And then came the shot

Gallery updates

2010-08-02T11:02:00.005+01:00

It's been a long time I've not updated the blog, and it's about time. I blame my lack of time, though! I just came back from a quick meetup at Cardiff City Council to discuss (briefly) the status the Third Floor Gallery and handing them a copy of our trust deed. Since the last time I wrote on this blog we've shown a few nice photo exhibitions...

David Solomons - Up West

For the lovers of street photography, one of its main exponents on this time and age...

Jocelyn Bain Hogg - Muse

New work by Jocelyn Bain Hogg from VII Network. Muse dwelled in the little details of natural beauty.

ffotoCardiff

A group exhibition that showcased a large variety of photography produced in Wales.

Chris Steele-Perkins - For Love of the Game

For the duration of the Football World Cup we produced an exhibition with Magnum heavyweight Chris Steele-Perkins showing the social aspect of the game in Ghana, Japan and England.

Carolyn Drake - Paradise Rivers

And currently we are showing Paradise Rivers by Carolyn Drake. Some of the most beautifull documentary photography you'll come accross.

Also, with Carolyn we have a novelty. For the first time we had the spare time on the day of the opening to interview her and produce a little video on vimeo. It is just good enough, but they'll definitively improve over time!

Carolyn Drake 'Paradise Rivers' from Third Floor Gallery on Vimeo.

Donations - Third Floor Gallery

2010-03-26T10:46:00.004Z

Securing public funding seems tough, most seem to require that we survive on our own for a period of time, so now we are asking for donations at the gallery. Currently it goes to the Print Stravaganza account with a line saying that it is for the Third Floor Gallery. Don't worry, everything will go where it has to be.

You can find a donate button at our about page:
http://www.thirdfloorgallery.com/about.html

The main worry right now is to pay the £1400 of a quarters rent. We have part of this money, but by far not the whole amount, so any help is more than welcome. We also are preparing a gift at the end of our first year for all those who donated £200 or more, so that you have a memento of your good deeds.

Auction for Third Floor Gallery

2010-02-08T10:47:00.004Z

We're auctioning this professionally handmade print of mine:

... to raise funds for the Third Floor Gallery. We obviously need some way to get enough funds to be able to sustain all the costs of having the place open. For a typical month:

-£433 go into the lease.
-£141 go into business tax (although I am afraid this might go up in April).
-£200-250 go into gas and electricity.
-£66 go into the building's service charge
-£60 go into advertising and publicit
-£100 go into buying drinks for an opening

That makes just over £1000. And we don't even have a fridge or microwave yet!

By bidding on the print you can help us to cover our costs. All the money will go into the Third Floor Gallery. Auctions of donated items will become a staple of the gallery, and there will be one item donated with each exhibition. So keep your eyes peeled.

Third Floor Gallery

2010-01-17T22:17:00.005Z

We've been working for over a week on the Third Floor Gallery. Check it out:

It's a very pleasant place to hang around. Views over the bay and to Penarth, being close to the Millenium Centre, more of a seafront feel to it. Being up there it has a strange 'underground' feeling. Amazingly enough, our first show is Love UK by Peter Dench.

Love UK is Peter's search for what is loving like in Britain like nowadays. It tends to be honest, harsh and humorous. If you're around, the opening is on the 12th of February. Casually, the other opening around, is a Martin Parr opening on the 11th, to which we'll be going too.

Christmas and a few words about the times to come

2009-12-24T15:16:00.003Z

Guests have arrived to my mother's house. It has stopped raining, and the leg of deer that I have in the oven is almost ready. There's a Pedro Ximenez, cranberry and apple sauce going with it, so fingers crossed.

I have been ill during these last days, and extremely busy. Maciej Dakowicz and I are opening the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff Bay in February. We have the first two shows scheduled already (if you're interested, get in touch, even if it's because of curiosity on how things work). I just bought the domain but we have not set up the page yet. Next goes creating something followable on facebook and flickr, so that people can stay in touch. It is going to be quite a blast. Exciting photography is coming up and I must say I'm excited myself. On the other hand it is all quite hard work and economically risky, but once in a lifetime it's worth trying. It has been a very long journey to get to this point, and it all started about a year ago.

So, I'll stop emailing, registering stuff, and so, get back to my leg of deer and wish a merry xmas.

Good times are rolling for the street

2009-11-28T19:30:00.002Z

It looks like as of late lots of momentum on street photography are actually turning into products, physical objects, things you can see and find around. Up to a point this comes from the pressure and drive generated online, and how the net has allowed the few distant practitioners to group together.

Some selected items:

Publication, is the first street photography magazine to date, as far as I know. It is published twice a year and is made out of a little magazine with essays and interviews (Meyerowitz, i.e.) and 22 lovely prints on heavy paper and nicely edited together. You can buy it for £14.

David Solomons has self published two great books. One of them, Happenstance, is the best of his black and white work to date. It is a great book, with a nice flow, and very stylish pictures. The second one, Underground, reveals the underground life of the London Tube lighted up by Solomons' flash, in fascinatingly contemporary colour. You can get both books for £30, which is a steal.

Jouko Leskelä has published Tilannekuvauksen Opas. It's a title in Finnish, but as far as I know is the first practical guide to event and street photography. It covers things from themes and methods to practical tips given by the author. The style is very approachable (many of the photographs are very approachable too!) and the tips instead of patronizing just reflect the practice of the author. I wonder if something similar (or a translation) will appear in English. Price online is 24e.

Dr Karanka's Print Stravaganza: LONDON - 9th of October

2009-09-11T18:01:00.004+01:00

The next Print Stravaganza is going to take place in The Others, in East London on the 9th of October as part of the London Photomonth. Samuel Bedford is the main organizer of this one. You're still on time to submit your work. Also, I have finally figured out how to use paypal to process donations for the Stravaganza. Yes, the Stravaganza is as close to free as it gets, but everybody is running some costs. Now the main one is submitting the accumulated work to the next venue, because we have several kilograms of prints. Samuel has been doing a great job, and the event in London will have promotion such as fliers, which incurs in extra costs. If you wonder whether your donation will be well spent, check the photographs of the events that you can find here.

Anyway, there's the donation button:

Mirroring

2009-08-30T18:46:00.002+01:00

It's fun when photographs mirror other photographs. This is mine, from some night out in Cardiff not that long ago:

And this one is from the Ma'alot massacre 35 years ago:

(Thanks to nir kristal for noticing.)

Paintings and stuff

2009-08-12T16:34:00.003+01:00

I was feeling a bit bloated about photography and I wandered into the Martin Tinney Gallery. This is a private art gallery I've heard of pretty positive reviews, and it's a nice large space. It's strange to check out paintings when what you do and see most of the time are photographs. It's a bit like surviving a year on documentaries and then watching two musicals in a row. I do wonder, though, how much the bluntness, and the twisting of reality that photography provide influence my taste in painting. Most of it was tremendously boring: landscapes, more landscapes, some portraits, a nude. Very few non figurative work actually, and of the little there was, I could not judge on its merit (didn't really make an impression).

I did really like some work, though.

Darren Hughes had up a number of very bleak landscapes. The dark tones, and often the extremely large fields of view resembled panoramic photographs. They were a depressing but beautiful view of the valleys. Lots of rain and fog on top of the hills.

Kevin Sinnott was my favourite, though. Interesting compositions of town life with some contemporary twists here and there, like a painting of a chap free running up a bus stop with some girls watching, or a country scene by a house that randomly happens to have naked figures in one of the groupings. I've not been able to find either one of these online, so I'll show some other of his pieces. Once again, I'm afraid I could see the first one of these being a scene shot with a Mamiya 7.

To further dig into the paralelism with the photography world, I thought that the work of Sally Moore deeply resembled things that you could find in Flickr Explore. Some sort of pop crowdpleasing. Maybe I'm just a very boring guy.

Mindfist

2009-06-27T00:27:00.004+01:00

Slowly, mindfist is growing and developing. We're a collective of photographers with intentions. I think we got together because we know how we can do things, not really knowing what things to do. Maybe I'm tired, but it's a bit like those Pistols lyrics of "I don't know what I want but I know how to get it". It's a melting pot, a small one, but the good thing is that we're all motivated. Not the best photographers or curators, but hopefully we are aware of our limitations and stick to small pieces of work that are achievable with our limited talent. Well, maybe not that limited.

Mat Newton drives his photography sideways, I think. When things start to work, he'll get interested in something different and bring it to a visually finished point somehow. He has his urban growth gallery on mindfist. Cyril Costilhes is stuck in a small town. He dreams of travelling but all he has to shoot is a corner of the French riviera. A sunny but dark town which walks the line between being empty and overcrowded, where the elderly come to die under the sun. His Down the Riviera gallery is on mindfist. Gareth Jelley is chasing the dragon. The subject of his photographs seems to have just disappeared at the blink of the eye or be at some distance in the future. Often, they are fragments of diaries to which the viewer has no access. Other times, they are stories that draw from cinema. He has been working on several series on mindfist. Then we have Philip Koch and Diada. Diada is pure photography. So pure she's not had time to put the camera down to stop and show what's going on inside her head. I've seen the stuff, and I know it's coming up soon. There's some faith you need for the waiting as there's some faith you need for getting into her images. Philip is mad, and will prove it too. He's sort of both the black sheep and the ingenious mastermind of mindfist. I have two sets in mindfist. Each tries to be presented in its own fashion, the way that resembles the most the way they would be presented in a physical form.

Into the mainstream

2009-06-25T20:44:00.003+01:00

I shot a handfasting (sort of a wedding) last weekend. In nice sweet 220 colour film in square format. It's kind of fun to give a go to what is the ultimate breadmaker of the professional photographer. I got the film processed pretty fast, so I'm already making a dummy of the book. This is misleading in the speed, as I only got low res scans of the film, and the final copy will need rescanning of all the images that are bound to be printed.

Anyway, a truly enjoyable experience.

Shortcuts in photography: nudity = intimacy

2009-05-20T15:34:00.002+01:00

It's quite surprising how bad photography is for capturing certain things. The lack of narrative of single images and even sequences is a large handycap compared to mediums better suited for such things (as literature or cinema). One of the main 'cheap tricks' that this has led to, I think, is the equation nudity = intimacy in photography. As soon as we have somebody naked in a remote location (tree, lake, desert) or in an enclosed space (hotel room, house), there is this tendency to give intimacy to the shot. In some cases this is the case, as with Sally Mann's Immediate Family, where the artist photographed her own children for years. But more often than not, just an illusion of closeness is created. The nudes of 100th East Street by Bruce Davidson comes to mind. I like the work, but, what's their purpose and how did the photographer get there? It's not as clear cut as Mann's work.

Anyway, if you like the nudity = intimacy equation, you might want to sign up for the newsletter Nofound(secret). It's limited to 5000 subscriptors.

