Some People

BARGAIN! TWO for the price of ONE!

This is one from Cornershop, a new series. They really need to be seen as big prints but I’ve made the jpgs bigger than usual, so click above to enlarge or see more by clicking here.

Three from this set will be on show as part of the LIP annual exhibition: 14th to 27th October 2007 at Cottons Atrium.

Workshop at Photofusion: Street Photography

I’m running the Street Photography workshop for Photofusion again. The last one was fun, the feedback was good and you can see some of the participants’ photos here. It runs over two Saturdays (22 Sep / 6 Oct) with 2 weeks in-between to give time for practice. You can find more details on the Photofusion site or feel free to contact me if you want to discuss.

3 Views on TV vs RL

I was going to title this post, The Bizarre World of Not London but I’m aware that most people don’t realise that I’m joking most of the time so I went with numbers and acronyms. I recently went on a rare trip out of London; firstly to see the Birth of Colour exhibition at the National Media Museum in Bradford. This was the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (pic 1 - I don’t remember it ever being called just the National Museum of Photography so I guess this sign was just a contraction). The curation of the show was a bit “Blue Peter” in it’s tone but I suppose that’s partly due to the NMM being closer to the Science Museum than an art gallery and a lot of the exhibits seemed to take the dumbed down approach so I assume it’s the house style. In fairness, there is a lot of good supporting material on their web site for the show. Fortunately, they did have some actual autochrome transparencies on display. I wanted to get an idea of what 4 million potato starch grains per square inch could look like, because you can’t really tell from web photos (or the recent TV series). I think most of them were “quarter plate” size, so a bit bigger than 6×9cm format, and they looked great; the best of them similar to modern transparencies to my eyes (although they weren’t of consistent quality) but there were a couple of thin, vertical portraits which were much bigger and looked stunning.

Bradford seemed surprisingly rundown. I keep hearing about how much is happening in Leeds and Manchester but Bradford was dominated by boarded up shops and huge office to-let banners as if it hadn’t changed since the last recession. There were signs of tidying up in the centre but it’ll only end up looking like everywhere else so I rejoice in the mess (pic 2). We took advantage of the one of the nice cinemas at the NMM followed by curry at a very cheap restaurant, which in a neat coincidence, Sarah spotted in that day’s Guardian. The Kashmir. Because of the article, I half expected it to be full of Guardian readers but we seemed to be the only people who looked out of place.

The next day, on the way to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, it seemed like Leeds, seen from the train, had lots of emerging glass and steel and a horizon of cranes. That completed the survey of Northern developments.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park
If you visit the YSP web site you will see that the nearest railway station is Wakefield but there’s no mention of how you’re supposed to get from there to the park. We had half a plan to get a cab from the station but arriving at Wakefield decided to be more adventurous and find a bus. There were no signs at the station, no YSP leaflets amongst the many other attractions in the ‘things to do’ rack but a helpful man in the information office directed us to the bus station. Same thing at the bus station, no mention of the sculpture park. Another helpful man gave us the bus number and we started to feel like this wasn’t a well travelled route. The bus didn’t get us all the way there but the weather was ok so the 20 minute walk wasn’t a problem. By the time we arrived it was pretty clear that they expect everyone to get there by car. There’s no charge for entry, only for car parking. I felt a bit confused as I thought I might have been part of their target audience. (pic 3 - sculpture and tape)

The main reason for this part of the trip was the Andy Goldsworthy show and seeing some of his work in the flesh made me realise that it’s about 4,000 times more interesting than looking at the usual presentation as photographs. The pictures on the web site don’t do it justice and the postcards in the shop are even worse but I’d say, If you’re anywhere near the YSP before January ‘08 you should go. This was during the school holidays so the main building and restaurant were quite busy. However, most people didn’t venture far from the main galleries and even if they had I suspect, like me, they would have found the park map confusing and signage irritatingly minimal. This turned out to be a positive as it meant that the James Turrell Deer Shelter Skyspace (pic 4) was reasonably quiet. In this case, I was less wowed than expected after seeing similar rooms on TV (here, I think). I suspect you need to sit for hours in changing, end of the day, light to get the full effect. (More on skyspaces).

