Written fragments

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

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...

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

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.)

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

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

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.