an alright start

A Stranger View

Moving in creative circles can present you with an abundance of inspired and interesting ideas, little gems eked out from the corners of the minds of friends.  Some can start small, grow faster and larger than expected and become, say, the Second Hand Marching Band.  some are simple, beautiful, throw-away ideas that serve only to make people smile and feel part of something - and these are no worse for that.  One such idea is that of Neil Douglas, a friend of mine most commonly known as "Dougie".  Tonight, on his fledgling blog - Up My Tree - Dougie has posted the first fruits of a project he calls A Stranger View.  The method behind Dougie's particular brand of madness is simple.  He places a disposable camera somewhere in Glasgow accompanied by a sign saying "Hi! If you don’t mind could you please use me to take a picture of anything?  My owner will be back later to collect me.  Thank you!  P.S. Don’t steal, I am only a disposable".  A few hours later he returns and all being well, he processes the film.

Until the blog post this evening, I'd never heard of this project and I was both surprised and, I don't mind admitting, somewhat envious that I hadn't thought of it.  with the participation of random pedestrians, it is a project that exhibits a strange sense of togetherness amongst strangers.  As you would expect, the photographs are a little hit-and-miss though for me, the hits outweigh the misses.  The photographs, individually, are not as important as they are viewed together.  It is together that they have their greatest impact, and thankfully Dougie presents them all, including the final photo missing half it's frame as the film ended. 

A Stranger View is well worth having a look and you can find it here.

Two Times Intro

It hasn't been too long since We Sink Ships launched its first exhibition in Talvi / Winter.  From the very beginning, Heidi and I had always planned to follow We Sink Ships' first exhibition with a bigger collaborative effort involving many other photographers.  We only ever really had one subject in mind.  Music.

Before We Sink Ships was born, Heidi and I were part of an aborted blog project called Access All Areas.  The premise of the blog was to bring gig photographers together and share their work in an online journal.  It never took off.

Instead, though, when it came time to put together the music exhibition, we talked to our friends and approached the photographers involved in AAA and everyone wanted to be part of it.



We launched the exhibition a week ago and are very proud of it.  In complete contrast to Talvi / Winter in which the photographs were solemn, still, occasionally desolate; the photographs exhibited in Two Times Intro exude movement and energy.  Andrew Moore's photo of Eagles of Death Metal, for instance, stops time but you experience the motion none-the-less.  John Linton's liberal use of motion blur in his photo of Black Lips throws the viewer into the front row as the audience bounce all around.  It is certainly well worth having a look.

I hope you enjoy it.  Two Times Intro will be online and found at wesinkships.co.uk until 17th May 2009.

"Aim Well, Shoot fast and scram". Paris, March, 2009.

When I woke on Friday morning it was to thoughts of the coming weekend, the football and a long, relaxing Sunday spent, for the most part, in bed.  I was also anticipating just exactly what form the birthday surprise my girlfriend had been promising me would take, however, no matter what I thought it might be, I was completely unprepared for what was to come.  I knew the surprise had something to with photography as the night before Asia had asked me to make sure memory cards were empty and batteries charged.  I did just that.

I received a text message from Asia around midday asking me to meet her at Glasgow Central station.  "What has she done?" I wondered.  We were clearly going somewhere, but where?  When I arrived at Central Station Asia had my camera bag but more surprisingly she had a small suitcase which I later found out had a couple of days' change of clothes for us both.  Within the hour we had boarded a train to Prestwick airport though I still had no idea where our final destination would be.  Excited but feeling a little guilty that Asia may have spent far too much on my birthday surprise, I decided to make the surprise last for as long as it was possible.  Asia had checked in online so avoiding the destination sign as we walked past check-in, I finally learned where we were going about 30 minutes before boarding the plane.  For my 30th birthday, Asia was taking me to Paris.

After many gleeful cuddles, kisses and - for Asia spending so much money - the occasional scolding glance, our plane took off and we were bound for France.  I spent much of the journey deciding where I'd like to go and what I'd like to photograph and when we arrived in the centre of Paris the only thing still to be decided was where to spend the night.  A couple of phone-calls later and we had ourselves a room wherein, given that it was now late in the evening, we decided to get some sleep.

