherited trait from his dad Arthur who had been taking pictures there for some 40 years. On his first visit, he photographed the marathon match between Gozales and Pasarell. The general advice from his dad was merely to ‘look for anything unusual’ and to try to, “Get the player diving - going for the ball”. Apart from those pointers he left Michael to his own devices – basically just to get around the courts and get on with it. Now he has accumulated images of all the major – and quite a few of the minor - players and more than a fair share of the decisive moments across six decades if you include Arthur’s work.

Turning to equipment and stock over the years, in 1969 he used a Pentax SV with a manual shut down 135mm F2.8 Tamron lens. This was perfectly adequate at the time for volleys from the side of court. In the Gonzales-Pasarell match, for some reason, he ended up using a Rolleiflex - which he found awkward and clumsy for tennis - loaded with Agfapan 1000 because of the fading and appalling light.

The Pentax was replaced by a Nikon F with noisy motordrive attached. Michael still has a lot of his old cameras, including the Pentax and Nikon F. Being a bit of a sentimentalist he finds it difficult to part with certain things - this amazingly includes his old school blazer, cap and tie as well as a pair of swimming trunks - all from the 50's! He rates the legendary Nikon F as the toughest body of them all - built to last, he reckons. The 180mm F2.8 was predominantly used courtside as well as sometimes the Novoflex but he never really got to grips with that squeeze-trigger focussing. A while later, he acquired a 400mm F5.6 Nikkor lens - a slow lens but remembering he was shooting predominantly b&w at this time this wasn't too much of an issue. In those days he never used zoom lenses because they were 'soft' compared to primes. The Nikon F was superseded by the F2 to be followed by the F3 and the 400mm F5.6 was upgraded to the F3.5. 1991 saw Michael switching to Canon acquiring an EOS 1 with a 200mm F1.8 with both the 1.4x & 2x converters. Later he added a 500mm F4.5 which was his favourite lens for down-court and was razor sharp. He got Canon to change the polarity on his lenses because he had got so used to the Nikon direction. He still uses Canon lenses with reversed (Nikon) polarity today.

Stock wise, the benchmark was Kodachrome 64 because of its well established stability and reliability. He still has some dating back to the early 1950s. However, this is more than a difficult film emulsion to scan these days. Occasionally, he would also use High Speed Ektachrome which gave an overall 'blue' hue in overcast conditions and was also quite grainy but speed was of the essence in such conditions. The emergence of Kodachrome 200 was an interesting innovation with its tight sharp grain texture but somehow it lent itself more to available light portraits rather than to tennis. Kodak gave him several boxes of this to 'test drive' before it went into full production. He also experimented with GAF 500 which was even grainier.

The gear he currently uses for tennis runs to an EOS1D Mk 2 and a 5D along with a 15mm F2.8, a 24-70mm F2.8 zoom - his first ever zoom lens and only purchased a year ago he tells me! -the trusty old 200mm F1.8 and a 400mm F4.

Throughout his career, and it is by no means over yet, he has followed his dad’s early advice and sought out the unusual. In fact that is very much a hallmark of his work and approach. In 1994, Tennis Week magazine in New York voted him the Best Tennis Photographer in the World. Michael was humbled by this and was quick to point out that this was the opinion of one tennis magazine's findings. In the early ‘80s, he acknowledges a debt to Racquet magazine in New York and Tennis Revue in Germany both of whom enthusiastically gave him a platform for what he calls his ‘details photography’, often publishing his interpretations full-page over a number of years. This took him away from merely supplying backhands and forehands month in month out. Before 1979/80 how many other tennis photographers were taking these kind of shots on the tennis courts and getting them published regularly? Michael was a creative innovator and still has the appetite to continue that tradition.

As far as meeting client expectations is concerned, it has never been an issue for him: editors either liked or needed his pictures or they didn’t. Michael is of the opinion that every photographer has his own approach to a subject and to be influenced to stray from that path is not something he would contemplate.

In terms of the competitor environment over the years, it is certainly true that more competition means fewer opportunities to sell these specialised images but Michael reckons competition is healthy. In such a specialised market, he perceives that because of the deals being done, there is a significant number of great photos out there which never get to be published where they should be. Driven by cost, publishers seem to be in favour of all in deals at the best price rather than the quality of images supplied. Such deals, he feels, mean that really creative pictures are no longer sought after and published on merit.

