Sneak Peek

...a glimpse of something strange in a Lincolnshire field. More about this soon...

I can't believe I'm sitting here in late June having to wear a winter sweater and drinking endless cups of white tea to keep warm, watching driving rain lashing the windows and my chili plants getting knocked over by the wind... I swear I saw hailstones this morning.

And, um, with my very English gambit of complaining about the weather used up, I find I don't have much else to say. Oh.

Except: recommended photo book: Good Girls by Maya Goded.

Back to the real world...

...with a bump this week. This, of course, being the same real world in which most of my photos are rubbish. So, just for a change I thought I'd post some of my also-rans and near-misses from the last week.





I do actually like this next one (and, in the immortal words of Rolf Harris, "can you tell what it is yet?"), but it loses too much as a small jpeg...



I've been fascinated this week by the start of David Milch's new HBO series John from Cincinnati. My interest in his work stems mostly from my abiding love of the English language, and all who sail in her, rather than any particular predilection for detectives, Gold Rush barkeeps, or professional surfers - and, while this new series doesn't have the utterly glorious "Shakespeare on crack in the Wild West" quality of Deadwood's dialogue*, Milch's voice and love of words shines through. It actually reminds me a lot of the way characters talk in Don DeLillo's novels - a sort of studied, stylised realism.

* - I still occasionally chuckle to myself at Swearengen's plans to open a "a small joint in Manchester, England catering to the specialists exclusive - to let them know they're amongst their own maybe I'll operate from the corner hanging upside down like a fucking bat."

Rock o' Clock

Now, I'm fairly sure that everyone reading this is either coming already, or much too far away, but anyways...



Back to, like y'know, photographs soon.

More Smoke, More Mirrors

There'll be a gallery of these up soon...



I've just got back from Photo London 07 ... pretty disappointing really. I'm not even sure what it's trying to be - a showcase of new work? a trade fair for galleries? a viewing opportunity for wealthy collectors? Certainly they seemed to be trying to make it very "exclusive" - it was at a posh venue in the City, with uniformed doormen, and an exorbitant admission fee… not really ideal for this struggling photographer.

Contents-wise: I was very happy to see some new colour work by Graciela Iturbide, and some (well, two…) lovely prints by Hiroshi Sugimoto, but otherwise there wasn’t a huge amount that caught my eye. The whole New Objectivism/Düsseldorf thing seems to be still in full swing, and there was some rather unfortunate video art.

In contrast – I also went to see How We Are: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain which is incredibly straightforward in what it’s trying to do, viz. showing the story of British photography from its inception to the present day. Masses of really fantastic work – an absolute delight. A revelation for me was the quality of some of the images from only a few decades after photography was invented. A Roger Fenton print from c. 1860 could have been made yesterday. Some astonishing colour images from the 1940s really stood out for me too … but there’s too much for me to list here. Go and see it if you can.