Images: Albany Road

Albany Road is my closest shopping street. I have not taken pictures with any dedication for weeks. I'm writing up my thesis, and the only predictable time I leave home is when I go to drink coffee. I am getting into having a little half an hour stroll around Albany Road when I do so. There's not much going on. People shopping, Tesco eating and spitting people, Iceland all red and charity shops. Sometimes workers giving a new look to a shop or building. The brighter days, at four in the evening the sun starts to elongate the shadows along the pavement. Again at eight in the morning. It's strange to shoot in my neighbourhood as sometimes I bump into people I know (and I'm unable to really stop for a chat).

Story: the story of Maz

I met Maz at a party. It was sometime in the early Autumn of 2005, maybe September. It was probably before October, I think. Everybody left in October. It was at the house of my friend Petra -when she still was here-, next to the tracks of the train. I spent time picking raspberries in my way there and then we took buckets to go down to the tracks to keep on picking. There was a fire and a barbaque. It was warm for Cardiff. The sun was setting and I picked a guitar and played with this guy that had bongos with him. His name was Maz and he was the boyfriend of this one girl from Swaziland I had met before. The girl was savage -in a nice way-, so straightforward and fun, really lacking that British defect (or barrier) of the Politeness. Once over dinner, when a friend said that she was vegetarian, my Swazi friend replied disgusted: "vegetarian? you're useless!" I really enjoyed that. She was even more surprised when I told her that I ate my meat raw sometimes: "you're evil!" That was great, I love teasing people. Anyhow, we got on well and lots of times spent drinking till late (beer, wine, the bottle of vodka, that bottle of whisky she had at hers when I walked her back with a friend a long long way at night very very late to the residences where the students are so so noisy).

Well, so there was Maz with his bongos, me with a guitar, a fire taking care of the loads of meat, the sunset behind us -making the sky blue and bright like in a summer day- and buckets full of berries. We played I'm Waiting for the Man at least three times; before, while and after drinking, which meant that we never played the same song. It was great, it just got longer and better and more twisted and it had more stories and that drumming got louder and more monotonic and faster till it was part of the night like the stars above us. Which means that nobody cared a shit, excepting Maz and me, of course. Maz told me that he was going to visit Quasi -his girlfriend- in Swaziland. I thought he was mad, just never do those things for a girl unless you really know what you do. We have all been young and mad, which is the reason why we are all old and mad now. And the night turned morning.



I met Maz in the pub. Since that night with the Man and the berries I hadn't seen him or heard from him. My first question was... man, did you really go to Swaziland? He did, he really did. I was amazed. It was one of those places I hadn't heard much about, where white men go with cameras to say they've been there. We kept on chatting about it with a beer, we kept on chatting about it in the urinals with a beer in the hand and then back in the pub. Maz went to Swaziland for a month in a quest of adventure and passion. Brilliant. When he got there he found that she had met another man and this guy was not very happy about Maz being around. None the less he took part of the ritual ceremony in front of the King. I can picture it. This huge flat dusty plain full of men dressed with a piece of animal skin, a shield and a spear. In the middle of it, our white and chubby Maz popping out like a raisin in a scorn. He told me it took a bit to get in synch with all his Swazi, that children all skilled with their spear were giggling at him, but after a while he got into it. "It's all about hitting the shield with the spear" he said and jumping to the sides (Rocky Horror anybody?). There he is, the white man with the shield in the middle of those muscular black bodies dancing in a velvia sunset of reds and purples, almost naked, in a country not of his own, with the trance-like drumming going on for hours, without really a girlfriend anymore and wondering what to do next. I forgot to mention that her parents talked about marriage. Yes, he met them. In the backroom her father said that ten cows would do. Some other girls were more cows, but she was getting a bit old (mid twenties) and had a child, so that seems to give you a bit of a reduced price. But instead of leaving, Maz stayed in Swaziland. And he had fun and adventures for a couple of weeks and he really loved it. He was a bit disappointed about not learning more drumming techniques there. At the end of the day it's an adorable place. He tried to call me but I was in Italy.

I met Maz in the pub. It was about a month ago. We watched rugby. We drank a pint. We drank a couple of pints more. It's a long time since I've touched a bottle of whisky. We talked about music, the Underground, the Pistols. He plays with a band. At some point I got home.


(The image is some random house party I shot before the end of the last term.)

Life: the end of the Staff Club?

Anthony just sent me an email to this news from the South Wales Echo. It seems to be that the councils have taken action on the club and locked it. There is a note on a window saying:

"Take notice that we, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Bridgend, Caerphilly and Merthyr Tydfil (county borough councils), owners and persons entitled to possession of these premises, have today re-entered thereon in accordance with our power to do so and as a consequence of such re-entry, the premises have been secured."



