foam magazine #11 / young
On My Mind...
From ‘Notes from Jo’ (1991-94), © Keith Arnatt
Chris Boot I first met Keith Arnatt four years ago, in a pub near his home in Chepstow, South Wales, to discuss the possibility of doing a book of his work. He’d become a very obscure figure within photography, at the time preoccupied with taking pictures of cows in the fields around his house, which he felt combined all the themes of his work to date – the history of art and the history of photography. But barely anyone else saw them and I didn’t really get them. He struck me as lost and quite sad, much like his story: the highly successful conceptual artist who was converted to photography, and then became obscure and forgotten as a result. Rather than publish the cow pictures, I said I’d do a book of all of his photographic work if we could get a show off the ground. Four years later, we did, although not long after our meeting Keith went into care in a nursing home.
017
In the 1990s in perhaps the most straightforward documentary series he made, he documented notes that his wife left for him around the house. Jo – who he married in 1953 – chastises him for his domestic misdemeanors (‘Where are my wellingtons you stupid fart?’, ‘You bastard! You ate the last of my crackers!’) and gives him rudimentary instructions on feeding himself (‘Pies in oven. Press down thing that says ‘start’ to start.’). They are a portrait of a man who’s rather helpless about the house, looked after by a loving but necessarily slightly bossy partner. David Hurn, who worked on the book, had to explain one of the notes to me: ‘In bed but awake!’ was Jo’s invitation to Keith to come and make love to her when he got in. I find it a wonderfully poignant testament to growing old with your lover. + Chris Boot is a London-based photobook publisher, see www.chrisboot.com. He is the publisher of I’m A Real Photographer – Keith Arnatt Photographs 1974-2002 in association with the Photographers’ Gallery, June 2007.