East of the river Taff

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.

F double feature

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).

Travelling: London

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:

Question to readers... describing images...

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.

Common Diaries

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.

Arles: Night of the Year

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.

The coffee walkers (and Arles, etc.)

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.

Welsh Surfaces

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...

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.)

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

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.