The magazine of the art-form of the photo-essay
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Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
July 2014 back issue
by Damian Bird
I left my house on the South West coast at 8pm hoping to reach Stonehenge before dark. I didn’t. I arrived at the
Stone’s car park as an inky black night fell upon myself and 35,000 others. Walking towards the Stones I felt calm and
anonymous without the light even to see my own feet. The moon was invisible and the pilgrims that I could hear
walking around me felt like spirits drifting through the midsummer night air towards the 4000 year old temple, all for the
spectacle of each other.
My stamina was to last from 9pm to 2.30am and I spent all of that time circling the Stones, weaving in and out of
huddled groups on the ground; some sleeping, some sitting and a few standing. It took much concentration not to walk
on the faces, abdomens, arms or legs of the many horizontal, smorning dreamers and love-making couples scattered
around.
The evening had a musical pulse. Jammers strummed guitars. Singers chanted and the drunk shouted. The smell of
pot in the air was intoxicating and delicious and the beer and cider cans crunched underfoot. I passed a burly security
guard at one point who was claiming to his colleague to have scolded a man for snorting cocaine off his lit up mobile
phone screen and that he believed the climber who had made it to the top of the Stones was a disgrace. He added
that the less adventurous ground-dwelling revellers would all like to punch him in the face for his sacrilegious trespass.
Love and laughter hung in the air like a mist and the most recurring image that my flash picked out in the pitch
blackness was of entwined couples, old and young marinating in the heady summer solstice fever that gripped the
Stones that night.
Beauty and the beast.
Standing stones at midnight 21st June 2014.
Beers, poppies and cigs.
Camper buggy.
Illegal stone climber thows moss and lichen in the faces of the security guards.
Supported by the stones as the alcohol kicks in.
Make-up by torchlight.
Tantric lovers.
Gimp centurian en route for the stones.
Love is in the air.
The future’s so bright, I’ve got the wear shades.
Love tangle.
Flower power and Pellegrino.
The dawn will come.
Levitation. I am stardust.
Warrior princesses.
Nocternal cyclops scout.
Midsummer night’s dream.
Three in a bed.
Henge Angels.
