Alex Chappel

When I was first asked to write something I immediately thought of “ayorce arack de-dack tulis” which was (still is, I guess) my best, but not very good, stab at knowing Homer. In 1990 I was directing a documentary about art and science, and one of my interview subjects - a professor in such things - pointed out this Homer quote, i had to write it phonetically in my notes and have remembered it ever since. I can’t remember the context but I his point was that as a scientist, he can analyse things to the nth degree, in pursuit of knowledge, but an artist need not - all an artist need do is take the truth & beauty of nature, and do their best to do it justice. Not with tables of figures and experiments, but with a well-written line of poetry or a stroke of the paintbrush or indeed the click of a camera.

When I was a DJ, people would congratulate me at the end of the night or the next morning, telling me the music was great. “I know”, I’d say, and as they were taken aback by my immodesty, I’d reassure them “I didn’t make it, I just chose it”. Same with a beautiful photograph - nature made it, I just did my best to capture it.

My late mother was fascinated with the amazing winter sunsets available from the attic window of our house on a hill overlooking the Cleveland hills. She left a legacy of thousands of fairly badly taken photos of them. She wanted those moments to last forever. And they do. 20 years after her death those beautiful sunrises and sunsets still happen with the same regularity, as they will after the last human has breathed its last breath.

In a similar way that the stopped clock in this photograph tells the right time twice a day, the sunrise and sunset conspire in this, it has done since before the invention of clocks, and will do until the end of time itself.

The line from Homer which I can now google and therefore correct (we didn’t have google in 1990) is rhododaktulos eos - the rosy-fingered Dawn. Isn’t it a lovely phrase?