When not photographing tennis Michael likes to get involved with photographing classic and sports cars which involves going to meetings and events such as Goodwood and Brands Hatch. E-type magazine regularly use his pictures on their covers. Recently, Michael did a feature on stripping the body of his own car, a specialised task away from photography which he undertook himself.

He also loves his stock photography too and has a good deal of travel photos in his collection. His images of Venice are quite stunning and have been widely used in travel magazines and in a series of greetings cards and even by the National Trust to promote music festivals in England.

He is not just first and foremost a photographer then a tennis or sports buff. He is entirely and exclusively a photographer, tennis happens to be both his canvass and palette. Had he not have turned up to Wimbledon all those years ago he would quite probably followed a fine art route having spent five years training at Beckenham School of Art and later at The Ravensbourne College of Art & Design.

What a loss this would have been to tennis photography and tennis photographers, because as anyone who knows him will agree, he is so easy to be around. Such talent with such modesty, too.

Desert Island Questions & Mikey’s Answers

Q: Favourite piece of kit of all time?

A: The Canon 5D is best digital body I've ever owned/used to date. The 500/4.5 was best long lens ever owned/used.

Q: Favourite tournament?

A: French Open. Love the ambience, the spectators, the fashion and the glamour and the late afternoon/early evening light - for those reasons it's the best Grand Slam for me.

Q: Favourite players to photograph?

A: Connors, Mac, Borg, Nastase spring to mind immediately because of the many pictures they "gave me". I'm almost grateful to them for being around competing when I was around working and I count myself lucky to have been on court to photograph them for so many years. Charismatic characters all of them.

Q: Favourite meal?

A: Scallops in their shells.

Q: Favourite drink?

A: Champagne but dry sparkling cider is a good substitute. The occasional Sussex real ale, too.

Q: Favourite music?

A: The Stones, Chuck Berry, Dylan (timeless - I get into Dylan every so often on a regular basis - love the lyrics and the monotony of the music - Gawd that dates me! Trad jazz and Chopin piano music too.

Q: Favourite movie?

A: Carve Her Name with Pride.

Q: Favourite photographer?

Ernst Haas. I'd never heard of him until I was on a Marlboro shoot in the mid 80's and one of the cowboys showed me one of his books and I was just totally inspired - the images excited me. I was and still am passionate about his work.

Q: Favourite comedy?

A: John Cleese especially in Fawlty Towers. John Shuttleworth, too, but that is almost documentary!

- Parinirvana Day 2010

Talk given at Birmingham Buddhist Centre

I’m just going to share some reflections around death and becoming upon Parinirvana Day. Parinirvana literally means ‘liberation without remainder’ and refers to the Buddha’s physical death. Here, I am making a few connections which have evolved over time and which have begun to make sense to me, but they are neither polished nor finished. It’s a bit like an ad hoc bouquet of different flowers. Some of them may work well together others may clash in the context of the company they keep. So these are just a few ideas fuelled by feelings born out of experience.

In two days time my dad, Jim, will have been dead 28 years. He was just about the same age as I am now. I have lost other relatives and dear friends in that time (and before) but Dad’s loss was the most painful. He was an electrician, lived in a council flat and was proud of the fact that he had never read a book. Nonetheless, he supported me unreservedly through the annealing of adolescence, through my various changes in direction which saw me occupying spaces he had never dreamed of. Likewise, my brother, Stuart, nine years younger than me and so different, pursued yet other directions and Dad was even handed in his unconditional love of us both. Though I have long since let Dad go, I have recently been working through some unfinished business in my grief which came up following a retreat at Padmaloka two weeks ago.

Last June I lost a young friend, Anna, a close friend of my daughter Katie. She died after an eight month struggle against cancer at the age of 24. Anna was a beautiful girl, very talented especially musically playing cello and singing in choirs. She read geography and development studies at SOAS, loved Africa and volunteered her time helping refugees in this country. There was a documentary – Into That Good Night - just after Christmas on Channel 4 which featured her hospice, St Christopher’s, London. In the context of an art session exploring identity, she talked very movingly about her illness and its trajectory. Prompted by a question from another patient as to whether she could rationalise her predicament or make sense of it, she reflects beautifully and wisely:

This is my path, this is what has been given me and I just have to keep going. And for me a lot of it is [that] I put on a big brave face because I don’t want any sympathy from anyone. They haven’t done anything wrong to me there’s no reason for anyone to feel sorry for me. [...] For no explainable reason – this is what has been given to me. It makes you a lot more sensitive and aware of things than ever I would have been before and not in a big-headed way. I feel so much more aware of my own strengths. For me, a positive mental attitude is really the only way forward. You can’t think otherwise - because anybody who hasn’t even got cancer or an illness has a chance of dying as much as anyone else has.