Fuck, let's do it, and cheap

2009-05-15T11:18:00.003+01:00

For me one of the main problems I have with photography is that there's not much for show where I live. Yeah, we have the ffotogallery that's cool but it's a) miles away, and b) very small. When I look at prints (and I've seen loads), I don't see them as extremely expensive items. Of course, with speculation some pieces might go for ridiculous prices, but if I asked a photographer mate of mine to send me a dozen of 8x10'' prints, it wouldn't cost him that much. That's why I set up the Dr Karanka's Print Stravaganza, which is now on a world tour. I mean, come on, if you love photography you can move your butt and send a few cool prints. And I can do my part and stick them up somewhere. And you, lurker, pop by and have a beer. Seriously, that simple, and with good results.

First I had it at home. It was pretty cool, but there wasn't that many people. The space was ok, but to make the most of it everything worked by blue tack and no attempts of framing:

Then I found a social club that gave me a room to show in. Again, very few people, but a pretty cool place to show with nice atmosphere and good beer. The show was further smartened up by using frames:

Then the whole lot of prints went to Bologna, Italy. We had a whole social house in an old market to work in. I mean, it was massive. Luckily the guys of Fotografi di Strada (twelve, fifteen of them?) were around for a good six hours of work sorting through prints, editing, sticking, gluing, making panels, hanging stuff. This time we had so much space that we arranged some 'solo' walls. On top of that there were three bands and two dj's. The whole thing carried on till 7am.

What I'm trying to say is, if you love photography, it's time to stop complaining and starting to do stuff. It doesn't need to be expensive, you don't have to do it every week, but let's just fucking throw a ball every now and then. If I get any kind of random invitation I'll most probably accept than decline, and most probably promote it too. I must say I'm quite busy, though, trying to get the photography collective I am part of into an organization that can also promote some shows. But also trying to sneak some vans displaying photography into Rencontres d'Arles. I must say this last idea is by Laura Rodari, but it's too cool to not think about it.

(Photographs, in order, by Joni Karanka, Maciej Dakowicz, David Wilson and pizzafellas.)

Dr Karanka's Print Stravaganza @ Bologna

2009-05-06T22:36:00.004+01:00

Dr Karanka's Print Stravaganza keeps on growing and opens on Saturday at XM24 in Bologna. The event will have also plenty of music and assorted mayhem. If you're around that bit of Italy, pop in for a beer and say hello. You might even enjoy the Bitchy Heart Killers, who knows.

Diane Arbus in Cardiff

2009-05-03T09:58:00.003+01:00

There will be an exhibition of 69 prints by Diane Arbus at the National Museum here in Cardiff on the 9th of May (although I can't find it on their site). If you can, contact the Museum about the opening event taking place on the 7th of May...

I managed to find a note about the whole thing in USA Today. Worryingly little publicity about this, so I'll try to confirm my rvsp.

Dr Karanka's Print Stravaganza - Tonight at the New Park Liberal Club

2009-04-17T15:45:00.003+01:00

I'm going to hang the stuff for a week tonight in the New Park Liberal Club. There are some images of the last Stravaganza:

Starting at 6pm the a part of the same photographs (I got submissions from 60 photographers) will be hanging at the Club, that looks like this:

East of the river Taff

2009-04-09T11:51:00.002+01:00

As of late I've been shooting during the day around the neighborhoods of Cathays, Roath, Penylan and Splott. I like the chaos of the back alley.

Dr Karanka's Stravaganza: aftermath

2009-04-08T12:19:00.004+01:00

This is what the walls looked like on Saturday:

I'm probably hanging the prints next Wednesday on the wall of the New Park Liberal Club in City Road for about a week. After that they are shipped to Bologna for the following event there. If you live around Bologna, stay tuned.

(Photographs by Maciej Dakowicz)

Daily Telegraph steals the photographs of my mate, adds them enfuriating captions and publishes the whole lot

2009-04-07T14:56:00.002+01:00

The Daily Telegraph has published online this set of photographs, that are the work of Maciej Dakowicz. This was done without asking for permission, with no payment and not even credit on the photographs. Some of the captions have been twisted on the interest of the Telegraph, even if they are untrue. I've sent them a complaint, but I wonder if they'll read it. Here it goes:

Regarding your article on "shocking photographs of drunken behaviour in Cardiff" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5119650/Shocking-photographs-of-drunken-behaviour-in-Cardiff.html)

You migh at least want to contact the photographer (Maciej Dakowicz), as I doubt he has given his consent in the online publication of these photographs. Among others, his name has not been cited anywhere. Also, some of the claims that have been added as captions to the photographs are untrue. One of them is that people in one of the photographs are being beaten and kicked, which I think might not be the case although the editor has happily claimed so. Another claim is that people perform sex surrounded by other people. Such sexual acts are not depicted in any of the photographs, so I think that it's again the fault of a "trigger happy" editor.

Photographers are not very keen on having their work robbed by established magazines and newspapers, so I'd like to ask for this article to be removed or ammended with the consent of the photographer.

Sincerely,
Joni Karanka

Dr Karanka's Stravaganza - Cardiff

2009-04-03T18:15:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow I'll be showing in my living room prints from a lot of photographers. I've been receiving these over the last month, and once they are placed in a box they will be sent to Bologna. Dates: tomorrow from 6pm in 41 Arran Street, Cardiff. On the 9th of May in XM24, via fioravanti 24, 20100 Bologna.

Some picks:

Cyril Costilhes

Joni Karanka

Vicky Slater

Ben Roberts

Jules Boast

Maciej Dakowicz

White Sea Black Sea - Jens Olof Lasthein

2009-04-02T16:34:00.004+01:00

I got today White Sea Black Sea by Jens Olof Lasthein. Its imagery is some of the busiest I've seen as of late. Each panoramic photograph is almost a portrait, street photograph and landscape all in one. Everywhere that you look in each frame there is something going on. One photograph has four geese walking on a line in a corner and I find it over the top. It is actually so busy that by reaching the end of the book I feel bloated. It is good though the story on the change of Eastern Europe has been done before. By the way, this pretty book is going at £15 on amazon.

A Thousand Portraits

2009-03-01T12:59:00.003Z

My mate Eamon Lane and Carlo Nicora have shot Thousand Portraits. In one weekend they shot 1000 people in London. This gives a very short term description (everybody there in one slice of time) of what you can find there. Reminds me of that Borges short story, On Exactitude in Science, in which the cartographers guild produces a map of the realm that describes the realm in a 1:1 scale, and so, occupies the whole realm.

Photographicon - Exhibition at Newport

2009-02-20T15:35:00.003Z

Next week I'm taking part in an exhibition by Newport documentary photography students (as a guest). It's entitled Photographicon and I just finished framing my photographs. Should be viewable from Monday evening till the next week, and takes place at the Newport School of Art, Media and Design.

(Photograph by Chiara Tocci)

Back

2009-01-23T20:07:00.001Z

Back into work. Replaced yesterday my laptop and started scanning again today. First picture comes from Somerset, and is from the first roll shot with my new half frame camera.

Things to keep myself busy

2009-01-14T15:26:00.002Z

I've lately been shooting sequences of images with a half frame. I've started to write papers out of my thesis to get something published. At the end of the month I'm going to Finland. First Helsinki, later Karstula. It will be freezing. I have to start scanning again (I don't have a laptop due to a burglary) to put things together. I bought a Mamiya 6, and hopefully it will make its way from Korea before travelling. There's some C41 in the shop around the corner, developing. I'll see if the Olympus Pen works or whether I'm wasting my time with the half frame. I bought it for 3 euros, and at a rate of 72 frames for a 36 roll of 35mm, it seems like a good deal.

If you have been missing street photography, check these interviews with Mike Peters at the b blog and Jesse Marlow at the f blog.

F double feature

2009-01-14T15:24:00.002Z

Some of the stuff I shot in 2008, at the f blog. Part 1 and part 2. Both from my slightly massive night project by now entitled last orders (this link leads to older images).

Bye bye November

2008-12-16T12:47:00.002Z

I'm back in Spain for Christmas. At the beginning of December I got my PhD. On November, I had a picture in La Pura Vida (check the slideshow).

I'm more busy over at tumblr if you want to see images that catch my eye.

Being Jack Kerouac

2008-11-12T12:59:00.003Z

As of late I've been reading The Subterraneans by Kerouac. At the beginning I thought that the chaotic speechlike style of the writing was making the book drag... the flow at points was pretentious and pompous in a way that caught more of my attention than the message the author was trying to get through. This changed in the second half, although I still don't know if this is due to a change in my own perception -getting used to the flow of the book- or a change in the writer -dropping the over the top style a bit and getting into the beat-. However, at this point the love story somehow manages to get the most out of the reader. It preys page after page in what I might have in common of Kerouac's experiences up to the point of exploding when he experiences jealousy. Somehow, the buildup to this part of the book works due to its anarchic style. Since the beginning we know that she's going to run out with Yuri, he has premonitions of what's going to happen and -as the book is more confessed than narrated- we have glimpses of past and future. I just find it hard to believe that any collection of photographs can produce emotional recognition of the same sort or stamp us with the feelings of the author. Reading The Subterraneans I get two impressions... on one hand I am Jack Kerouac watching Mardouc -Alene Lee- having fun with a friend at the back of a car and getting more and more insecure and jealous... and on another hand I'm myself remembering similar feelings once and again. I know what memories Kerouac is preying on, and I can sort of see how his confessional style can make the effect more intense. The fluidity of his prose at points reaches something that is either the blurred beat of the speach of a friend or the mental language we go through on our awake.

(Jack Kerouac by Burt Glinn, 1959)

Instead, when looking at photographs I usually experience the shock of Webb or Gilden... those photographs stamped as with hot iron in my mind for months due to their graphic nature, the aesthetic of a poem spread out in a single layer of paper... but I rarely get the emotional recognition of what is going on in the image, that brings me back my own memories in the way literature does. This doesn't mean that photography can't touch me, although more often it does shock me yet not touch me. Anders Petersen and Tom Wood, do somehow touch me more, although I find it hard to put in words what would they prey on. Tom Wood, for example, doesn't seem to rely much on a narrative, and the feeling I get seems to be out of the raw beauty of his images. Petersen seems more predictable, being a close and more obviously emotional photographer that he is... all feels like getting out the notebook again...

Tate

2008-11-11T19:51:00.001Z

Photo taken at the Duveen gallery of Tate British, by the Tate.

Travelling: London

2008-11-05T16:01:00.004Z

I'll be in London from Friday till Sunday. On Friday evening I'll pop by the Tate British where one of my pictures will be shown. Part of the Street and Studio book by the Tate.

I wonder what it looks like very big:

Away, yet not slacking

2008-10-28T09:51:00.004Z

I have not been updating the blog, but if you need some refreshment, check Photohemorrhage.

These days I've been busier than it seems. I did some printing with Joe in Edinburgh and now I'm unemployed. I'll try temping for a while, and so, I'm writing and rewriting my cv and applying for all kinds of crap. On the side I'm writing grants on arts and sciences, for getting a research post next year and hopefully some photography funded as well. Not that I'm expecting it, but it would be a plus really.

