Category: Uncategorized

Start of the day

Start of the day

Gardening tools at the start of a day in Golders Hill Park

I was out for a walk in the fog this morning, photographing the usual suspects: trees against a background of mist. Yet, with all the obvious beauty of the familiar cloaked in unusual robes, I was drawn to this half-hidden collection of gardening tools, laid out for park gardeners at the start of the day. Would each person have a separate task – raking leaves, digging, hoeing? Or would everyone get a go on everything?

For a few moments I felt a pang of envy.  I wanted to do one of those jobs. It reminded me of meditation retreats I’d been on, where some of the most enjoyable hours were those spent doing manual work outdoors, like raking leaves, or digging damp soil, listening to the birds and finding meaning in small things.

Don McCullin

In a documentary on BBC2, celebrated war photographer, Don McCullin, discusses some of the harrowing images of war and man’s inhumanity to man that still haunt him. He has turned to landscape photography as a way of forgetting.

I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate [these harrowing memories]. I’m just going to photograph landscape. The English landscape is my heaven. But the one thing that upsets me about it is that there’s always a threat surrounding the things you love. When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, I think a tree is dying. When there’s pheasant shooting I think there’s going to be some blood somewhere. The gunfire immediately switches on another part of my nervous system. I feel that as much as you try to run away from these things, someone always presses a button and says ‘here’s a reminder of what you used to do.’

Towards an Iron Age hill fort, Somerset, 1991. Don McCullin
Towards an Iron Age hill fort, Somerset, 1991. Don McCullin

 

 

sights and sounds

ImageOn a  walk around Kenwood this morning, the repeated notes of a song thrush were, for once, the first I heard, rather than the squawking of ring-necked parakeets that has started to dominate the birdsong in the woods around here.  The ribald laughter of a green woodpecker interrupted  the caws of carrion crows and  descending song of a chaffinch. Familiar sounds that seem  at home here among the old oaks and beech trees. But there are human parakeets today, dressed in fluorescent lycra, sweating as they jog or wade like space-age shepherdesses among flocks of spaniels, poodles and grinning labradors.

Far off sounds of an aeroplane, an ambulance siren.  By a pond, what I think is a fisherman under a large green umbrella turns out to be a homeless person lying on a sun-lounge, his bald head emerging from a sleeping bag. And in a car park in the Vale of Health, fairground people live in caravans called Monza and Barracuda, next to a jolly painted cart advertising Happy Falafels, in the shadow of bankers’ houses.

Vivian Maier

Extraordinary documentary on BBC2 last night about Vivian Maier, a nanny living in New York and Chicago who took stunning photos with her Rolleiflex. She never showed them to anyone, never exhibited them, never had any fancy prints made. She stored them in containers in a warehouse – tens of thousands of prints and negatives. They were only discovered when, in old age and without her job, she could no longer pay the rent for the storage space.  The contents were sold as job lots to a couple of dealers for a few hundred dollars. They didn’t know what they were buying…

Her website: http://www.vivianmaier.com

The BBC Imagine documentary is on iPlayer this week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0366jd5/imagine…_Summer_2013_Vivian_Maier_Who_Took_Nannys_Pictures/

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midsummer

The longest day of the year / summer solstice.  There was a slight mist over the lake at Kenwood this morning, more reminiscent of Autumn. And it’s dull, shadowless. The sun is somewhere else today, not in London. Nine years ago on this day I was living in the Perche, a beautiful part of lower Normandy in France. A 15 minute car ride away was a 600 year-old oak tree, with a trunk that was over 4 metres around. I got up very early and stood under the tree waiting for the sun to rise, hearing owls hooting and little rustlings on the ground, realising how vulnerable small creatures like voles and mice are to hunting birds at night. The sky started to fill with light several minutes before the sun finally appeared in the east. It lit up a bead of water hanging from one of the oak leaves, silhouetted against the sky.

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Endangered species

Following on from the swift sightings, I realised a few days ago that  telegraph poles have almost disappeared from the landscape, at least in London. It was common, when I was growing up (in Buckinghamshire) to see swallows lined up along the telephone wires – a photographic cliche.  This pole with its radiating wires, one to each house, now seems like an anachronism. 20130509_1264_small

International Urban Photography Summer School

International Urban Photography Summer School

Urban photography summer school 2013
Goldsmiths, university of london

Designed for photographers, artists and urbanists whose work address notions of urban space and culture, the international Summer School provides a highly intensive two-week practical and theoretical training in key aspects of urban visual practice. The course aims to offer participants a wide range of relevant skills resulting in the production of a photography portfolio drawn from London’s urban environments, combined with a collective final exhibition.

The programme has been developed in collaboration with Urban Encounters (Tate Britain), the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Photofusion and the International Association of Visual Urbanists (iAVU). The course is taught by experienced tutors from Goldsmith’s top-ranked Sociology Department and the international MA in Photography and Urban Cultures. The programme draws on the advanced theoretical, research and practical image-making specialisms of key practitioners in the field.

Summer School tutors include: Paul Halliday (MA in Photography and Urban Cultures Course Leader),Beatriz Véliz Argueta (Coordinator/Goldsmiths), Les Back (Goldsmiths), Caroline Knowles (CUCR Director), Mandy Lee Jandrell (Southampton Solent University/Goldsmiths), Peter Coles (Oxford/ Goldsmiths), Alex Rhys-Taylor (Goldsmiths), Manuel Vazquez (Goldsmiths), Laura Cuch (Goldsmiths) and Jasmine Cheng (Goldsmiths).

The programme will explore how the practice of urban image making informs the development of a reflexive and critical research perspective and will include assignments and guided fieldtrips focusing on(1) urban landscapes, (2) street-based photography and (3) material objects.

The Summer School will take place from 19 – 31 August 2013. Application deadline is June 10.
http://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/summer-school/