Such wisdom, compassion and equanimity in such circumstances and in one so young.

I don't know what happens when people die

Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try,

It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear

That I can't sing -

I can't help listening

For A Dancer, Jackson Browne on Late For The Sky

Death is most people’s biggest fear. It is the greatest of unkowns when we shall die and what happens next. It is that country from whence no traveller has returned with or without an account or set of photos or film, so how can we ‘know’?

Even the Buddha would not be pressed on such matters. To the question

What happens to a Buddha after death?

he would not answer saying that it was undetermined – along with three other questions –

Is the universe finite?

Is the universe eternal?

Is the life force synonymous with the body?

Sangharakshita reminds us (A Survey of Buddhism, pp 100 – 102) that these are questions which are not susceptible to logic. The Buddha refused to answer because such ‘holy’ matters are not dependant on the truth or falsity of any of the four propositions. This does not mean to say that the Buddha did not know the answers, but it does mean they are not open to the discernments of the unenlightened mind.

We are thus encouraged to live with uncertainty regarding our own demise and that of our loved ones.

Yet if we can really start to see ourselves as processes rather than entities with more than a suggestion that we are somehow fixed, then what is it or who is it that dies? We are a conglomeration of cells constantly dying and renewing and becoming. We are composed of elements found outside of us: the earth, water, heat, air, the spaces we fleetingly occupy, our awareness – consciousness itself. All of which are found in other people, other creatures, the whole world around us - and beyond. Bill Bryson (in the modestly entitled A Short History of Nearly Everything) reminds us that we have billions of ‘adams’ - atoms – in each and every one of us that were in Shakespeare. And in everyone else I guess that means. Someone was telling me the other day that the air we are breathing today was breathed in China about 6 or 8 weeks ago – though I guess it depends which way the wind blows.

Even if the ego is somewhat resistant, I like the idea of processes and seeing myself – and others – in terms of component parts. It facilitates a letting go, some kind of renunciation, and easing of possessiveness in terms of me and mine. Which brings me to nearly the end of the puja and the Transference of merit and self-surrender.

Just as the earth and other elements

Are serviceable in many ways

To the infinite number of beings,

Inhabiting limitless space,

So may I become

That which maintains all beings

Situated throughout space,

So long as all have not attained

To peace

The spiritual well-spring which helps nurture and propel this letting go is sraddha. Not just in terms of faith but mainly in terms of trust. It literally refers to where you place your heart, what you put your heart upon. Whether in Pali, saddha, or Sanskrit sraddha, heart also includes mind.

To return to Jackson Browne:

Don't let the uncertainty turn you around

(The world keeps turning around and around)

Go on and make a joyful sound.

Which is precisely what Anna did.

- The eye of the tiger

When I did a marketing course a little while ago, we were told that in a presentation about 93% of communication is non-verbal. People make certain judgments and inferences about you before you open your mouth and regardless what comes out of it irrespective of the slides you may have sweated over in your PowerPoint presentation. There is a fabled practice in the FWBO which I had heard much about but never actually done until last weekend. It is a communication exercise and it was set within the context of spiritual friendship on a retreat entitled ‘Entering the tiger’s cave’. The title refers to a Zen story where human footprints are said be seen leading into the cave but none do seem to come out.

A route into exploring certain aspects of this commitment was afforded through this communication exercise. You work in pairs, ideally with a partner whom you have never met before. The first part of the exercise involves looking in and around each other’s eyes. Then you break off before going back to repeat the exercise this time taking some awareness to being open and letting the other person in and really being willing to enter into this other person’s being. It is striking how much the superficiality of the first encounter is deepened by engagement with these possibilities in the second. Each mini session is about 3 minutes long.

Then one partner chooses a phrase to be repeated and the other partner affirms it by saying ‘Yes’. The phrases on offer (and it is part of the fable that they are usually these) were:

The cow is in the field

Do birds fly?

Water is wet

Flowers grow here

The sky is blue today

Each partner takes it in turn to utter the phrase and to make the affirmation. All the time you are still holding each other with the eyes.

Finally, the phrases are dropped and you go back to just sitting and staring into one another’s eyes.