It's sort of fun to try to water down my "hello, I'm an academic" cv into something that is more like "hey, I'm a guy that happens to have lots of experience doing research and giving talks (ups, sorry, forgot the programming)".

Question to readers... describing images...

2008-10-10T12:44:00.004+01:00

I'll try to describe this image in words. I'm quite interested in what you'll come up with, so I'll write my description in a train trip from here to Manchester tomorrow and post it at some later point.

Could you describe it as accurately as possible while being sort of evocative and avoiding too many technicisms? Or maybe there's so much variability in the descriptions that I shouldn't ask for any constraints...

Cheers.

You have it larger here.

Travelling: Manchester, Edinburgh, St Andrews

2008-10-10T12:43:00.001+01:00

I'll be in Manchester tomorrow evening and Edinburgh on Tuesday afternoon. On Friday I'll stop by St Andrews and then head back.

Common Diaries

2008-10-08T18:14:00.003+01:00

I started about a month ago to shoot something that I've started to call the Common Diaries. I think that most of my shooting has to do with what everybody has in common with each other, what is universal about the human experience. When shooting nightlife, my usual reference is the lust for life, the apetite for more than what is possible that is at some point broken into by reality -a body too fragile and a place too decayed-. When shooting adolescence -in a series with the working title The Fountains-, what started as peering into a group that I'm not part of has turned more into a work on my own memories. I think that both the primordial lust for life and the melancholic recollection of adolescence are universal human experiences.

Common Diaries tries to be a visual diary of things experienced by anybody, sort of my diary minus me. It is common or shared or universal. It was seeded by a single image that I have been trying to follow, and it has been lending itself towards being evocative and graphical. I try to produce images that will have a strong texture and no central elements. Something like a visual puzzle that is a bit too obscure to have a solution, yet interesting to peer into. After a few days fully shooting and now checking the contact sheets, more and more ideas emerge, and I'm fully enjoying it. Not all the images are follow ups of the original anymore, although I hope they work at an interesting beat. It also has an enormous chance factor. I don't know about the look of the images nor I'm interested in them until I see them on the negative. That frees me some time to actually just enjoy, lay back, and go shooting.

Same place, different photographer

2008-09-15T23:32:00.002+01:00

I was amazed in July when I saw this print by Paolo Pellegrin:

Seen large it is quite a gritty beauty. Between heaven and hell, shot in some exotic location in the middle of a storm.

Then you notice that it actually is shot in Marseille and that all that contrast must come from sunlight. Oh, red filters, bless us.

Same place, same ferry, shot by Julien Boast:

Views from Children of Weegee

2008-09-05T14:01:00.005+01:00

I run this small flickr group called Children of Weegee. I thought it was about time to update a selection of images from the pool to show over here. Thanks to all the regular (and not so regular) contributors!

- by Patrick Romero

- by Olivier Thebaud

- by Andrej Filev

- by diadainconsupertrafra

- by Eric Weiss

- by Joni Karanka

- by Todd Fisher

- by Olivier Thebaud

- by Rose and Olive

- by Todd Fisher

- by Igor Moukhin

- by Joni Karanka

- by Philip Koch

- by Rafal Pruszynski

- by Rafal Pruszynski

- by Maciej Dakowicz

- by Andrej Filev

- by Cyril Costilhes

Politics & condoms

2008-09-03T13:21:00.004+01:00

I'm following the American candidate race for presidency. It's much better than following football, and it has some real life soap opera elements. Plus you can perfectly follow it from the newspapers. It's just hilarious, where did they find a character like Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vicepresident? Guns, babies & Jesus sounds like a great book title -I might borrow that one-, but it has been stated that it's what she stands for. No, not by her haters, but by her followers! What an archetype... holding a gun in an office fitted with a bear fur she prompts memories of macho characters such as Rambo or Terminator... maybe one of those A-Team chicks that holds a submachine gun and has the same hit rate than the rest of the team...

But anyhow, the really tragic character is Levi Johnston. He's -allegedly- the man that made Palin's daughter pregnant. She says that they are going to marry, but I'm not sure if he has said anything. It's a bit late for abortions, and anyhow, Palin wouldn't really like that. With Bristol being seventeen and Levi eighteen, they can't even drink champagne after their wedding. Plus the mum is pretty much against abortion. And she hunts moose. And not only she's the Governor of Alaska and has been found to use this in her advantage before, but is running for vicepresident. The eyes of the whole Republican party -and also Jesus, and a random passerby like myself- must be on Levi. Could you get an erection with the whole Republican party watching? Damn. I think Levi makes a great pro-condom campaign. A month ago he was happily having a bit of a go with Bristol and now suddenly things have changed quite a bit. From a cheerleader she's turned into the daughter of Sarah Palin, the Red Sonja of Alaska. Case he had used a condom, things would be perfectly ok now. Instead, he's confronted with the pressure of a big political party and a mother in law that doesn't show compassion even for polar bears. Come on, if she sued the Federal state for trying to list polar bears -because the poor things happen to share territory with oil deposits-, what can she do to a guy that wouldn't marry her pregnant daughter?

Enough politics / gossip rant for today. Use condoms.

Moving pictures... High Hopes

2008-08-31T14:12:00.002+01:00

I usually don't like music videos. Often I think that they manage to misrepresent the song or they age too easily or are too cheesy. I was really surprised when I loved the music video of High Hopes from beginning to end. It's full of beautiful surreal scenes, filmed with smooth camera movements and notable variety. It carries on suggesting and making me wonder. It manages somehow to mix these simple dreamlike scenes of warm colours with strong dutch angles. The mood and imagery it carries sticks as much as The Third Man. Sorry for the quality of the following captures... you'd rather just check the video I linked above!

Thanks to the f blog for pointing out the video!

Welsh Weather complaints

2008-08-27T15:52:00.003+01:00

After reading in today's edition of the Western Mail the article The most miserable August on record I'm not that surprised I shoot indoors and at night. August in Wales allows for up to 14 hours of sunlight / day due to it's high latitude. However, we only reach an average of about 4 hours of light / day this year, which is even less than the usual 6 or 7. And it's true, about half of the days are heavily overcast and the other half are cloudy (that's when some sun comes through). Rainfall has been pretty heavy as well. The only times that you see people out is when they go shopping and at night when they go out. Gloomy as fuck. Of course, not even the most miserable weather can stop people from going out for a pint even if they have to return drenched.

I think there was more activity in spring than there is now, at least in places like parks and other outdoor venues. People knew back then that the weather was rainy and they were prepared for it and went out. Even sometimes, the activity that would otherwise take place outdoors would move into the undergrounds, but with the gloomy summer that doesn't happen either. Oh, when is March coming back?

(The Fountains in winter by me.)

Photographers featured in tumblr

2008-08-19T21:21:00.003+01:00

If you want to see the latest odd findings of photographers or fast and dirty edits of interesting work I'm doing, you should check my tumblr Photohemorrhage. Preferably, subscribe to the RSS feed, as it gets quite a few images / week in.

In the last couple of days it has featured...

- Natasha Klimchuk

- Micke Berg

and

- Kramer O'Neill

Visitors

2008-08-13T15:54:00.002+01:00

This blog has visitors. Usually they come from these places:

Council Estates

2008-08-09T00:06:00.003+01:00

There's this thing in the UK that I can't recognize a minimally rough council estate when I walk into one. Sometimes I wonder if they actually are rough at all. At least in Cardiff. Last night -this morning for the rest of you mortals- I couldn't sleep, so I went for a walk. I started around half past four or five and went up to some hills in Cardiff that I had seen in google maps. Cyncoed happened to be this very posh neighbourhood with large gardens and up to four cars / house. There was a UWIC university campus up there. Nobody on the streets and lots of green. Anyhow, pretty posh, as said before. Then I walked into Llanedeyrn on my way back. It's a bit higher on the hill, and you can see that it's rolling down towards the sea, but all the houses get into the way. There are lots of alleys and underways and bits of green in the middle. My mate tonight was telling me that it's full of 'nasty boys' and that people there have lots of dogs for self defence. I didn't really see anybody while I was there between half past five and half past six, excepting a lady walking on her way back home and an old lady walking a dog -who happened to say 'good morning'-. Anyhow, the houses were pretty cramped together, but the bits of green everywhere made me think that this was way more posh than my home in Roath. And the cars were pretty posh as well. My mate was saying that people give certain value to having proper cars and arrange them one way or another -benefits, i.e.-. Ok, none the less, this seemed like a pretty ok neighbourhood to be in, more than my own. The only dischording note was the local newsagent / supermarket. It was this sort of concrete bunker with steel shutters. Although it did not have graffiti, the underpasses around had, and they were dark. At some point the sun was raising (quarter to five, I think) and I couldn't see shit with all the houses. So I decided to get into this tower block. I shot from the fourth story. It was quite lovely. Clean, smelled nice. I could see Rhumney and the sea. The hill got there gradually. The clouds took all over the sky, with little patches of blue above me. Then I walked back home. Penylan was as posh as usually, but the streets seemed longer. Black clouds came and it started to rain. My mate was telling me that he's going to take holidays in Trefforest. I thought, damn, there's nothing in Trefforest, so I asked what is there. 'Nothing!' he said. He'll go there when the mushroom season is good to pick for the rest of the year. Oh, these prosperous hills.

La Pura Vida Gallery

2008-08-02T12:58:00.003+01:00

La Pura Vida Gallery carries on and is looking for August submissions (open to everybody). I've heard that the gallery of July is almost ready, and yours truly features in here and there in June. These are nice varied mixes, so if you think you might not have anything suitable for it, check if you have old polaroids or slides, check the pictures you took six month ago and you still remember, and go and submit. It's sort of fun too.

Martin Parr - British Cities: Cardiff

2008-07-26T15:48:00.004+01:00

Today with the Guardian comes a supplement shot by Martin Parr about Cardiff. The coverage is quite good. There's even a place I haven't been to: the Canton Liberal Club. Probably because I go to the New Park Liberal Club in Canton, but hey, this one he shot is posh. On the other hand, the photography is sort of average. No Martin Parr classics in this one, although it's not bad bad. Ash and Nick from Spillers are there, Ninjah is there, the Clwb is there.

I must have almost bumped into him with Maciej one day. He shot the Heineken Cup final in rugby, and writes "The city was very lively indeed that night, as Munster fans gave the Welsh a lesson in drinking and celebrating". He sadly doesn't include a photograph of the city at night, though, but one of the match. I took this one that night:

Ah, Munster fans...

Welsh Surfaces 2nd Edition, on Blurb

2008-07-25T17:44:00.002+01:00

I revamped the layouts of Welsh Surfaces, and now it is available on blurb for £8.45. I'm waiting to see if the double page spreads work this time. On the first edition they ran over the spine! Dammit!

