Christmas and a few words about the times to come

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.