A Proper Job
Having just completed a rare 5-day week of teaching I’m once again wondering how people manage to do that 9 to 5 thing on a regular basis. World of Work. It’s odd.
The Guardian web site has a slideshow of 11 pictures from the Onto the Streets show so you can try to spot my picture.
Spider
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” - Chomsky.
Onto the Streets Again
As promised in a previous post, I’ve made a gallery of the five photos that are in the forthcoming Photofusion show. You can see them here, with dates and links to the other photographers.
Our ways are not your ways
Onto the Streets
I’ve got some pictures in the group show, Onto the Streets, which opens next month at Photofusion in Brixton (21 July to 16 September and then touring to Greece and Croatia I think). I’ll put together a web gallery of my pictures and add a link here when I’m a bit less busy. Update: gallery.
WPD
It seems that World Pinhole Day is the only time I use my pinhole camera.
Boys
The test rolls were fairly entertaining but I think I need to rebuild the body and this shot is just to show that it wasn’t a complete disaster. It’s a gxwide (I had to name it so that it could have a blog category) and will take some getting used to so I think constructing a viewfinder is probably a good idea. See the previous post for a picture of the camera.
Version One
I haven’t posted a “gear in pieces” picture for awhile so here’s the next best thing; the first version of an extremely wide angle medium format (6×12cm) camera I’m building. It’s mostly bits bought on ebay with a couple of pieces of plywood in the middle, all held together with lots of tape. It’s missing some niceties and hopefully the final version will have less tape. I’ve put a couple of test rolls through - results to follow assuming there’s something on the film.
Get Closer
In case of confusion, see here, or here.
Nearly New
Another accidental diptych.
The Lure of Surrealism
I recently started reading “City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris” which ought to be interesting because it’s a study of “surrealist realism”: the exploration of a real-life surreality encountered on the streets of the city. On reaching chapter three - Nadja: a ‘voluntary banality’? - I thought I’d better break off to read the book of the chapter title. I didn’t really take to Breton’s style of writing and although I enjoyed his descriptions of the meetings with Nadja the story had more impact after finishing it, first by reading the introduction (glad that I didn’t read it first) and secondly by filling in details via a quick google and reading this essay, Trailing Nadja by poet, Susan Elmslie.
Coincidences ensued. In a box of booja-booja chocolates, the message (Boojagram No. 17) read, “Practice a reliable attitude towards fish”. I didn’t think much of it, except that it was a little odder than the usual sentiment. However, I then went out and drove over a big fish, maybe a piece of salmon, in the middle of our road and on the return journey noticed a black glove in the middle of another road. Unrelated to this, I walked past a woman who said into her phone, “I get lost if I walk around”.
Nadja by Andre Breton
Looking at a Thing in a Bag
5DWII - day five. So, what have we learned about Landscape this week? “It’s just a medium” [JA] or a vessel that we can pour whatever we want into. I’ve mostly been reminded that it’s just another unhelpful label although I have been enjoying making some bad landscape pictures. As labels go, I certainly prefer the term street photography but that’s because I have a very wide open view of what street photography is and can be, whereas some people think it died with HCB or Winogrand. A term with little or no baggage would be ideal but unlikely. Joining ‘urban’ to ‘landscape’ only makes it worse.
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