thirtyfivemil

Spinning

2011-11-21T16:31:00.004Z

This was taken two or three years back at a 'Celebrating Sanctuary' event, I think it was. Sometimes you snap away all afternoon at these things and nothing falls into place. The dynamic, close-up pictures you thought you had die as soon as you look at them: there's too much unresolved clutter in the frame, everything refuses to cohere into a pleasing, well-composed moment when things fall into place, never to be repeated -- at least, not quite as they were at that fraction of a second when you pressed the shutter.

This was one of the lucky moments. A good sky, beautiful buildings offering a fine background, lovely action in the foreground. Click.

(And in the spirit of the huge new book Magnum Contact Sheets, I've just been looking at the frames that led up to and away from this moment and they are....rubbish.)

The elegance of hats

2011-11-09T09:34:00.002Z

All human life...

2011-11-04T11:21:00.001Z

Age

2011-11-02T16:47:00.003Z

Another from this sequence. I really ought to get round to archiving larger scans from these negatives and maybe I will, but for the moment these relatively small ones will have to do.

John Loengard

2011-11-02T16:26:00.006Z

The great thing that the internet has done for photography is to make it possible to stumble almost endlessly on names and work that is new to you.

That is also the worst thing it has done – opening the floodgates to billions of mediocre and uninteresting photographs, often posted (in fact all too frequently posted) on websites devoted to high-end photographic equipment. One might almost be tempted to explore whether some sort of inverse relationship exists between owners of the most expensive cameras and the interest of the pictures they take...

But put that aside. There is an interesting article here by photographer and picture editor for both Time and Life, John Loengard. A new name to me. Which I'm sure reflects my appalling ignorance rather than his obscurity.

I enjoyed it because he reduces what is often a grossly mystified subject – how to take good, interesting photographs – to the plainest of speaking. He says:

"It is not important if photographs are “good.” It’s important that they are interesting."

He also says:

"...I assumed that 'good photographers' took 'good pictures' because they had a special eye. What I found was that good photographers take good pictures because they take great pains to have good subjects in front of their cameras."

Those three sentences alone constitute a photography class...

The message

2011-10-10T12:34:00.002+01:00

What makes an 'urban landscape'? How much or how little is needed in the way of detail, action, scenery, whatever?

This picture is a sort of ongoing discussion I am having with myself about how to photograph landscape....

Sometimes you get lucky...

2011-09-16T16:55:00.003+01:00

This was one of earliest street photographs I took. I just found it again while reprocessing some old scans (that's one of the other things that happens -- you realise your early attempts at film scanning desperately need improvement).

Anyway, it's a picture I'm very fond of. One of those (very rare) instances when a fully-fledged composition just unfolds in front of you...

At the community centre

2011-09-16T12:53:00.005+01:00

More rediscoveries from a few years ago. These men in the picture below are Poles and are waiting for lunch to be served at a Polish community centre -- in fact, the centre you can see in the second photograph.

These were taken some time apart. The one below on a Saturday during a bitterly cold winter's afternoon, not long before the light became too poor to carry on taking pictures. I was attracted by the Katyn memorial and so grabbed a shot as the young man with unmistakeably Slav features emerged. I didn't know then that I would go back there to photograph during one of the centre's events.

Dancing with light

2011-09-13T19:27:00.002+01:00

The other day I came across a link to the website of a French darkroom printer -- a woman called Nathalie Lopparelli, and her printing business in the heart of Paris.

What an enviable set-up. The tall atelier windows look out on a courtyard of cobblestones and potted shrubs. But what really counts is what goes on in the darkroom -- and this woman has printed for Salgado, Haas, Stanley Greene, Doisneau and other greats.

Traditional darkroom printing is an arcane skill, but her website has a rather marvellous short film so you can see for yourself. Watch as her hands weave gracefully in the light from the enlarger -- she is burning and dodging to bring up or suppress particular areas of the print, but to me she dancing with light, and it is as choreographed as a secret ballet in the dark.

If you have ever wondered why -- or how -- the black and white photographs of the real masters look as luminous as they do, the answer is that behind them there is someone like this, dancing with light.

The deluge

2011-07-30T12:33:00.003+01:00

Toin Adams' sculpture, the Deluge, and a shopfront James Bond poster in the Custard Factory's Zellig building.