What is extraordinary is that there is a real sense of knowing this erstwhile stranger that soon builds up as well as a sensitivity to the tone and cadence of the voice. Some affirmations are more gentle or more brusque than others despite the repetition. Something else is communicated beyond the words themselves. It is a stripping bare of communication. It feels as though you have entered the tiger’s cave because you have poured yourself into another being through the pupils and you have let another person in because you opened the door to your own being as wide as possible and you just don't know what will happen. Friendship is thus a risky business and we have to be prepared for anything and for surrendering ourselves completely.

- A step, a stone, a path and a couple of other things

Les Eaux de Mars is an old Georges Moustaki song in the style of a lively bossa nova which starts with the line :

A step, a stone, a path which progresses.

Then goes on to make an arbitrary list of objects, states and attitudes. (The lyrics can be found at http://www.france-jeunes.net/paroles-georges.moustaki-les.eaux.de.mars-2501.htm)

Occasionally I have experimented with this idea photographically, of photographing objects in an uncontaminated way as far as that is possible, neither with the aim nor intention of producing aesthetically pleasing images so much as attempting to grind down the meaning and eliminate extraneous threads of connotation and detonation. Of course it is a vain endeavour because as soon as you commit to any representation or act of communication you effectively lose control of the meanings which may be mined from the utterance. Meaning is in the mind of the beholder. But at least you might be able to park the signifier just a little way off the lawn of Barthes’ notional idea of a degree zero. Odd perhaps for a Buddhist to chase after the integrity of any object being itself a set a processes arising upon conditions in a particular conjuncture at a particular time.

Reading Nagapriya’s book Visions of Mahayana Buddhism, I was very much struck by a quotation where he humself quotes Zhenzie Qingliao quoted in turn by McRae (a bit like opening up Russian dolls!) in Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism,

Without taking a step, you should constantly sit in your room and just forget about the teachings. Be like dried wood, or a stone, or a wall, or a piece of tile, or a pebble.

This is very much in line with the ‘if you see the Buddha on the road, shoot him’ and points towards the fact that the teachings are not the Dharma, practice is: they merely point to the Dharma. Here, nonetheless I stretch out towards a certain purity or integrity in these objects in my mind’s eye much as in the same way as I envisage the segment of tomato in Robbe-Grillet’s description (see the first blog entry October 2009).

- New Word New Way of Seeing – Bokeh in Prime Position

I have recently been tempted away from the use of zoom lenses back to prime. For over a decade I have been happy with the zooms covering 16 – 200 mm in just three cylinders. When I did sports photography, I only ever had primes. Zooms were supposed to have got better, which they did, but recent experience has shown me that the difference is appreciable. Not only that, this crisper way of seeing has sharpened up my practice encouraging me to be less lazy and move about more. There are objective tests for lenses and they tell you quite a bit. What they are silent on is the feel of the lens. Not just in the hand, but the overall quality or qualities which the lens lends to every image.

Prime lenses can be much faster, wider, more available for less light. This alone makes looking through the camera a heightened experience. At wide aperture however, the depth of field is perilously narrow: it is so easy not to hit the spot even with autofocus target areas and motors or for the lens to be distracted by back focus or be drawn to a strong, contrasty pattern in clothing or background. Such lenses are appreciably brighter. In old money, back in the day of wet processing, one used to talk about acutance which I always understood as the apparent edge sharpness around a subject; something to do with the kind of contrast you got with a certain time/dilution and chemical adjustment. In other words, something you got out of the processing rather than the lens itself. With the lenses I have just got, this acutance seems to be imprinted their DNA. Then there is resolution something which wet processing also could also enhance but which mainly inheres in the quality of the lens: the ability to deliver objects in terms of the amount of detail transmitted. There is correction for chromatic aberration, too, which describes how a lens copes with colour. Newer to me was ‘coma’ which I take to refer to a lens’ tendency to distort light sources.

Newest of all however is the term ‘bokeh’ borrowed from the Japanese meaning ‘dizzy’ or ‘fizzy’. This applies especially to one of the new prime lenses which has an aperture of f1.2, ie which is very wide and fast. It refers to the quality of bur you get in out of focus areas especially in highlight areas. I kind of know what this means but it’s as if I have only really twigged it since I discovered the term. Actually though, whether the term works or not, something else is working for me at a more intuitive and subliminal level. Quite simply, I like the sharpness and shallowness of the lenses even if the successful shoot rate is lower at such apertures, because when it is right it is almost other dimensional. It’s as if the zone of focus, all the more narrow with a wide aperture lens used at a wide aperture, cuts the subject out with a scalpel, creating some sort of stand-alone sliver within the frame. I have just recently learned that the new Canon bodies are being used by professional video and film makers partly because of the tack-sharpness and narrowness of focus afforded by these still lenses used in conjunction with wide apertures (see http://theeoscars.com/5dblog for example. In the bouquet of bokeh, by way the examples above, it is in the eyelash and part of the glasses of one shot, the right pupil with its contact lens on another and the left eye particularly again in the other. (The eyes always have it for me: a strong tendency in my approach as well as a widespread phenomenon in our culture, it is deserving of a far deeper exploration, but at some other time!) What’s more, these lenses have enabled me to start to see in a different way and to find a new pleasure in creating images.©www.roypeters.co.uk

