Last edited: Friday, January 06, 2006
About Megalithic Landscapes
Between 1975 and 1989 I formed a collection of photographs of megalithic sites around the British Isles. I am gradually scanning and adding......
Many of the photographs have been published over the years, but how I wish the Internet existed in those days. Well, in fact, I wish desktop / laptop computers were available then. I spent hours in the darkroom (I can smell the chemicals now) crafting beautiful black and white photographic prints, many were exhibited.
If computers and the internet had been available 20 years ago, I could have done these marvellous things:
Paola Arosio and Diego Meozzi have crafted this fantastic site.
When I look at these and other projects on the WEB, I’m intrigued that others have shared an obsession with me and travelled the same journey. I have this large collection of photographs, and I am now posting these up here.
The black and white photographs were taken with either a Mamiya 6cmx6cm or a Mamiya 6cmx4.5cm. The bromide prints (still in good condition) were scanned on a Microtek flatbed scanner. The colour photographs were taken as 35mm transparencies on a Rollieflex or Pentax and scanned to PhotoCD.
I have used these photographs to create interactive pieces with different authoring tools. In 1990 I created a CD-ROM “Megalithic Landscapes”, using an authoring tool - Guide from OWL Ltd. This was a successful experiment and led to the commission from the British Museum to create the Anglo Saxons CDROM, published in 1993. Interactive pieces created with that version of Guide will only run in Windows 3.1, so it is not possible to view this without using a PC from a previous generation!
Later, I used the photographs in a piece using ToolBook.This gave me a good foundation to use this tool in the early Shakespeare CDROM series for BBC/HarperCollins.
When it came time to move on to Director, I was able to use the Megalithic material again to see how that tool could be used to create an interactive CDROM for this content.
Many of the photographs have been exhibited:
1976 “Megalithic Sites”, I.C.A., London.
1977 Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh
1978 “Megalithic Landscapes”, University of Toronto, Canada
1979 “Megalithic Landscapes”, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow.
1979/80 Souther Arts touring exhibition - South of England
1980 Elise Meyer Gallery, New York.
1980/81 “Megalithic Landscapes”, Touring Canada. Organised by the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery, Edmonton
1981 “Art and the Sea”, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
1982 “Megalithic Landscapes”, University of Maine Gallery
Many of the photographs have been published:
1978 “Sun, Moon and Standing Stones”, J.E. Wood, OUP.
1978 “Megalithic Remains in Britain and Brittany”, A.Thom & A.S. Thom, OUP
1981 “Celtic Consciousness”.(ED) R.O’Driscoll, Dolmen Press
1983 “Overlay: Ancient Images and Contemporary Art”, Lucy Lippard, Pantheon Books, New York
1983 Early man and the Cosmos, Evan Hadingham, Heinemann, London
1988 “Records in Stone”, (ED.) Clive Ruggles, Cambridge University Press
1995 “Walking in all of the Squares”, Archibald Thom, Argyll Publishing
1997 “Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy”, Michael Hostin (ED), Cambridge University Press
1999 “Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland”, Clive Ruggles, Yale University Press