I had expected a Saturday morning of cleaning the flat followed by an afternoon of football in Perth watching, what I was later to discover was, Airdrie being comfortably beaten 3 - 0 by St. Johnstone.  Instead, Asia and I left our hotel at 8am and didn't return until late that night, the time inbetween spent exploring and photographing Parisien life.  Our first destination was Rue de Rivoli in a bid to find where Henri Cartier-Bresson lived with Martine Franck.

Paris, by all accounts, is home to street photography.  Robert Doisneau, William Klein and Henri Cartier-Bresson to name but a few have all treaded the streets looking for interesting moments to photograph.  After my characteristic half hour or so of shyly "settling in", I realised I was full of confidence and photographed easily and without hesitation.  Throughout the day I kept in mind Cartier Bresson's paraphrasing of Charles De Galle when he said the secret to his photography was to "aim well, shoot fast and scram" and heeded these words as often as I could.



We took a short detour from Rue de Rivoli onto the île de la Cité where we visited Notre Dame and afterwards I took a photo, a homage to Cartier Bresson that I had decided I would take on the plane the night before.  One of Cartier-Bresson's most beautiful photographs is his 1952 picture of the île de la Cité taken on a particularly foggy day.  Finding where he had made the photo isn't difficult, it was on the first bridge after point-neuf, the bridge seen in the photograph.  As Saturday was a beautiful, bright, sunny day I decided an easy way to emulate the fog was to over-expose the photograph and thankfully it just about worked.

After finding Martine Franck's address on Rue de Rivoli, we continued through the beautiful Jardin des Tuileries until we reached the Egyptian obelisk at the bottom of the Champs-Élysées.  Not content with this, we kept walking until we reached Arc de Triomphe pausing only for breath and for tickets before we climbed to the top to be greeted with the almost incomprehensible sight of Paris in its spralling entirety.

 

Already tired but loathed to stop, We took the metro to Montparnasse where we visited the sites of both Man Ray's studio and the Dingo Bar - where Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald first met in 1925.  Our main destination in Montparnasse though, was 2 Impasse Lebouis and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.



We spent what was left of the evening walking around the Latin Quarter before taking a walk along the river then the metro to our hotel and to bed.

After our exertions walking around the city the day before, Asia and I both agreed to take it easier on Sunday.  We lay in bed longer then it was off to the Eiffel Tower.  A much colder and windy day, we agreed not to go up but it was eye-opening to realise the scale of it.  The rest of our afternoon was spent walking around the vast expanse of the Louvre.  The scale of this building and the artwork contained within really has to be seen to be believed.  I imagine you could spend a full day in the Louvre and still have much you didn't see when you leave.



On Sunday night we took the bus back to Beauvais and then a flight back to Prestwick.  After such a fun, busy, enjoyable and slightly fantastic weekend, it was a sobering thought to realise in just a few short hours, we would both be waking up to a Monday morning.

C'est la vie.

postscript: Thank you Asia - for everything.

Talvi / Winter

In May of last year, my friend Heidi and I started a collaboration that after false starts, missed deadlines and some interesting experiments, is finally taking shape.

We named the collaboration We Sink Ships and as the project was born of a mutual appreciation of photography and music, we decided to use pinhole and selective focus photography while also experimenting with ambient sounds and music that might fit alongside the visual work.  Since May we have also been posting online a 30 - 40 minutes worth of a music mix created by either one of us and hope to announce some occasional live DJ gigs in the coming months.  Not to be stopped there, since May - after a few years hiatus - I began to write music again and the results have become the musical output of We Sink Ships.

Of course, the project is mainly photographic in nature and so Heidi and I were delighted, and somewhat relieved, to announce our very first, online, exhibition hosted on the We Sink Ships website.

The exhibition is called Talvi / Winter and will run on our website until the 3rd of May 2009.  I hope you might take some time to visit the exhibition and come back here to comment.

You can visit the exhibition here

Henri Cartier-Bresson interviewed by Charlie Rose

I'm reviewing the content on my website and creating further sections so there might be a few days until my next post so in lieu of some actual blogging, here is Henri Cartier-Bresson in conversation with American interviewer Charlie Rose.

Travel. (à la Kapuścińki)

Pack the bag. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: Camera (Leica M8), passport (410763717), ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, take off, unfasten seat-belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seat-belt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten-seatbelts, stairs, airport, queue, border, customs, train, streets, houses, people, building, key, flat, stuffiness, thirst, familiarity, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life.

