John Sheldon's photos

Olympus OM10 with Zuiko MC Auto-S 50mm f1.8 lens. Ilford HP5 plus black and white negative film. Canoscan 8800F scanner with home-made negative frame.

Picture created using layers. The ballet Rite (or Coronation) of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, Nicolas Roerich and Vaslav Nijinsky was first performed in Paris in May 1913. As well as provoking a riot, it seismically shifted the direction of Western music. The scene is Pagan Russia, tribes of people come together to carry out ceremonies, venerate their ancestors and elders and choose a young girl who will have the honour of dancing herself to death to ensure a good harvest. In my picture the spring growth, dancing wildly in the wind, sprouts from the music score of the Sacrificial Dance and the ground is symbolically stained red. The message, in 1913 and 2013, is that no matter how sophisticated your industry and technology is, if the harvest fails you are in trouble. The ballet reflects a time when people were so aware of this that they were prepared to sacrifice something of utmost value to ensure a good harvest. We lose contact with the soil that feeds us at our peril. There are about 100 recordings of this music currently available, countless more archive recordings. Encountering it in my mid-teens, I abandoned rock and pop music as just too tame.

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Olympus OM10 with Zuiko MC Auto-S 50mm f1.8 lens, fitted with Olympus 7mm Auto Extension Tube. Ilford HP5 plus black and white negative film. Canoscan 8800F scanner with home-made negative frame.

Olympus OM10 with Zuiko MC Auto-S 50mm f1.8 lens. Ilford HP5 plus black and white negative film. Canoscan 8800F scanner with home-made negative frame.

The tones here are intended to reflect the hard, cold temperature. Olympus OM10 with Zuiko MC Auto-S 50mm f1.8 lens. Ilford HP5 plus black and white negative film. Canoscan 8800F scanner with home-made negative frame.