Journal Notes from
Notes from
the making
Field reports, reflections on process, and the questions that shape the work. Written by Mash Bonigala, Founder.
Field reports, reflections on process, and the questions that shape the work. Written by Mash Bonigala, Founder.
A day at POST in Hove with Josh Redfearn - the artist-led photography studio founded by Simon Roberts and Nina Emett. Developing a roll of Fomapan 400 on the Paterson tank, then printing on the De Vere 504.
Read →
Four hours through the village with Julie Thomson and Melonie Clubb of the Long Melford Historical and Archaeological Society. The historian and the rememberer, in two voices, walking the place they carry.
Read →
A working morning at Dennett Boat Builders in Chertsey with Stephen and his 83-year-old father Michael, who still comes in every day to work the masts. A yard that trains the apprentices no one else will take, and a three-generation chain visibly forming.
Read →
Four hours at the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in Cambridge with Lida, Roxanne, Vincent and Hallam, and the letterer Emily. A lesson about a pencil, an apprentice who walked in off the street, and the inheritance of a twentieth-century English craft.
Read →
I spent a full day with Josh Redfear at Intrepid, learning to work with the 4x5, and I came out the other side with a working understanding of the camera and a much clearer sense of what it is actually going to do to this project.
Read →
I arrived fifteen minutes early and sat in the car with the engine off. When he opened the door, the first thing I noticed was the twinkle. Seventy-seven years old and still looking.
Read →
Something shifted this week that I did not plan for. The responses came quickly, and a lot of them came with something I had not anticipated: relief.
Read →Seventy-four outreach emails. Eight regions. Six categories. Two people and a spreadsheet. The responses have been more interesting than I expected.
Read →The five categories did not arrive together. They arrived one at a time, over several months, and the early versions were wrong in ways that took me an embarrassingly long time to see.
Read →The demographic reality is simple and unforgiving. The people who remember a fundamentally different England are in their eighties and nineties. This project cannot wait for better funding or a more convenient time.
Read →The choice of camera is not a technical decision. It is an editorial one. It tells the subject what you think their story deserves.
Read →We have eight regions. We should have more. The North West is absent. The North East is absent. Cornwall is absent. I want to be honest about that from the start.
Read →Nobody told me the hardest part would be before the camera came out. I have spent the last several months doing something I have never done on any project in thirty years of building things. I sat with a question long enough to actually understand it.
Read →