That sounds quite dramatic. For what I had understood the club had been in a bit of a 'limbo' in terms of who posessed it or who took care of it since Mid Glamorgan was divided in those four councils. In the shadows, in the bottom of some pile of bureacratic scribbling, the club kept on going and eventually managed to be the Real Ale club of the year. The atmosphere is the one of the forgotten club, with the old wallpapers and old customers. Hopefully things change to better in the next days. Fuck, I need a pint. Strong one. Who does serve me now?

(Image is a composition of two slides shot by me. The guy sitting down and smiling is Maciej, the guy standing and shooting is a local with Maciej's camera.)

How far is close enough?

What do these two images (first by Jonas Bendiksen and second by Susan Meiselas) have in common?






Well, believe it or not, both are pictures of somebody stepping on a puddle. I love the colorful and twisted image produced by Bendiksen, the sense of scale... but the first time I saw it I completely missed the girl in the bloody DEAD CENTRE of the frame stepping on a puddle. In this unreal image, a girl in an absolutely deserted street carefully lifts her foot towards the water. What if I had seen it directly, as if we were very close to her? Probably the whole aura of mystery and the game would have died. But what if I never got to see her? I guess I'm lucky to have the book, in which she's a lot easier to see that in this poor jpg...

Street in the web: Hardcore Street Photography on flickr

I guess that most of the virtual readers of this blog (if there are any) know about the flickr group hardcore street photography that I've been helping to administer for about a month. As an online street photography group is probably one of the biggest and most active that can be found on the net. Many people knew about street on the first place, or learnt to shoot it by reading the threads and looking at the images that make up the pool. This pool grows every day with the addition of an average of five new pictures. This is quite a slow intake if we take in account that the group receives about two hundred submissions and thirty new members a day. The images are sent by all kinds of people: those who give their first steps in street photography and managed to take a good shot and maybe later on manage to make more of a track into it, those who have been shooting street for a while or try ocasionally and even those who have managed to make quite something out of it. In general, a very worthy group to give a look at if you are interested in street photography either for viewing, showing your work or for improving your style. After all, it's an open forum.

Ok, so instead of that much chit chat, lets go to see what the pool looks like. I've selected some shots that came out since I started curating. This is just a personal selection and it's not by any means comprehensive of styles or highlights.


(by james1hour)


(by keith15)


(by Hugo*)


(by buchanear7)


(by | GW |)


(by hinius)


(by shveckle)


(by eyeblink)


(by macskata)


(by David Solomons)


(by flat5five)


(by rafmad)


(by bennybedlam)



It's nice all that mixture of photographers and formats actually.

Life: going for film to Grangetown

-I was not sure what to write today. A male pagan poledancing? Why three midgets dressed like tomatoes are Marks and Spencer food? A paper about individual differences at different stages of visual processing?-

Today, this evening at twenty past six, I left to Grangetown to get film. Somehow Royal Mail had managed to not deliver it to me and left one of those notes saying "sorry, but you weren't home". I checked redeliveries and the website didn't find my package. So I had to walk to Grangetown, one of those dingy areas of town populated by big huge shops (IKEA, a supermarket, a car dealer), empty roads and ambar coloured street lights. Actually, I took a train from central. It left me in this train station with a small roof and bench in the middle of it. Some blokes run to the departing train shouting something about killing somebody. I walk down the stairs and into the road.

I get my film, unpack it and ditch it in my rucksack. Forty rolls of thirty five mill and thirty rolls of one twenty. Total, a hundred and twenty quid. Better this way than the last one, when my Amazon package of books was left outside the door and somebody had just opened it (sorry pal, it was not a mp3 player).

Back on the station some guys chat under the dim light. Two guys on the stairs smoke and one of them asks the other, "is he foreign?", "no, don't think so". The bunch of people on the bench make me look posh and stylish by comparison. One of them is a woman with a stray dog. Half of the group departs for a train. A man, small, without many teeth turns and asks "what's your names?" and they exchange a few names before he finally jumps on the train. And I still have to wait eight minutes there.

On the way home I stop in Subway for dinner. When I sit down a woman enters and orders her sandwich with double cheese and bacon. Wow, we still have higher classes. I check her out, but the additional money spent doesn't make her any less unattractive.

Spotlight: People I have Asked by stpiduko

Finally a touch of colour in this blog. stpiduko (I call him Eamon) shoots portraits of strangers. He's quick. Approaches a person, asks politely, and has probably shot by when the subject is getting out of the shock. Apart of all the blablabla that he does in the previous blog you can also see his stuff as a more stylish photoblog.









People shot anywhere stopped in the middle of their daily affairs. Something catches our eye in the images. The girl that has been shopping, the dressed up man in a party, somebody's new sunglasses. A very simple cross section of what the street looks like in 2007.












The complete series of People I Have Asked are here. Every now and then there are new images added. I think that Eamon wants to make a thousand...