Maria Larssons Eviga Ögonblick

It is a universal truth that whenever there is a film festival around me, I will invariably have little money to spend on tickets to see any films.  It hadn't occurred to me to volunteer as a photographer for Glasgow's International Film Festival, as my friend Heidi had done thereby guaranteeing some welcome free tickets, so I was restricted to what I could afford and that wasn't much.  In the end I managed to see two films.  The first was a Palestinian film called "Laila's Birthday" and the second was a film by acclaimed Swedish director Jan Troell called Maria Larssons Eviga Ögonblick (Maria Larsson's Everlasting Moments).

Based on the true story of Troell's Mother-in-law, the film tells of Maria Larsson, a working class woman living in early twentieth century Sweden.  Trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive, womanising drunk, Maria finds escape through a camera she had won in a lottery.  Her discovery of photography grants her a new lease of life and a new way to see the world and it is this that makes the film so attractive.

While watching the film, I was reminded of my first, playful, childhood, impressions with an automatic film camera.  I remembered thoughts of my excitement at the click of the shutter, the whirr of the film winding and the incremental ascending of the exposure counter, and my amazement at the film negative against the positive 6x4 print.  Most of all though, I remembered more recent times and the first time I picked up an SLR camera.  Everything felt fresh and each new discovery - be it in composition or in technique, be it in black and white, or in colour - felt novel and important.  Most of all though, the film reminded me why photography can have such importance and gravitas.

For some, the film's Maria for example, photography can be a way to escape the mundanity or even brutality of their every day life by looking at the world in a different way.  To change the way you see the world, even if that simply means limiting it to a viewfinder's frame, can have a profound effect on how you understand your life and what surrounds you.  Taking a photograph, for instance, can become an eloquent metaphor for cropping or discarding what you don't need or want, leaving you with what is important and necessary.  For others, photography can be a medium through which artistic ideas can be presented by someone who may not have the skills to be creative with another medium.

I had just made the decision to close Too Many Fireworks when I first picked up an SLR,and it would be some months before the disappointment of bringing an end to my record label would subside.  I immersed myself in learning to photograph to give me something to focus on, something to identify with.  Six months on, I was smitten and knew I had my new obsession.

...and, well, I sure as hell can't draw... yet.

Bookmarks and Burn

A few days ago I decided it was time to have an overdue clearout of my bookmarks in Firefox.  The ever present individual bookmarks, done so in an effort not to forget a certain page needed only once more are the worst.  A column of links, their usefulness long forgotten, stare at me, willing me to remember why I'd taken the time to save them.  I resist and click delete, time and again.  Finished with these, I move on to my tidy bookmark folders, neatly seperated and lovingly labeled.  Well yes, they might be lovingly labeled and neatly seperated but they still get ignored as much as the individual links.  This particular afternoon, however, I've noticed a folder of photography blogs and realise I haven't visited them in quite some time.

After a few moments of chiding myself I decide to have a read at one of my favourites, David Alan Harvey's "Road Trips", only to find that a month or two back he had stopped posting.  I must admit my disappointment was somewhat shortlived when I realised his end to Road Trips only allowed him time to start an online magazine based around the fantastic community of photographers that would comment on his blog.  I looked at Burn Magazine for the first time the other day and I'm hooked.  Billed as an evolving journal for emerging photographers, it is a combination of blogs, photo essays and projects.  In Harvey's own words it "is born from an educational imperative and  to bring strong photographic essays and powerful text to not only photographers, but to anyone fascinated by a visual and literary interpretation of our complex planet".  Sounds interesting?  Then go and have a look...

http://www.burnmagazine.org

I bookmarked it, though, I hope I won't be reporting back in a month, bashfully - how else? - that I'd forgotten it.

No photos please!

Returning to my An Alright Start blog after the hiatus I had taken, I didn't expect my next post to be of a particularly political nature, however, today, it has become an offence to photograph a police officer.  Monday 16th February 2009 is the enforcement date for Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.