Seen in Arles... Andrej Ban

2008-07-21T15:04:00.007+01:00

Another photographer whose name I wrote down in Rencontres d'Arles is Andrej Ban. I probably saw his work in the slideshows of the European Night. He's a Slovakian reporter, and you can see more of his stuff in his webpage. Some strong stories in there, although the stuff that makes me most curious is that he has a book about Slovakia. Close to home is usually good...

Italian summer

2008-07-20T12:45:00.003+01:00

It's quite surprising how much the number of interesting Italian photographers has increased in the last year. I guess it's all slightly based around the growth of fotografi di strada, the Italian street photography group. I'll misrepresent them as mischievious little buggers with very direct shots and some sense of humour. So as for trying to get simplistic tags that other people can misrepresent as well.

- cafone

- ciarlicappa

- laura rodari

- philip koch

- pigei

- sanoi

I guess this summer I can be expecting more of the same. Plus the oddities of hardcore animal farm photography. Hum.

Arles: Night of the Year

2008-07-16T11:23:00.004+01:00

In Rencontres d'Arles I was showing photographs in a slideshow with tangophoto. Here is a photograph of what the crowd that did not manage to get a seat looked like:

We were sharing our nice little square with a new music magazine called Vox Pop. I met by chance three girls from the magazine at a restaurant earlier, when I handed them my mosquito spray. Arles was full of mosquitos. Here the girls from the magazine look a bit lost:

And here are my new Dutch contacts, who were producing excellent photographs in a centric square of la Roquette by the simple act of bringing their own wine with them:

There's a different edit of the night in the f blog.

Arles: Christian Lacroix fashion show

2008-07-15T22:59:00.003+01:00

I had free entry to the Christian Lacroix fashion show in Rencontres d'Arles. My seat was very very far away, so at some point I dodged the guy that was handling the big spotlight on stage and just walked down there. I shot maybe a dozen pictures, but was lucky enough to catch one of the two guys kicked out of stage. At some point they just ran into the middle of the stage and started to dance. As can be seen, one of them is carrying two cameras!

(All pics by me.)

Arles Polaroids: improvised Cardiff by Night Exhibition

2008-07-15T21:44:00.001+01:00

Shot by Cyril Costilhes. Exhibited on the window of Pharmacie du Forum.

Seen in Arles... Stefan Vanfleteren

2008-07-14T17:01:00.007+01:00

The European Night of Rencontres d'Arles was for me a bit disappointing. Lots of boring photographs of more of the same shot in more of the same way. It is amazing how many photographers from different countries decide to put a photograph of an abandoned car in the middle of the forest in their slideshow. Coincidence?

At least the Belgians were hitting a bit harder. They had at least two photographers that got ovations from the audience each time that a new bunch sat to look at their work. One of them was Stephan Vanfleteren:

The edit he has online doesn't seem as strong as what he was showing in Arles, and I can't find many of the photographs. His portraits of Belgians at home and in bars were very strong. Often funny, close.

Arles

2008-07-11T13:25:00.002+01:00

I am in Arles now and it is sunny. My photographs are hanging in the window of Pharmacie du Forum, between the main venue and the square where you go to have a pastis. Tonight is the Night of the Year and some of those photographs are in a slideshow in the first square in La Roquette.

This far only five photographs have been stolen. Polaroids of the venue to follow.

Weather again

2008-07-05T17:58:00.003+01:00

All the rain is driving me a bit mad now. I start to think that Britain has only two representative months in a year: March and October. Marches are characteristicly rainy, murky and windy. The average day is cloudy, cool but mild and presents rain at some point. These days carry on one after another for weeks. Ocasionally there is continuous rain for a day or two, but this rarely carries on for a week. Sometimes, cool but dry days happen. Snow can't be expected. The sun appears every now and then. Very rarely a day or two of sunshine raises the temperatures unexpectedly, only to immediately return to the murky rainy days. Octobers are characeristicly rainy, murky and windy. The average day is cloudy, mild and presents rain at some point. These days are mixed with the occasional day that does not present rain and in which the clouds retreat to show some sunshine. This happens for a day or two, but rarely carries on for a week. Every now and then you get thunderstorms and torrential rain. Altough rarely we get the cold average weather of Marches, occasional very cold days can be expected. Sometimes a day or two of peak sun and warmth appear, but these are as frequent as snow, which means that you can't rely on them happening on a specific year.

Also, you can't expect Marches and Octobers to happen on a certain part of the year, they are just sort of mixed around. They can't be predicted. For example, this July (like last year) seems to be another March:

I feel very lucky that I'm going to France on Monday. They have summer months there.

Weather, geography, culture, street photography

2008-07-02T18:27:00.004+01:00

The weather is pissing me off quite a bit. Not that I'd do anything better than sitting in a cafe and writing, but oh my, this is a bit too unpredictable. About five minutes ago it was almost sunny (although raining) and now it's murky and grey again. This morning it was sunny for a bit. This is a very common trick of the British weather for getting you out of home without an umbrella. It sort of enjoys watching people get back from work absolutely soaked. This afternoon, when I went to the shower there was a thunderstorm. There I was, washing my hear listening to the thunder. I got out of the shower and it was sunny. But raining, of course. Back in the day, before coming to the UK seeing rain while the sun was shining was sort of an exceptional happening. "Wow, look, how is it possible?" Now, well, it's just another state of the day. For the last two weeks it has been raining every day, not as badly yesterday, when it only started in the afternoon and carried till today. But a few days ago it was just rain and rain and rain. We have worse weather than Canada! They at least have "dry" summers! Damn.

Being in this kind of enviroment I always wonder how there can be so many British (or Britain-based) street photographers. It doesn't make any sense. They should be doing something like pub photography, or cosy home-by-the-stove photography, but no, they sort of run out on those twenty sunny days a year and shoot the hell out of it. I thought it might be that English excentricity, but then I realize that Tom Wood is Irish (although based in Liverpool):

At least Martin Parr took full advantage of the highlights of our weather in his book "Bad Weather":

But god, what kind of a self-lacerating geek you have to be to do such a thing? It had to be Parr, who always turns all the odds in his advantage, who came up with such a book.

Anyhow, things are not a lot better in the rest of the world. In northern and central Europe the weather is just a bit better than over here, so yeah, strolls are perfectly possible, but you rather maybe move outside the city and chill out a bit? In the south we mostly lack the idea of purposefully going out to the street to catch some glimpses of reality. This seems to be changing (check for example the Italian fotografi di strada flickr group), and although the laws -as in France- do not rule in favour of the photographers, these seem to be the perfect lands to shoot. On the other hand, in the United States only a few spots seem to be good for walking around and shooting while doing so (NYC, e.g.). There seems to be a lot of empty space and people in cars. Boring. Plus you can be stopped for crossing a street. They even call such an event jaywalking.

Maybe time to move to Japan.

Photographs, diaries, snapshots

2008-06-25T18:11:00.002+01:00

I was talking with my friend Neil the other day. He said he was shooting after a funeral, in order to have some sort of memory of the even happening at all, and that people were most surprised of this. Somehow, the function of photographs to be reminders of events seems to be fading, slightly... it doesn't come up as the first thing in most people's minds when asking why do they take pictures. Everything goes faster. The diaries are uploaded on facebook and they are massive collections of snapshots, compared to those big books we used to have before, which due to sheer size had to be somehow edited down (and on which the events would be written down). Also, I have the feeling that the photographer himself is more self aware nowadays when shooting. If you check flickr, you'll see that lots of people that shoot daily life diaries have either an explicit or implicit artistic presumption. The thing photographed has to produce an artistic result that is greater than the thing photographed. Back in the day, when you took holiday photographs, the circle of people you shared them with was small. This lead to some unpretentious gems. Maybe the attitude to photography (by photographers) will not bring these back.

I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I had not been sailing through 70's and 80's snapshots in flickr. Rarely anybody takes photographs like these anymore. Some work amazingly well. The photographer is slightly on the shade, and the subject is well delivered through a rich composition. Some of my favourites come from the archives of Harald Hauesler:

These are from 1962 Familie Kramer.

The coffee walkers (and Arles, etc.)

2008-06-16T18:02:00.005+01:00

These days I'm stuck into coffee shops. I spend lots of time in them usually, reading the newspaper or a book, having a coffee. These days I'm spending even more time. I just wake up, go through the usual bunch of emails and rss feeds, and head for lunch. Only reason for this is that I'm spending much more time writing my dissertation, and almost no time at all finishing off images. I carry on shooting the same amount (almost) and developing film. Sheets and sheets of negatives accummulate without seeing a scanner. There will be time for that when I finish writing... I hope...

One of the things with coffee shops is that I meet the same people almost every day. I start off in Albany Rd, eat there, later move to Wellfield Rd (now there) where I can connect to the wifi for an updated, and when everything closes, move to City Rd. A rota of other people doing the same is around.

On a different topic... I booked flights to go to Rencontres d'Arles. I'll start of visiting a friend in Bordeaux on the 7th of July, move to Arles on the 9th of July and fly back from Toulouse on the 13th. Is anybody else going? If you are, give a shout for having a beer! I only know of Audrey Bardou and Olivier Thebaud going there, and I sincerely don't want to spend the festival chasing Josef Koudelka around with my copy of Exiles. I'll do my best in making friends on the train there, I guess.

Also, I was briefly reviewed in snapshot.fi.

PS: bad photo of Neil by me.

Limited edition - Welsh Surfaces

2008-06-05T14:28:00.002+01:00

I've not yet seen it, but Welsh Surfaces arrived yesterday and it's a limited edition of 15 signed and all that for £9. I try to remember who wanted one, so if you feel like you're not on this list and you told me, well, tell me again!

Maciej, Bartek, Giulia, Dave, Gareth J., Radek, Philip K., John G., Nick, Neil M., my mum, me. (That's 12/15)

Written fragments

2008-06-03T18:35:00.003+01:00

I was walking down Queen Street, around 3-4am, shooting. I was shooting piles of dirt after having too many animals and people in the previous shots. A guy shouts at me why am I shooting dirt. Hey, you have to strike many of the wrong chords before you come up with a new song, I reply. You know, I don't know why I shoot it, I don't know what it will look like, but I want to find out... it's just... different. We walked about a quarter of an hour chatting. Cardiff, born and bred. He told me that eighty years ago pubs were full of prostitutes, they had to. Like saloons in westerns. Kept me thinking.

On a bank holiday Sunday, everybody on Albany Road speaks Polish.

210 Weegee pictures have been found by two women that confused them with family snapshots. In a letter Weegee said that his shooting in Berlin was delayed because it was really hard to find two midgets there. On Friday we were talking about what is the average penis size of a midget. Somebody found the answer. In the film In Bruges, the character played by Colin Farrell loves midgets, maybe until he learns that they are people like everybody else. On Saturday a girl was telling me about some cute boy that was like a midget. She accused me of not loving midgets... I don't love them like you do, I like them, though.

I took a portrait of a girl biting my darkslide.