Faces in the crowd

2011-07-30T11:48:00.004+01:00

More pictures that come from the previous post -- faces in the crowd that caught my attention. I especially like the second one -- the pool of warm golden light in which the woman is standing as she talks animatedly, the elegant jawline of the young woman just visible in the top lefthand corner, the lush bluey-greys in the background...

Worshippers

2011-07-30T11:06:00.007+01:00

Further to the previous post, here are some pictures taken at this year's Rathayatra festival.

A devotee prostrates herself before the chariot.

A woman moves amongst the crowd painting the tilaka on worshippers' foreheads -- shaped like a tuning fork, it represents the footprint of Krishna.

An elderly woman makes sure she has a prime place for when the time comes for worshippers to draw the huge chariot forward.

The chariot is pulled along. A devotee shelters Krishna from the sun while a woman showers holy water onto the crowd.

Scent of lime and camphor

2011-07-22T16:57:00.003+01:00

Rathayatra, the festival of chariots, is celebrated by devotees of Lord Krishna all over the world. In Birmingham it will be celebrated on Sunday 24th July from about noon.

This is a picture taken last year but I shall be photographing there again this year. In this picture Krishna worshippers are preparing to offer what I think is called arati -- a coconut, sometimes dyed with tumeric and I think filled with lime juice, is topped with camphor and lit. After chanting, the coconut is thrown to the ground, the shell shatters and a wonderful smell of camphor and lime fills the air. You can just see a lit coconut held aloft in the background.

Michaelgate, Lincoln

2011-07-22T16:32:00.004+01:00

I loved the timeless beauty of this scene... And I waited and waited until I could catch it almost entirely free of people -- just the two women approaching in the distance to offer some scale, but for the rest, just a concentration on the gorgeous perspective. Not my usual kind of photograph but I do like this.

Machine that uses a 1000 years to shut itself down

2011-07-07T18:38:00.003+01:00

It isn't often you can photograph a modern artwork, its title (apparently hovering in the air) and the chamber dedicated to its display all in one frame, but it was possible at theIkon gallery recently when Kristoffer Myskja's Machine that uses a 1000 years to shut itself down was exhibited.

To be quite honest, I thought the piece resembled a posh hamster wheel, and I didn't -- as the Ikon did -- find its "fragile beauty and thought provoking nature...antidotes in a world too informed by ideologies of functionalism."

But it made for a pleasing photograph.

Mysterious moment

2011-07-06T16:58:00.004+01:00

Grainy black-and-white reinforces a sense of catastrophe, but in fact this was a perfectly ordinary moment at a children's mask-making session. The camera may not lie exactly, but it does tell a very selective truth. And it has the power to render the ordinary mysterious, which to me is one of the most curious qualities of photography.

Slow Photography

2011-07-05T14:00:00.007+01:00

I get so tired of reading the endless diatribes on camera user forums about the latest firmware, the best post-processing routines, the advantages of this four thousand quid aspherical lens over that two thousand quid non-aspherical lens, that sometimes I despair of photography. These technical matters are assumed to hold the key to 'IQ' (image quality), whereas in fact they have nothing to do with quality, the mysterious characteristics of photography that make us return again and again to a picture as it gradually gives up its secrets...

As the Slow Food movement was a fight against the values and domination of fast food and junk meals, I think we need a Slow Photography movement to help us reassert the simple pleasures of taking pictures more meditatively, relishing every step of the process including the wait as film is processed and scanned and we work gradually through the images, assessing the merits of each one carefully, selecting, rejecting, revisiting, rejecting....

I look almost constantly at the Magnum Photos website to remind myself that some of the greatest photos have been taken with the simplest of equipment. And that whatever it is that moves us about a picture has little to do with technical excellence and everything to do with content.

Pictures like this... Raymond Depardon's opium smoker in Vietnam. The same photographer's picture of camels crossing the Tenere Desert, where only the tiniest silhouettes of a camel train demarcate sand from sky. Erich Hartmann's oblique, touching pictures. The miracle of timing, incident and composition that is Henri Cartier-Bresson. Inexplicable combinations of events which nonetheless have their own logic and grace, as in this picture by Nikos Economopoulos.

The historian Tony Judt has said in a different context, "In the arts, moral seriousness speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint..." If he had been talking about photography then I feel sure he would have been thinking about pictures like these.

More summer scenes

2011-07-05T12:49:00.006+01:00

I'm not a great fan of summer -- heat and harsh overhead light don't make for great photographing weather. But one of the things I do like about summer is that you can often just let the moment and its extravagance of colour take over. They don't necessarily have a deeper meaning, but somehow the profligate colours become as much a subject as the other things in the frame...