Glasgow, 02/06/07

As a photographer and an aspiring photojournalist this is an incredibly important issue to me.  A vital aspect of photojournalism is the recording of political dissent as it takes place on the streets and this cannot be unaffected by the new legislation.  By taking a photograph or - in the case of an editor - by publishing a picture of a police officer you are in danger of being arrested, if the police believe that it may be "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

I have found myself in several situations in the last two years where either I or other photographers were asked by Police to "desist" from photographing in the street, be it at a protest or some other event.  Until now though, there has been no legislation that requires the photographer to cease as long as he isn't breaking another law, so I have politely declined and continued photographing knowing that if I recieve any further attention by the officer, I can take his number and take this up with his superior.  From today, of course, the fear is that this legislation may be open to abuse.  Photographers will be asked to stop, then simply forced to stop citing section 76.

There may be grounds for necessary legislation to ensure certain information does not find its way into the "wrong hands", however, rather than it being an offence to make these images, would it not be more sensible to make the offence to knowingly supply these images "to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"?

As a side note, the new restrictions on photographers seem particularly distasteful especially when viewed alongside this country's particularly aggressive CCTV policy.  Yes, you can photograph us in every aspect of our public lives, but God help us if we turn the lens back on you.  Not content with this only, certain forces have been using a more intimidating form of surveillance.  A story from the Brighton Argus shows police setting up outside a club in the centre of town hosting a meeting of an environmentalist group.  Eye-witnesses reported officers "snapping visitors using a paparazzi-style lens" and behaving in a "deliberately intimidating manner”.  One rule for them...?

Returning to the original topic of this post, however, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Mark Thomas combined today to bring together an event outside New Scotland Yard.  Billed as "not a protest, just photography", photographers from the UK wide were invited to join them and simply take some photos.  Financial restrictions and work commitments prevented me from high-tailing it down there and I've yet to hear how it went - I can find little reporting of it in the press, however, I can only hope there was no trouble and that the point was emphatically made.

Keep calm and carry on

Photographers.  It may be a particular weakness in our psychology but we do like to categorize.  You have your landscape, your portrait, your commercial, your corporate, your sports, your macro, your PR, your panoramic, your stock, your wedding, your aerial, your fashion, your nature, your still life and your wild life photographers.  I like to consider myself - if I can presume to make such a consideration at all - above all else, a street photographer.

From my very first interest in photography I became intrigued, excited by and then besotted with street photographers and their art.  From Cartier-Bresson to Erwitt, Klein to Meyerowitz I was fascinated by the enigmatic frames caught by their Leica rangefinders.  As is my character, I read what I could, biographies, reviews and monographs, all to learn as much as possible about their craft.

It didn't take me long before I'd lost my initial inhibitions and made my way out onto the streets of Glasgow with my camera to put skills to the test.  After only a few short months shooting on the streets I had my first brush with over-zealous authority and in recent weeks, in our increasingly paranoid society, I've been thinking back to this time.

I'm sure, by now, most photographers who read this blog will be aware of the Metropolitan Police's "Thousands of people take photos every day..." anti-terrorism campaign.  For those who aren't familiar with it, you can see the poster here.

Though at this time specific to London, the poster has caused a marked unrest increasing to outright anger and concern from the photographic community in the United Kingdom.  Though, I'm sure worst case scenario, the obvious worry on photographers' minds is that innocently shooting in the street could lead to, well, a mistaken shooting in the street.  We only need to think back to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 to see that mistakes can happen when hysteria or paranoia take over.

The most worrying aspect of the campaign is its lack of detailed advice to the public.  There is a vague suggestion of what may be considered odd, but this can surely be misconstrued - quite wildly - by a public terrified at the thought of another terrorist attack.  The average Joe Bloggs in the street is sure to find it difficult to decide what constitutes odd behaviour when a photographer is in the street.  How do you accurately distinguish between a hobbyist and a terrorist?  Skin colour?  Dress?  The waters are already muddy before delving deep within.

Terrorists and terrorism exist solely to disrupt the way of life it disapproves of.  In the worst days of World War II, the government distributed posters bearing the legend "Keep Calm and Carry On", a sentiment that seems to have been forgotten in recent years.  A country with more CCTV coverage than anywhere  else in Europe and an allegedly over-reactive Police "service" pulling photographers aside for stop-and-searches; those in charge need to snap awake and realise that Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning not as a template.  The day we experience the Ministry of Love, I'm getting out of here.