I bought a Boris Mikhailov book the other day. Pretty is not part of his photographic vocabulary. I read the whole thing and I enjoyed it. Maciej told me that it's interesting but could I look at the pictures? A day after reading it many of them crept into my mind. Mikhailov in the book -Look at me, I look at water- reminds me of a mad uncle with a strange sense of humour that forgets that his balls are hanging out of his underwear while he eats pasta and watches the news in the telly. Strange guy.

Unconscious sequences, mishmashes, things that arrange randomly

2008-05-27T19:00:00.002+01:00

Don't you find that the more you look at photographs the more unexpected sequences arrange themselves? I see this a lot when I look at places where other people's photography is highlighted (like Bryan's Photograph's in the Brain or my photohemorrage). Sometimes images that I scan in a roll seem to have some perverse sense of story or narrative. It somehow reminds me of free association and surrealist imagery. Things sort of click, and they are more than what they were by themselves.

(Last unconscious dream sequence I found in my negs...)

Upcoming events...

2008-05-23T21:26:00.003+01:00

There was a print of mine hanging somewhere in Milano (Italy) today. Next Thursday (till Saturday morning) I'll be around in London helping Maciej out with a workshop about photographying the city at night. If somebody misses it, we'll be in some pub around Brixton after that. Yesterday I also got confirmed that I'll be taking part on a slideshow in the Nuit de l'Annee in the Rencontres d'Arles photofestival. I must thank the Tango Photo collective on arranging this, specially Olivier Thebaud.

Welsh Surfaces

2008-05-15T11:48:00.004+01:00

I started a sort of serial of pictures of a roadtrip. All shot during one day in seven hours going from Cardiff to Port Talbot and back. The result is called Welsh Surfaces and was edited in about an hour. The boring well-composed (maybe classically composed should be better) colour snapshot style of it is not at all representative of how I shoot, but more of a joke, I guess.

The slideshow right now has 10 photographs, and every day I will add 5 more until the total of 28 is reached.

All tomorrow's parties...

2008-05-07T15:52:00.003+01:00

I like shooting in parties. Birthdays, happy things. Somehow they lend themselves for double readings and anarchic compositions of people. I guess you have to be a bit cheeky when you look at things, but well, it's much more fun than do straightforward pictures of things.

I guess I just write this because it had been quite a while since the last time I uploaded any pics in this blog. Also, quite a while that they weren't in b&w. Well, happy birthday that is!

So, anybody has favourite party pictures?

(Both pics from last Saturday, by me.)

La Pura Vida - April: beautiful consciousness, the flight of emily

2008-05-04T14:57:00.002+01:00

La Pura Vida is a loose idea or sketch of a gallery that has been developing for over half a year on it's multiple basecamps on flickr. For the first time there is a final edited monthly issue available here: April - beautiful consciousness, the flight of emily. It's short, dreamy and nice, so you aren't wasting your time. Submissions are open for a darker, grittier, grainier May issue on this group on flickr. Over there you can also see currently accepted submissions. As usual, I'll see if they find anything fitting in my vaults...

Bryan Formhals, Raoul Gatepin, James Hendrick and Ludmilla Morais are to be credited for this project and Nathalia Mendes for the photograph in this post.

Editing: think positive

2008-05-02T18:41:00.002+01:00

My friends are sometimes down because of editing their images, essays, sequences, projects, collections, sets, whatever you might want to call them. I think there's a misconception that editing your work is the end of the road, that last thing you do before you call it a day. Probably I saw editing like that a while ago... when you go through your images and say, "man, this isn't good enough", "oh, I have three good images of X, but nothing else to interleave", "I have eight shots of Y, but only one goes in, which one?", "stupid, in this kind of pictures all the characters are girls", etc. Suddenly nothing keeps the pace, the thing falls apart, it turns tedious, or too strong or too soft or too fast or just doesn't work... and then you want to find a nice tree and kick the bucket.

I mean, it's hard to come up with an idea clear enough of something to shoot, and go and tick all the 'compositions', 'locations' and 'topics' boxes. Plus your idea might have been immensely unsatisfactory for yourself and you didn't realize it. Nowadays I find the first edit of anything that I'm shooting a very creative process... it's the first time that I see what I am shooting and how I want to follow it. Yeah, follow it, because it's not the end, it's more, I'd say that something is not a project in my head till I have edited at least once. Once I am done, instead of seeing all the things that the edit is lacking and go to find a very tall tree, I think about how I am going to shoot them. Suddenly, from the images new branches and paths emerge. You can easily plan ahead what images to drop completely ('lets get rid of all the portraits', e.g.) and what to follow. Where there are gaps on the edit that need a certain pace, whether you have tried a certain shot too many times without noticing it, whether you have biased yourself to give a certain message to the whole when actually, under the surface, something more quiet but stronger resides. So if you are thinking about your first (painful) edit... cheer up! It's still only the beginning!

Anyhow, if I come up as too optimistic, well, give a go at Always Look at the Bright Side of Life.

The z-series

2008-05-01T15:23:00.003+01:00

Back in the day, a few months ago, we started a thread in HCSP called please don't waste our time. It was mostly to show to the members of the group what kind of photographs we don't want to see submitted once and again to the group. I thought that we had not used this thead a lot, but today I realized that it has 263 comments in it. I understand that having more than 21k members that potentially can submit stuff to the group means that we have to go through lots of crap, but most of it is not amazingly shocking enough for us to go on to this thread (oh, I had to correct a typo there that read 'shit thread') and post the image.

Some of it is so bad that it turns... well, maybe not good, but worth a look at. Take this one, for example:

Potentially homeless person, selective desaturation and shot through a mirror. I mean, when would I have come up with that one? It has so many of the elements that make an admin's finger go towards the reject button that is surprising that it lived long enough for being highlighted in the thread.

Or this one.

The creative use of the frame and certain elements that might be postproduced guide you towards the main topic of the image in case you were missing it. I would be interested in seeing what sort of postproduction that image would have had if one of the subjects was the photographer's ex.

Loads of postprocessing on top of a potentially interesting image. Hum.

Oh, I can't even remember how many times I've rejected this one:

But somehow, nothing beats the day that I deleted this image from some long time ago lost vaults of the group...

This reminds me that What the Duck is having an excellent series of daily comics on the issue of photoshopping. Like this one:

Also, don't miss Photoshop Disasters.

Editing and horror films

2008-04-27T13:33:00.003+01:00

This is going to be a confusing post. Stills from The Shining, general chitchat about editing photoessays and a review of The Orphanage. Sorry about that.

Last week I saw The Orphanage (El Orfanato). It's a ridiculously good Spanish horror film, that works in several subtle layers and has that classic buildup tension that good -and nowadays fairly rare- horror films have. Actually, there are not that many really frightening moments in the film, but they are sometimes so tightly knit together, and others they are so unexpected that they make a great film. On the background you have this strange arousal... all the time something is a bit wrong about the whole film but there you sit watching. Is probably these moments in which nothing scary really happens that makes the film stand out. If it was all the time bang bang, ghost here, ghost there, people dying, etc. it would have been crap. Instead, it's an extremely well paced and thought film. Exactly like editing pictures, at least for me.

With editing pictures... selecting and arranging a photoessay, I find that the best way of describing my modus operandi is some sort of horror film. You start by hinting that something is going to happen or something is slightly wrong or crooked about all this. It doesn't require a strong internal logic, just something ambiguous, worrying. Then you try to get into the stronger shots by building up tension to them. Some things that you want to cover with the images don't somehow work together (last edit I did managed to contain two portraits, I still don't know how I pulled that one), so somehow the sequence should lean in their direction without losing the main track. Once you get into the particular strong shot, you can sometimes follow with another very strong shot, a bit like those shocking aftershocks of horror films, but doing it too often creates too much of an expectation. It's all about guiding the viewer's state of mind through the images... to play with that theoretical observer that might look at the sequence, hopefully being absolutely naive by when they start.

Of course it's not all frights. The Orphanage contains that little bit of drama that reminds you that the characters are still human beings after all, that you could be one of them. It opens with a happy and long scene, that just makes you more worried on your seat, as you expect the awful to happen, but not. There the orphanage is, back in the fifties, probably, and all this kids that nobody really wants are playing in the garden, chasing each other. You barely need this in terms of the story itself, but it's setting the mood. It's like a backdrop that you get back to when you are viewing the rest of the story. Half way through the film there's a big pause. The whole story moves forward by six months and sort of resets. It had got to one of its peaks in terms of horror, the plot had advanced suddenly, your nerves don't take it much more. Then the pause comes and gently everything resets a bit. All the paranormal lightens and you get back into reality and into the characters. You sort of need this to take another good dose of horror.

A tight pace, a sequence of images without bumps, up and down, an "easy" ride for the viewer. Reaching the peaks and playing with expectations. Sudden but announced shocks every now and then. A coherent whole that goes around hitting very different images. Hide the repetitions, don't put them together... returning to some motives gives it a beat. Not too obvious either, just hinting to things that will come and reminding of things seen. Of course there are lots of exceptions, not all sequences are horror films, but I do love horror films. Damn.

Boredom, photographs, paintings, art

2008-04-16T11:54:00.003+01:00

I remember when in primary I saw for the first time Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...

We had just got out of impressionism, and hitting abstraction, cubism and futurism. On Duchamp's painting I stopped and said, damn, I see it! Well, it's not as if you couldn't see all the stuff, but most of it was fairly obscure (like music for musicians we do have art for artists, I'd say). But, hey, here you could stop for a moment and actually think that that is, in a sketchy way, what a person looks over time when they walk down a staircase. Everything superimposed. Seeing this so many years later took me to reading the wikipedia entry, and it has this interesting bit...

In the composition, Duchamp depicted motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. The painting shows elements of both the Cubist and Futurist styles. Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey.

Well, the influence of that was recognized looks like this:

- Man walking down an inclined plane

- Horse walking

- Pelican landing

That makes Duchamp look a lot easier actually. And it somehow brings me full circle to photography and Trenk Parke...

Boredom, paintings, art

2008-04-14T16:29:00.005+01:00

Hah, plenty of people seem to be bored of conteporary photography out here. Not very surprised. People have always been bored of contemporary photography at least since the beginning of last century. I'm bored as well. Maybe it's time to bring in that old clash that photography shouldn't try to imitate paintings. Too much painterly stuff out there, when the interesting thing are all those images that you collect with a camera through a viewfinder and you wouldn't conceive on your own or through your eyes.

This reminds me. When I look at this Bruegel painting I can't help but to think...

... that the framing is sort of not perfect. There are chopped trees at both sides and even the people are in a slightly non-optimal position and they are slightly cropped also at the bottom. There are multitude of small scenes and actions going on, just like in daily life. I just guess that the framing and choice of the scene is for enhanced realism.

If we now compare with a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson depicting a similar snowy and populated scene...

... well, somehow the composition tries to imitate paintings and it's more clean than Bruegel's. Just because it being a photograph brings the realism that the painter tried to achieve? So painters imitated life, and photographers imitated painters? Aren't we missing something here?