- Amid the wreck of is and was

Whilst looking up a sporting moment on YouTube, I tripped upon a lovely short video from Cambridge Ideas, entitled Strange Seas of Thought, in which the presenter Ruth Abbott looks at the comparative production of the imagination in the arts as opposed to sciences via a consideration of Wordsworth’s notebooks (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2r5ewTqlwE). The strange seas of thought comes from a few lines in consideration of Newton’s statue in Trinity College in which Wordsworth muses at his

Voyaging through the strange seas of Thought, alone.

Along Ms Abbott’s short but intense journey in this piece, she refers to the phrase

Amid the wreck of is and was, things incomplete and purposes betrayed.

‘Betrayed’ is such a strong word. Regret turns to resentment. Who’s done the betraying? The rest of the expression is so matter of fact in comparison, merely identifying things as they are or as they come about. Life is like that. ‘I could have been a contender,’ says Brando, as Terry Malloy, in On The Waterfront .

As I look over my shoulder I can see the chair in which I meditate functional and comfortable enough, but it is empty and I have not been in it today nor for a few days. I’ve got excuses transparent as the air. Usually to do with busy-ness, breaks in routine. But I also know – and I don’t need to burrow very deep – that I have betrayed my purpose through a mixture of sloth and distraction, perhaps allowing myself to get too caught up in the moment of residing in some version of a devaloka. Am I a meditator whilst I am not actually doing it? When exactly does ‘is’ turn to ‘was’?

Such procrastinations can easily mask the fact that change is possible in every moment. The day is still young and so I may yet avoid trading places between a devaloka and Brando’s Palookaville. My inspiration will be Bhante serving so well as an example of how to occupy a chair.© www.roypeters.co.uk

- Technology and Wordsworth – Seeing through the dark

If you calibrate a Mac display using the faculty of your eye, you begin with a screen shot, in System Preferences, which invites you to set the brightness at the point where, in true Goldilocks style, the oval centre within a black square is neither too light nor too dark. It is both a question of judgment and a leap of faith that the display has the technology to deliver what is assumed to be the correct level of brightness. I wonder what Vermeer might have made of this, for whom the dark shadowy areas from a distance appear to merge but close up they maintain their variegated differences. I have never seen anything approaching a good repro of Vermeer for this reason. The photographer always seems to expose with too much deference to the shadows thus rendering the overall feel too light, muddy, lacking mood and contrast. I am thinking of paintings such as The Letter, The Geographer, Lady with a Maid where there is a heavy use of dark shadow particularly on the edge or the side in a way that frames the subject.

Pursuing the Bahiya advice from the Lord Buddha (which turned to Insight for him on hearing it) if we move from ‘in the seen only the seen’ and ponder what do we actually see – a good and fruitful enough exercise at most times – then Wordsworth segues most powerfully from the recalled visual experience to the imagined in the episode from childhood recalled in The Prelude involving what is often referred to as ‘the stolen boat’. (I prefer ‘borrowed’ to ‘stolen’ because he was always going to return it. What else could he have done with it?)

At first he rows out into the dark lake as light is falling, gradually he becomes aware of a great mass which seems to pursue him. This ‘grim shape’

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me.

He hurriedly replaces the boat to its original mooring and is left to ponder on the nature of this experience of something else beyond him, leading him to a sense of the transcendental and a ‘dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being’ where

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

I certainly don’t access this gateway through from the visual to the imaginal when I am calibrating my Mac display, but it does make me stop and ponder where else there might be portals. At the moment, such an illumined space, where brightness may be found in the dark, lies somewhere between what was gleaned on a recent retreat on the Sutra of Golden Light, led by Vedanya and Padmavajra, when we were all given a bunch of keys with which to open particular doorways into the sutra, and the excellent book by Nagapriya called Visions of Mahayana Buddhism which is full of maps and signposts of understanding.

© www.roypeters.co.uk