I dont know about anyone else but I often wake up from dreaming feeling vaguely guilty about something or other! Here I offer tangible and clear-cut evidence of a guilty past. Caught on grainy 8mm film, the significance of the incidence is merely that I have thrown a cricket ball through the window of the bed and breakfast my family were staying at in Cornwall; It could easily be given another and far darker context. My sister Andrea seems amused at my predicament and the fact that my Father has captured this image of guilt for posterity. It remains an enduring memory of my childhood.
The Laocoon, the high priest of Neptune, tried to warn the city of Troy of the plot by the Athenians to invade using a wooden horse to conceal their soldiers. The God Poseidon, hearing of this sent a massive sea-serpent to strangle the Laocoon and his sons. The famously vigorous Greek sculpture dug up in Rome in 1506 had a huge impact on artists like Michelangelo and Titian and shows the agony of the strangulation.
This powerfully truncated Greek sculpture from the 1st Century BC sits astride its plinth in the Vatican Museum in Rome. I was lucky to find it partially illuminated by a shaft of light from one of the upper windows of the magnificent gallery that houses it. Shot with ‘old-school’ Rolleiflex and HP5.