Post-London

2008-04-10T15:27:00.006+01:00

Got back from London. Didn't shoot even one roll of film, but now I have applied for being Finnish. At the embassy they gave me back a receipt and 20 pence. I'll keep them dearly. Also got drunk twice. They stopped serving me at a pub somewhere close to Leicester Square. That annoyed me a bit. Met up with lots of the usual suspects of Londoner street photo, which is always a joyous event. Somebody stole a camera (if anybody sees a Yashica Lynx-1000 with an Olympus T-32 flash, it's mine). In overall, nothing too bad. Busy place. Oh, I also bought a book of Shomei Tomatsu. It drives me nuts. Good to know that he liked the work of Kerouac.

(All pics by Shomei Tomatsu)

Bryan Formhals is not dead... he just smells funny... hah...

2008-04-06T23:12:00.003+01:00

At some point I said that some mates were leaving flickr (where we met) and going on their own. Well, Bryan got into his stream of consciousness blogging with Photographs on the Brain, which I think is his daily ration of food for thought. Pretty good. Very much worth having the RSS feed sindicated, because the flow of short notes, links, and mostly, photographs can flood you in very short notice.

Trying colour...

2008-04-02T18:57:00.004+01:00

I have very rarely shot colour and now I'm giving my first go ever at scanning it. It's a bit of a strange experience. I try to keep it small, so I only use the (damn) thing when I'm in Spain. During Easter I shot a bit here and there (Alicante, Valencia, Malaga, Fuengirola) and it was very very odd. I maybe don't really like it, because instead of just reacting to stuff and shooting away and running and dancing and looking at lines and things going on, I have to also take a look at what colour they have.

I mean, this is a pretty monochromatic shot at the end of the day... it has colour just because it's the thing it was shot with...

Instead, this is much more the thing you should be looking forwards to when using colour... something in which the elements, or at least some of them, are told apart because of the colour. In other words, in this shot colour is important:

I also found out that all that old portrait film I was shooting with happens to be pretty good for -surprisingly- portraits and natural light. Duh.

So what are those things you're messing with that you never dared to touch? I'm losing a bit my fear to colour but I'm not yet sure if I'm seeing it at all...

(All photos by me.)

Life... last night

2008-03-29T16:50:00.004Z

"Joni, mate, one day you have to put your camera down and get your cock out."

- My friend Chris in the pub, when talking about women.

Some things that I hear when I sit around just have such a beautiful ring to them. I wish I could record all those conversations and transcribe them as easily as I can shoot. Hum, now that I read this I think I haven't learnt anything.

Photography is unnatural

2008-03-26T17:26:00.003Z

Many times I read comments saying how much better real life looks like than photographs. For example, people say that "out of focus" isn't part of real life, that blur is something that photography brought to other forms of art or that a rectangular frame is something arbitrary and unnatural. I remember for example this thread on circular photographs which although cool, doesn't really relate to how we perceive the world around as relative to how a camera perceives it. I mean, compare these and figure our if they have to produce a similar image on the sensor, film or retina or not...

I always wonder if people who say that they don't see out of focus in real life have looked at their fingers. If I take the thumb of my left hand and place it ten inches away from my eyes not only I get a background that is out of focus (if you have normal vision) but also a background in which objects appear twice! Diplopia is a natural consequence of us having two eyes, and it's something that this far I haven't seen anybody try to do with a camera. Try a couple of times, it does exist. About the quality of photographs... well... I have always thought that for a moment they are much more precise than our own visual system. After all, the only part of our retina that is particularly sharp and able to perceive colour is the fovea, which is also extremely small. The illusion of a richly coloured world that is entirely in focus and sharp takes places when our eyes move around it constantly and our brain keeps on storing this information. But if you only have the amount of time that a camera employs in taking a picture, it beats us neatly in doing the job of rendering reality as it is, as no needs for scanning the scene are required. Everything gets in in one single neat click. And what about the arbitrary shape of photographs? Oh well, we have two eyes that share part of the visual field, so after all... rather a rectangle than a square...

Discussions... the perfect street photographer

2008-03-24T13:51:00.003Z

Hugo Leglise today wrote:

For me, there's only one interesting point in that argument (tele vs. wide-angle): the paradox that most street photographers want their subjects to be candid and unaware of their presence, while also being as close as possible. Which ends up either in some kind of mystical invisibility cloak, either in plain dissimulation tactics. Add a dose of boyish smile or macho-man ruggedness for the after-taste.

So I guess the perfect street photographer is a mix of Houdini and Harry Potter, with a Robert Redford smile and Hannibal Lecter's looks.

What flavour of photographer are you? I certainly pull the smile in the worst situations, and the bit of confusing smalltalk can perhaps take place.

There goes Henri Cartier-Bresson in action:

Semana Santa

2008-03-20T12:25:00.003Z

I was shooting the Easter parades in Alicante the other day. After that, Fallas in Valencia followed. It was pretty strange to be shooting fill in flash during the day in colour. Of course, I haven't seen anything as I'm loaded with Fuji's NPC and NPH. Wedding film somebody told me. Easter is a strange time. I remember my father being nazareno and stopping me in the middle of some crowded dark street. Weather is not being great. Horrible thunderstorms stopped everything that might have been going on yesterday and today electricity went. It's back now. I'm not sure if the brotherhoods are going to risk taking out the hundreds of kilograms of gold and silver and the images.

I managed to meet up in Valencia (sequentially) first with old friend Fabrizio and then with my more recent friend Ana.

Photography discussions today seem to go back to Goya all the time. Welcome expressionism.

- El Aquelarre, Goya.

In Alicante

2008-03-16T19:05:00.004Z

I´m right now writing in a cybercaf in Alicante while drinking an Alhambra (beer from Granada) and killing all the annoying pop ups that tell me about the viruses this pc has. Arrival was a bit of a mess. Due to fog Easyjet diverted us to Valencia and kept on going about whether we would fly in a bit to Alicante or go by coach. Wow, the guy that runs this place looks like Fito from Fito y los Fittipaldis. Same hat. Well, back to the story. So Easyjet kept us in there hostage inside the plane for a couple of hours without food and with just a glass of water. Then I ended up in this closed airport at night fighting for getting room in the busses. The drivers didn´t know anything and there was no representative taking care of us. Brilliant. At least I ended up sharing the three hour drive with two beautiful girls from around here. Most things seem good here. Like the food. I just had yesterday caldo con pelota. Never seen that before. It translates as 'soup with a ball'... of meat. Nice. There´s also a cafe by the harbour called "Cafe del Puerto" which has the most beautiful waitresses I´ve ever seen. Oh, and nice metal pubs around here as well.

Today I spent the afternoon in the beach (how hard it is to shoot there!) and half an hour ago I was shooting (flash, colour, wide) one of the easter processions. Lots of blue and purple. Tomorrow I´ll go to the fallas in Valencia and meet up with mates. In a bit I go back to the street. By the way, I watched the final of the six nations yesterday. Wales won big time, so I guess the party in Cardiff had to be massive... and I wasn´t there! I had to watch the match with two Irish families...

So, everything is good around here, but the nine hour trip to Malaga is going to be annoying.

Oh, and in the plane a welsh guy on extasis was trying to make a trash metal band sing Welsh anthems. Good fun. Much better than just sitting around.

They're amongst us!

2008-03-10T11:57:00.002Z

It seems to be that the Metropolitan Police is making large efforts in creating chaos and public paranoia. Their latest campaign (covered in B, Boing Boing and HCSP among others) suggests that if we see any sort of suspicious behaviour by our neiughbours, we shouldn't think twice, but report it to the counter terrorist hotline. You can find the whole campaign at the Metropolitan Police website. Their radio ad is the most orwellian thing I have ever heard. It reminds me of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by PK Dick, in which human-like replicants are infiltrated amongst us, and the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It says:

"How do you tell the difference between someone just videoing a crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack?

How can you tell if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or if they’re planning to make a bomb?

What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously?

How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person, or a terrorist?"

Answer: "The answer is, you don’t have to."

Just call. Of course, they have dispatched also lots of posters advising people to call them if they suspect that somebody is taking strange pictures. They always take special care for us.

Finishing things off

2008-03-06T14:19:00.006Z

I just finished reading Doctor Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick. I can't help thinking that the perfect ending of the book is in the lines that come two pages before the actual ending of the novel. Once things are mostly solved, but still fairly open ended, Bonny Keller decides to escape with her lover to the city (San Francisco). Before that, most of the characters have lived in a placid countryside community, far away from large populations in a world recovering from a third world war.

"You're very good people, Bonny thought. So this is the city - this is what we've been hiding from, throughout these years. We heard the awful stories, that it was only ruins with predators creeping about, derelicts and opportunists and nappers, the dregs of what it had once been... and we had fled from that, too, before the war. We had already become too afraid to live here.

As they entered the kitchen she heard Stuart McConchie saying to Dean Hardy, '... and besides playing the nose-flute this rat-' He broke off, seeing her. 'An anecdote about life here,' he apologized. 'It might shock you. It has to do with a brilliant animal, and many people find them unpleasant.'

'Tell me about it,' Bonny said. 'Tell me about the rat who plays the nose-flute.'"

When you're doing something as open ended as writing, or shooting... when do you know that you're done and it's about time to put it all away and start something new?

Getting in...

2008-02-25T19:20:00.003Z

Don't miss the words of Paul D'Amato about his work Barrio. Not only the images of his project are very compelling, his writing also makes you want to get somewhere where you don't belong. In the case of Paul, this was a Mexican community in Chicago, but it could be anywhere. Diane Arbus said that she wanted to be where nobody had been, and that a camera was an excuse or license to get this done. But how cool it is to blend as a stranger were you don't belong, for moments forgetting the difference between you and your surroundings.

My subject isn’t that sensational. It’s more like: this is truly a privilege to see - - - and I know that I have to concentrate like hell because I know I’ll never get an opportunity like this again. I live for these situations where I feel a kind of profund sense of emotional resonance. It takes a lot of looking, clarity and luck. - Paul D'Amato

Technique: the overhead position

2008-02-25T19:14:00.002Z

Seriously, if you have never shot a twin lens reflex in the overhead position, you haven't lived. I actually shoot in an inverted overhead posture, so my face is pointing in the direction opposite to the lenses. I do this because I find it faster to just flip the camera over my head and keep the right hand index finger on the shutter. Oh well.

Jinx

2008-02-21T10:58:00.003Z

I'm not having great luck with cameras lately. I dropped my XA1 for the thirtieth time a few weeks ago and the cover blew away and I can't get it back in place. A mate gave me a replacement XA1 and last night the shutter simply stopped working. Last week I noticed that the Yashica Mat I've been using on weekends doesn't focus appropiately (I'll have to open it and check the mirror of the focusing lens). Plus my adored OM2 broke a couple of weeks ago, in slow agony. First, frame yes, frame not, the mirror wouldn't return. It doesn't read the batteries anymore so it's limited to B and 1/60. Right now, I have reverted to fully mechanical cameras without lightmeters (and an Olympus XA). Well, that's four cameras less in a month.

