Jan Gray
Photography
a photographer..........wandering the south downs, often into abstraction
F(l)ight
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I have always watched crows. At the bottom of the Cheshire garden of the house where I lived as a teenager, was a small woodland that had grown on what used to be a river bank before the Dee silted up. The Murder that made their home there were loud, brash and very smart. Some became quite tame, others sneered at me for years.
The crows in this series live at the edge of a field in East Sussex. I don't know them that well. But I know them much better having spent several hours documenting them. Ragged ones, sleek ones, shrieking together or brooding alone, in flight or playfully fighting with eachother. They are all here.
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“...the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness...”
[Ted Hughes, 'Poetry in the Making: An Anthology', 1967, Faber & Faber]
F(l)ight
______________________________________________________________________
I have always watched crows. At the bottom of the Cheshire garden of the house where I lived as a teenager, was a small woodland that had grown on what used to be a river bank before the Dee silted up. The Murder that made their home there were loud, brash and very smart. Some became quite tame, others sneered at me for years.
The crows in this series live at the edge of a field in East Sussex. I don't know them that well. But I know them much better having spent several hours documenting them. Ragged ones, sleek ones, shrieking together or brooding alone, in flight or playfully fighting with eachother. They are all here.
___________________________________________________
“...the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness...”
[Ted Hughes, 'Poetry in the Making: An Anthology', 1967, Faber & Faber]