So that’s RL 2 - TV 1. Do click the pictures to enlarge. Update: I had a google search hit from someone looking for the bus from Wakefield to YSP, so it’s not just me and I’ve made this page to help.

Interior Landscape

KEEP LEFT

A couple of years ago I made a short video with Jawed Ashraf that is like a moving version of our Twins project. I haven’t put it online before because I think it really works better when shown bigger, either projected or on a large screen, but Michael David Murphy at 2.8 linked to some street photography videos which made me think… so, now you can see it here.

The recent Street Photography workshop went well and another has been scheduled - get in touch for more information or see the Photofusion page.

How We Are

The How We Are show at the Tate has a flickr tie-in where users are supposed to have their pictures displaying as part of the exhibit (over 5,000 pictures in the group currently). Unfortunately all four screens were showing either crashed Windows or a spinning slideshow wheel with no pictures (how hard can it be?). The rest of the show is well worth seeing (room guide) although I have to admit that I found the best part of the last room was the ability to pull up my own flickr account and run it on a computer that was working.

In other news, my daughter Max is just finishing her degree and has put her final piece, a Knitimation Video, online. Go watch it.

How We Show

I’m always interested in seeing the underpants of a gallery and while I’m sure running such an enterprise is often a thankless task, it amuses me how often they seem unprepared for visitors. I sometimes find myself more interested in the mechanics of the place than the stuff on show. Today I went to Alec Soth at HOST and fortunately the pictures were enough of a distraction from all the construction work but I did feel like I was getting in the way a bit (click thumb to enlarge). Still, my arrival seemed to prompt the stacking of the otherwise empty bookshelf which gave me another chance to browse the Niagara book and get in the way some more.

Street Photography Workshop

I’m leading a Street Photography Workshop at Photofusion which runs on two Saturdays in July (7th and 21st) with time in-between for practice. Among the plus points is that it’s a small group of participants. There are more details on the Photofusion site and it’s half-full already so if you’re interested but have questions, feel free to contact me. Update: another has been scheduled. Update 2: I’m planning to run it again in the summer.

Upgrading This

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2 and it seems that it’s fussier about some of the hacks I made to the theme. Categories aren’t working at the moment… probably some other things too. I’ll either fix later or switch to some fancy new theme. Update: Using Spotlight to search for code I realised that I’d actually documented my previous hacking. Amazing! Now if only I could remember that I’m sometimes quite sensible. The notes I’d made said, “I should write this as a plugin so that it doesn’t break with future WordPress upgrades”. Please let me know if you spot anything else broken.

Five Things

I suppose it was inevitable that the five things meme would get me at some point. Kevin Bjorke tagged me so, after some squirming about it, I have to tell the readers of this blog five things they don’t know about me.

1. The acronym, GASP, was first used for some software I wrote (so, Gary Alexander Software Productions). Unfortunately the computer was built from a kit and despite its exciting (for the time) graphics capabilities, almost nobody bought it. As you’ll see from the picture, the software was delivered on audio cassette. One program was a Pacman ripoff and the other a graphics program which was developed for designing the Pacman sprites. The gasp is supposed to be a little ironic and my favourite usage was when I was working in television and I borrowed the SP from BetaSP (tape) where it stood for Superior Performance. I always told people this with a serious face and nobody ever laughed. It didn’t even occur to me that it could stand for Street Photography until years after I started this web site.

2. I have this much vinyl. Converting it to digital is a chore which I’d recently cranked myself up for but after about five albums my record deck gave up so now I keep pondering one of those USB decks. The shelf is bending - my camera doesn’t barrel that much.

4. My Father was a Prison Warder.

3. I’ve been vegan since 1992. I realise that most people who know me, know I’m vegan but I can never remember the answer to the ‘how long’ question, so there it is.

5. I didn’t go to art school. Well, that’s pretty obvious if you read my bio page but I did teach myself to draw while I was studying to be a software engineer. It seems I formally study things that I realise later I don’t want to do and self-teach the things I do want to do.

I now have to tag five other people. Why is it that almost everybody I know doesn’t blog? Probably to avoid things like this. I tag: Julian, Eamon (who I’ve never even met), Sarah, Max and Nils. Apologies to all.

CMT at Kinetica

A new Cabaret Mechanical Theatre show opens at the end of next week at Kinetica in London and runs for a month.