Spotlight... Brazil - by David Solomons

2008-02-16T19:46:00.005Z

Today's spotlight is special due to many reasons. One of them, it's a questions and answers session. Another, that this very set of images was recently published as the first slideshow gallery in hardcore street photography. If you're interested in getting Brazil as a book, don't hesitate in contacting David.

Gareth Jelley: Why Brazil? What led you there? And where would you go tomorrow, if someone told you they could fund you to go anywhere in the world, on the proviso that you had to leave the very next day?

David Solomons: I had wanted to visit latin America for some time and I can speak a little Spanish so Brazil didn't make much sense in that respect. It was mostly on a whim as my father had recently died and I wanted to take more of a vacation than pursue a serious picture story, so I went there as a kind of testing ground to see how I'd cope taking the sort of pictures I was taking in London in another city. I felt Rio was a good choice as I thought I could also do something about its beach culture.

In answer to the second part of the question, I'd have to say Mumbai, simply because I've yet to go there and it's the kind of place I feel I could take pictures for days on end and still find something new and amazing.

GJ: Did you have any aesthetic ideas in your head when you went out shooting, in Brazil, or did certain aesthetic themes and patterns (like the blue, and the strong angles) emerge organically, revealing themselves in the edit?

DS: I had a friend who worked at Geo magazine, which is the UK version of National Geographic, and the beach culture idea was something I thought I could pitch to her if I brought back a good enough set of images. From that perspective I took tranparency film as opposed to colour neg. which is what I'd normally use for my personal use.

The light there was wonderful and I quickly recognized that the combination of that and the transparency film immediately lent itself to a different approach as I'd be exposing for the highlights and allowing the shadow detail to almost disappear. So yes my approach was slightly different in that regard but nothing that I'd consciously thought about, I was just excited to be photographing in a new environment.

GJ: Do you feel, personally, that your photos get under the skin of the place, looking into it rather than just documenting it? Are the shots in that collection shots you don't feel you could have "collected" elsewhere?

DS: I somehow doubt it, I would even go as far as to say I barely sctratched the surface of the place on a social level but that's not to say the pictures are any less valuable for that. It's difficult to say if I could have taken similar shots elsewhere, with some I could others maybe not so. Obviously where you have famous places like Copacabana beach or carnival celebrations, then I think people would recogize that that's where the shots were taken.

Joni Karanka: I've talked about this with you already, so it's like cheating. How did you fit your shooting style with Brazil? You don't show the same that you get out of London. But well, it isn't dull and rainy all the time either.

DS: London is my home town so I feel more like I belong there which maybe allows me to take more liberties as it were. I was a foreigner in Brazil and as such I felt more compelled to respect their cultural sensitivities. Many people there aren't so keen on having their picture taken as they feel they're being exploited by foreigners. Many of the poorer Brazilians are happy to pose for you if you pay them but I found doing the candid type of work I normally do problematic. So yes, I shied away a lot more from the 'in your face' type of shot and took a more wide angle environmental approach instead.

JK: On another note. These don't come through as holiday snapshots. How long you spent there?

DS:I originally only intended to stay for a month but ended up staying 10 weeks as I wanted to stay for the carnivals in Salvador.

JK: Do you feel influenced by any photographers in these images? There's such a large amount of people that have worked in similar conditions of light... Alan Harvey's Cuba or Alex Webb's Under a Grudging Sun pop into mind...

DS: Possibly, it's difficult not to see the similarities and I've certainly been familiar with those photographers' work for a long time. I never go out thinking I've got to do an Alex Webb shot here or a Winogrand shot there, I just see how situations evolve in front of me and I interpret that the best way I can. If they look similar that's okay with me, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

So, if anybody has more questions, just ask in the comments and I'll do my best to getting them to David.

Streetdog

2008-02-15T10:48:00.002Z

Via 2point8 I found these street pics of the 70's taken by Robert Johnson. One of them is one of the best dog pictures I've seen for a while:

I find it interesting how dogs on the street are second only to humans in the interests of street photographers. They pop everywhere, but you can't do them often (unless you're Elliot Erwitt, who shoots them all the time). Then go pigeons. A few well known to enjoy:

Josef Koudelka

Richard Kalvar

Elliot Erwitt

Bruce Gilden

Influences

2008-02-14T15:46:00.003Z

I spent some time in Milano shooting at the end of August and beginning of September (about five days). I edited down those pictures into a short set that I'd say was done in a very direct and fast fashion. I sort of like having worked on something that is fast, dirty, incomplete and superficial. (I say that, but I still think it has a couple of nice shots.) Oh well, so I was looking at images on flickr, and one of my contacts, Luca, had this picture that made me think about the streets I had been wondering in:

So I pointed him out one of my shots of Milano that reminded me of his (he shoots there):

What I was not expecting was his reply, in which he pointed me towards this image he took a couple of weeks ago. I know the locations so and so, so I had a good giggle when I saw...

... mine is the next one...

So, have you ever been influenced by your peers? Do you have an agenda of pictures 'to steal'? (I do have such an agenda of very precise and explicit images, not just overall style, but I never see them emerge in the places I shoot.)

Captions

2008-02-11T21:28:00.000Z

I always wonder what captions are for. I mean, they sort of end up with the ambiguity of some images, but some happen to grow with them. My last favourite caption is in this image by Christopher Anderson:

When I saw it at first I went. Duh, a bearded guy having a good time in a swimming pool, probably after a few margaritas. What's that about? Then I noticed the caption. It reads: "KUWAIT. Kuwait City. 2003. Antonin KRATOCHVIL swimming in the Hilton pool just before the invasion of Iraq."

Woh, now the image completely changes, as Kratochvil is pretty much involved in shooting wars, catastrophes, etc. Suddenly, a nice bite of sarcasm warms my heart. Thanks, mr caption.

What are your favourite captions?

Life: drugs

2008-02-10T04:22:00.000Z

I was walking down Queen Street tonight. These street performers gave me a can of Guinness. They were pleased with the acoustic stuff I played and also with the House of the Risin Sun. I said it was shit. Even so, they gave me a can. I kept on walking towards home. I got to the next performance. There was a cute girl next to the guy playing. She didn't kiss me. A guy asked me someting.

- You want a sip? - I ask.
- Yeah.

Bloody bastard gives it a loooooong sip.

- Man, take care.
- What you mean?
- I need to go to bed, that's my valium.
- No, come on.
- Seriously, I assure you I have problems sleeping.
- Man, don't tell me that.
- No, I'm not joking, I can't go to bed before three or so, and that if I'm drunk.
- Come on, I've been taking extasy.
- Well, I've been taking valium.
- No, seriously, how many valiums where in that can?
- Two.
- What? I've been drinking, taking extasy and xxxxx, what's going to happen to me?
- Don't know.
- Fuck you! You didn't tell me there was valium in that can!
- I didn't know you were going to down it...
- Fuck you!
- Seriously.
- Fuck you! I've been taking extasy! Man! I can't mix! Please!
- Hahahaha, come on! I'm just joking!
- And the valium?

I love being a bastard sometimes. I'm not sober, though. But I like it when people give me free beer. Some north waelian people also gave me a fiver tonight for being shooting. Life is weird. People seem to like me even if I'm a cynical bastard.

Elsewhere: art and artlessness

2008-02-07T00:42:00.000Z

I just read this entry in the B blog (what's with all these letters?). I quite much enjoyed this bit when Blake writes about a group snapshot taken 21 years ago in the small village he is from:

"This particular photo seems to support that idea that the more "artful" a photographer attempts to be --the more referential and self-conscious-- the more quickly it is forgotten, while photographers who record reality in less stylized documentary way eventually gain recognition. Some of the greatest photographers of all time --Watkins, Jackson, Atget, Disfarmer, etc-- didn't think of themselves as artists so much as documentary recorders. The recognition as art came later, as artlessness became arty."

The picture he talks about is actually quite cute. It would be nice to see two dozens on the same line by now... but who knows where they're buried. I guess that with the ability of people to delete the crap from their digital cameras, thousands of potential future artworks are lost every week. Will we never see the proof of people picking their noses in school pictures again? Damn.

Bedtime, I managed to arrange greasy breakfast for tomorrow.

Technique: things nobody told you about...

2008-01-29T21:17:00.000Z

Today I dropped by WHSmith to see if they could help me out with the archival process. I mean, when you shoot and shoot and shoot you end up with lots of negatives. These negatives accumulate in negative preservers (Printfile is pretty cheap and it has a useful tagging system). The negatives preservers accumulate then into ring binders, and ring binders go inside cardboard boxes. So you end up with a big mess. Well, that was a reason to go to WHSmith... they had sales as well. 75% off two ring binders, three big cardboard boxes to store them for £1 and a ring binder with a zipper to carry prints for almost nothing (£2.49). But my most amazing discovery were the tags. Damn, I hoped there was something like this. Small white sticker tags for a quid and the most amazing of all... coloured spot stickers for a quid as well! Finally I can mark all the keepers in each roll by placing a tag of the adequate colour (yellow for stuff you shouldn't forget, green for keepers, red for things that already go inside an edit). Happy times.

Next I'll post something about editing. But editing is impossible without lots of ringbinders, stickers and small prints, so it's good we go through here.

And how do you make sense of your mess?

Technique: Olympus XA-1

2008-01-28T00:52:00.000Z

I wouldn't usually talk about cameras, but with time the very snapshotty and technically limited XA-1 has got to be my camera of choice. It is a normal film camera with a 35mm lens, no way to focus or change aperture. It measures the light with an old selenium cell that usually overexposes during daylight and you can only set it up for 100 or 400 ASA film. But it's terribly small, easy to carry and a no-worrier... as far as you shoot with flash. At night, things that are between about 1.2m and 2.5m will be focused and exposed. Framing is as simple as looking through the viewfinder.

I smashed mine badly yesterday and the flash stopped working and the cover opened. I have to give it to a mate one day to see if he can fix it. In the meantime I'm looking on ebay for an XA2 (more sophisticated... now you are supposed to be able to choose focus) with a larger flash. My idea was to carry two XA's, one in each pocket. One of them has a smaller flash and it's used for most situations when shooting. The other one would have a larger flash and be dedicated for shooting infrared flash and film. Finally all my needed equipment arrived. Back to ebay...

Picture by Maciej Dakowicz.

Life? John

2008-01-26T21:33:00.000Z

I was surprised to hear last night in Kiwi's that John had passed away last Friday at the age of seventy nine. He was one of the regulars at the Staff Club and I hadn't seen him since they closed down the pub. It's hard to keep in touch with the people from there as now they are sparsely distributed between different venues. We had a brindis in his memory (Maciej, Holga, me). I'll always remember him like a man with much more success with women than I've ever had or could one day achieve (that comment always made him smile). It's strange that these things don't sink and one still thinks that you can bump into a person even if it's simply not going to happen.

