It occurred to me the other day that I often say I like this photo when writing about my own photographs. So is it immodest to do this?
I’m going to say no it isn’t, because photography for me is a process of selection. That process has three stages. First (when I’m out and about) is the selection of the subject. Second (at home) is the selection of the image. Third (likewise at home) is the cropping, which is also a kind of selection. Selection involves liking and its opposite, so liking is intrinsic and implicit. For this reason I’m allowed to talk about it, I reckon.
But even if a photo were a thing you created from scratch like a painting, you must have liked it if you’re displaying it. So the argument wouldn’t be that different. Albeit in this case it might be cooler to leave the explicit liking to others.
But does any such rule of modesty actually exist?
Anyway enough of the self-flagellation and back to the above image, which is a close-up of a nettle leaf. At the third selection stage I cropped it to look like an aerial view of a rainforest. It has valleys, rivers and tributaries and you can imagine it taken from an altitude of about 10 km. Since this is a nettle I also look for the stinging hairs, and fancy I can see them when I enlarge the photograph.
When I was a child everybody said that dock leaves were a cure for nettle stings. We would rub our stung legs with them, but never felt any benefit. So I decided in my childish way that what you needed for it to work, was to extract the essence of the dock. I mashed up some leaves, added methylated spirit, and left them to marinate in a little bottle. I guess I chose spirit rather than water because of its medical associations. The glass of the bottle was a therapeutic brown.
My grandfather, who lived with us then, viewed this concoction with deep suspicion. You shouldn’t be meddling in things like that. You don’t know what it’s going to do to your skin.
This kind of caution was a common theme with him. I used to spend a lot of time playing with batteries, making circuits, and lighting bulbs. Electricity is dangerous, he would say. It doesn’t give you a second chance. You can’t get electrocuted with a nine-volt battery, I thought, so what are you on about? Looking back now, he may have feared I’d graduate to sticking wires in the mains sockets. He often said that hazards (like electricity) had very narrow shoulders. They could insinuate themselves where grosser things couldn’t penetrate. They could take you by surprise and floor you before you knew what had hit you.
Returning to nettles, I do know you can eat them. If you boil them they no longer sting your mouth I guess. I imagine they taste a bit like spinach.
Speaking of which, Popeye used to eat spinach in the cartoons we watched in c1960. It gave him superhuman strength when he needed it. We never ate it in our family and I’d never seen it, so I wasn’t familiar with it. Who ate it in the UK at that time? Nobody I knew. From the way Popeye used to pour it into his mouth from a tin, it looked like some kind of powder. To a child it had a similar status to haggis. You weren’t sure what it was and I don’t recall anybody giving me a straight answer.
Let’s return to nettles. I once watched a documentary in which a man was eating raw nettles. He was folding them to avoid the stinging hairs and his lips and gums were black afterwards. I’m not sure why he was doing it. It may have been a macho thing like having a vindaloo. At primary school we boys would try to impress the girls by putting holly leaves in our mouths, but not nettles. I guess our hormone levels were not yet high enough for that. Rutting season was still to come.
Blackthorn 