- in the image, Stuart and John

Life: so long and thanks for all the fish

2008-01-22T20:17:00.000Z

Flickr is one of the most inbreed photographical communities that you can bump into. Some of the people there publish pictures almost daily, and these images don't have any other purpose than hanging up there for the admiration of other fellow flickerites and in a year or two they'll be history. But being a community of communities (thousands of flickr groups) some people try to make something out of it and shoot consistent things. I guess it's just a matter of time till some of the people who have been for years shooting the same 'project' end up doing something outside flickr (in the real world) with it. And so much inbreeding and selfadulation also takes a good share of time, so in a way I'm not surprised that some of the mates I admire are leaving the service. There are better ways to present images than flickr, for sure.

So this post goes for those few that have kept not only street photography but arts photography in general alive for me in flickr, and now are leaving for a better life elsewhere on the net. I know that it isn't the end of it, and I'll keep on bumping into their pictures here and there. It's more of a transition period than an abrupt ending in my head. Now that I think about it... I don't really know why I write this, as I stay in touch with some of them more now than when they were active in flickr. Ah, now I know... I'll miss see all their rubbish and feel bad about being fed with only finished edits! That might be it....

Ben Roberts, who's pretty busy with enough projects already and seems to be more committed to portraiture than street photography nowadays. As far as I know he is in good health and will not stop shooting anytimes soon. If you seen around, feed gently with beer. Ben has deeply contributed to the development of my sense of humour.

Hin Chua, pretty busy as well, but easier to fill up with beer. Not to be given lager after midnight. Nice guy to have a chat about photographic literature.

Naveen Jamal, who I have kept less in touch but whose pictures are pretty much worth checking as well.

And Raoul Gatepin with whom I discuss too much rubbish at worrying hours (mostly due to time difference).

All those guys contributed in one way or another to how I shoot now, even if I really don't shoot like them. Every so often by dropping references, comments or tips, and other times, by feeding constantly interesting images into the vast seas of flickr.

Well, now the moment everybody has been waiting for: So long and thanks for all the fish!

Sidenote: I'm an invited guest at the F Blog thanks to Joanna Kinowska.

How to: Infrared Flash

2008-01-16T17:29:00.000Z

Many people seem not to be aware of this, but there is a way to use flash without anybody seing the light. The method is simple, the light you use is out of the spectrum that humans can see and the film you use is sensible to it. Perfect for shy photographers or when nobody wants the scene to be perturbed... lets say hello to infrared flash photography!

- by Weegee

- image from The Park, by Kohei Yoshiyuki

Those are probably the two authors that right now come to my mind as taking the most bang for the buck of shooting with infrared flash: Weegee and Kohei Yoshiyuki (who was previously spotlighted here). It happens to be that the technique for producing these images is not that complicated at the end of the day, and one of the contributors to the flickr group Children of Weegee wrote a whole step by step guide to how to build an invisible infrared flash. Check it out. All you need is a film camera, a flash (powerful if possible), some infrared film (the Kodak one is going out of stock and is the best) and an infrared filter for the flash. Well, and glue, scissors and cardboard. Welcome back to primary!

Shoot like... Diane Arbus

2008-01-14T22:16:00.000Z

"Oh, that little lady is giving me such a nice look... I wonder if she's up for a chat..." seems to be a bit what went the first time through the head of Diane Arbus' subjects. There are anecdotes here and there on her charm and how people just approached her to openly talk about intimate stuff. You could also tattoo in your forefront "I studied psychology" for a similar effect. Then, well, at some point pop the camera out as an extension of your interaction.

It's been said many times that the photography of Arbus shows us how no matter how much we try, we can't capture the essence of others. Nan Goldin always remarks that she made a huge effort to not show the subjects... but try to be them, even to a point of sickness. Well, no matter what happens in the images, somehow the real ugliness of reality as it is hits you in the face in those large fine grained prints. (If you read text by her, you'll be surprised on how beautiful and poetic it is in contrast.)

You need

A medium format twin lens camera, or a medium format SLR with a waist level viewfinder. This makes your subjects look at your head while you giggle and look at their faces from a point of view slightly lower (that's why they have that sort of sheepish look).

Very fine grained slow film. Remember, you really want to show things as they are. You have to be a bit obsessed about the truth of the image. No, not that obsessed, a bit more than that. Yes. Better... feel it torturing you when you don't reach it.

Inhuman charm. This takes lots of practice. The day that you enter a pub and a complete stranger buys you a beer, you're getting close. When you manage this every other day and they open their hearts to you when you open your mouth, you're on the right track.

Patience. Yes, a day shooting a single person is needed more than once. Or do you think people relax for the camera just with your charm? No way, you have to be there till they are so tired that they forgot about you, their daily job and the world. Giving them valium is considered cheating. Also, you'll need all that patience to hear the weird stories your subjects tell you.

Distaste for composition. Did I say composition? Ha! That's something that happens to others! If a subject does not work dead centre, it wasn't worth shooting.

A taste for the strange and nocturnal. Midgets, circus freaks, old men that think they are vampires, men dressed as women, Disney memorabilia. Yes, go for it. If after seeing your prints your mother throws them into the bin you are doing it right. If some chick that thinks she's the twin soul of Tim Burton thinks they rock, well, yes, whatever...

Master use of flash. Well, it's not only that it's a handy skill to have, but if there's something that can reveal the tiniest little ugly thing in a portrait, that's a good and powerful flash.

Pros

Art galleries really appreciate your stuff after some initial uneasynes.

Your subjects after some initial outfreaking learn to love their portraits... some of them.

Shooting can be easy and spontaneous, and you can have a good time meeting people while doing it.

Cons

The art galleries that appreciate you mostly do so when you're dead.

Commisions are few and far apart. If you are an old rich toothless lady, you probably didn't want anybody reminding you that.

People you meet are pretty, pretty weird. I mean, this is not a job for any average Joe (or Jane) to take.

Overall

You take ugly and misunderstood pictures that are fairly illuminatory for an artsy minory. Being dead is not really a requisite for this achievement, but it helps. In overall I wouldn't recommend to shoot like Arbus unless you're a complete copycat that fancy galleries can recognize straight on. I mean, to build up a career on a bunch of weird pictures is not going to get you money unless you stole the whole thing from the original... and acquiring all the charm and sweettalk is hard unless you were almost born with it. But after all, who's into this for the money?

Announcement: the results of DAH's call for projects are online

2008-01-09T15:01:00.000Z

A while ago David Alan Harvey asked for photographical essays to be submitted for an online project. Everything was being held on his blog. Finally there's a website in which the finalist projects are online. Mine can be found at the end of gallery 4. The site takes quite a bit to load, but it's worth leaving it loading in the background and check all the essays. Some very interesting stuff in there.

Life... First day of 2008...

2008-01-02T00:06:00.000Z

I woke up with a bit of a hangover on a kitchen floor today. Everybody had left and it was about 3pm. I went for a stroll to snap some pictures in that bit of the city that limits with the countryside. Two years ago none of those buildings existed here in Fuengirola. Oh, and I played Guitar Hero with a goth chick last night as well. I only hit the right notes in Slayer when banging my head.

And now later on I went on search of a cigar but I didn't find any. They don't seem to sell them in supermarkets. Laws seem to be changing in Spain. The reason for a cigar was not only the lack of one last night, but the results of the David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers. I managed to get my name into the list! I am looking forwards to see what it ends up looking like, and upload some shots when the pictures end up in some gallery.

Fuck, I have no funny, sarcastic, dry, cynical or very tongue in cheek words to add...

New Year

2007-12-31T20:06:00.000Z

Check out the happy new year post by Magnum. It contains pictures of new year eve parties in Wales, shot by Bruce Gilden! Now that's a christmas present!

Interview and some pictures with Tom Wood

2007-12-31T17:32:00.000Z

Includes an essay. Everything is here. It's just a must see. Tom Wood has been for decades documenting daily life in Liverpool, and according to the essay, not getting much recognition to start with. I've heard of him many times referenced as an influence.

Happy new year, by the way!

Merry Christmas...

2007-12-24T20:03:00.000Z

We are all getting older, fatter and uglier. Some people die and others get sick. Christmas is the time to remind ourselves of how much things can change in a year. And it's usually easier to see how they go wrong if as me you return home only for this time of year. Plus listening to depressive Sibelius christmas carrols doesn't help a lot. So welcome to the time dedicated to think about those you miss, those that departed, those you met again and ponder over and over what the next year will bring as it's getting closer and your pockets are emptier and your belly -filled with vodka and beer- brings you the least glamorous of thoughts.

So, I wish you´re visited by the three ghosts of Dickens and they make you think, overthink, separate the body from the soul, as time for that we don't have everyday. Not at least with this great moody dark nights. Merry christmas. I hope you make up with your past and future, and most importantly, with yourself.

Picture by Raoul Gatepin, who told me to post one of his pictures with my wishes.

Music. If you click on the play button on this page you can listen to "On hanget korkeat, nietokset". My favourite Sibelius carrol.

Spotlight... Igor Moukhin

2007-12-22T23:37:00.000Z

I´m a big fan of Igor Moukhin´s photography and I casually discovered him through his Flickr page. The reason behind why I like the images seems to be that in a way they are pure photography for me. They are direct, playful and not charged with cliches and artifacts. There´s a certain naturality in them. Igor somehow manages to shoot like a witness of life, that every so often strikes the right key. There is that casual feel about them that I love...

And I have a bad feeling that I´m misrepresenting him when I´m choosing images to show here. I´d rather go and give a visit at his webpages. Ok, back to topic. There´s even an article written about Igor over here with a lot more information in it that I could ever give. For example, I already forgot to say that he´s Russian. And that he´s been documenting the life of his country since the 1980´s. Non stop. I´ll quote: "Born in Moscow in 1961 and Moscow-based ever since, Moukhin was an original member (1989-91) of the influential group Immediate Photography, founded by his contemporary, the artist, teacher, and curator Alexei Shulgin." So yeah, he´s not some random guy you bump into in flickr it seems.

That´s the sort of stuff that makes me want to go out and take pictures. The sense of freedom and immediacy of the 35mm camera. No bullshit. Just reality hitting straight from the world into the film plane. Anywhere, anytime. It´s a pity I don´t have more to say really. I´ve been thinking about posting this for maybe two or three weeks now, and I just don´t have any words to add. Just a few images and reminding that I already used one of his images to start a post about tilted photographs.

Life: largest zombie walk of Wales

2007-11-28T23:21:00.001Z

"Some may argue the sight of zombies roaming the streets of Cardiff after dark is a common sight." - BBC News.

I ended up at the largest zombie walk of Wales last week with Anthony. I really enjoyed getting my face painted and walk around snapping pictures. Late at night I met David and Nicola as well and we went to drink to The Great Western. It's an amazing place to take pictures. There were some zombies there. There were zombies in McDonalds too. They were everywhere.

Picture by me.