Summer scene

2011-06-27T18:42:00.002+01:00

'Hollister, California, 1922'

2011-06-22T18:12:00.004+01:00

Well, of course it isn't California. It's Birmingham. And for all the corn-fed homoerotic Americana, it's just shopping.

I could be wrong but I guess that like many other Abercrombie & Fitch campaigns this is shot by Bruce Weber. There's a strange picture of BW in bed covered in cameras here.

Secret skatepark

2011-06-07T13:01:00.004+01:00

I was wandering around the area behind the Custard Factory and heard a curious noise coming out of a warehouse building underneath one of the railway arches. There was an open window; I stuck my head in to see what was going on and saw this.

I'm sure it isn't 'secret' to the many kids who use it, but to me it seemed secret -- the kind of place I would have wanted to go when I was young, had skateboards been invented and had I been able to use one without killing myself...

World of Leather

2011-06-04T14:33:00.006+01:00

Getting ready...

2011-06-04T14:28:00.005+01:00

Crowds begin to gather to watch the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on a large-screen broadcast in Birmingham's Victoria Square.

More on Madin

2011-06-04T14:11:00.007+01:00

There are a number of posts on here in which John Madin's brutalist Central Library features. When it was announced that it was scheduled for demolition, I started to look deliberately for pictures in which it featured -- such as the one below.

It makes for an iconic backdrop if you can find the right kind of action happening in front of it, as in the more recent ones below.

Felliniesque

2011-06-04T14:00:00.006+01:00

I've written before about the angels of photography -- the photographs you wind up with when something else seems to take over and look after pressing the button.

I shot lots of film again at Pride this year but in many cases, no matter how you try, what you get looks resolutely like what it is -- a gay pride procession, and no matter how much fun this may be, what I'm looking for ideally are photographs that transcend their literal circumstances and are open to wider interpretation. For me, that's when photographs start to get interesting.

This was the best picture I took in three rolls -- and it is the one I have literally no recollection of taking. The focus is off by miles, but what the hell -- sharpness isn't everything, the angels of photography know that.

I do also like this one:

Chris Steele-Perkins talk in Brum

2011-05-19T19:05:00.004+01:00

Further to this post about the outdoor exhibition of street photography by Magnum members, there will be an audience with Chris Steele-Perkins at the Library Theatre from 6pm-8pm on Monday 6th June. See below and note that you have to book to: events [at] rewiredpr [dot] com.

2-2

2011-04-29T14:00:00.001+01:00

Another one from St Patrick's Day. Another set is featured here.

All day breakfast cold drinks

2011-04-29T13:57:00.003+01:00

Sunday morning at the Synagogue

2011-04-29T13:41:00.005+01:00

A quick shot of a dignified lady who was talking to the greeters at the synagogue, taken on the same Sunday morning and just moments after the Cube mall photographs. Somehow, Sunday morning light often seems gentler and more lovely than at any other time of the week. Perhaps light is partly a frame of mind.

Singers Hill Synagogue -- which I have featured previously here -- is a lovely place to photograph in and around. If it opens its doors to the public again this year (I believe an open day is planned again as part of the annual heritage open days weekend from the 8th-11th September) then I shall definitely be there.

Lovely People

2011-04-29T13:30:00.004+01:00

Opening a new upmarket retail mall in the current economic climate must be a triumph of hope over expectation. Here is the new Cube development (alongside Birmingham's Mailbox) deserted on a Sunday morning. The curious sculptures, collectively called 'Lovely People', are by local graffiti artist Temper and feature Midlands people whose stories are inspirational.

There's something rather spooky about some of these figures when the mall is empty, shimmering under its carefully designed lighting system.

Merry-go-round

2011-04-29T13:22:00.002+01:00

Art gets everywhere

2011-04-25T16:25:00.002+01:00

Training taxi-drivers

2011-04-21T17:51:00.004+01:00

Taxi-drivers being given disability-awareness training, Birmingham.

'Take to the Streets'

2011-04-20T12:24:00.004+01:00

Kudos to everyone involved in making this happen... From the 18th May a free street photography exhibition opens in the Snow Hill Plaza -- photography about the streets, on the streets.

'Take to the Streets: Street life around the world through the eyes of Magnum photographers'.

And here's the exhibition in situ -- Chris Steele-Perkins' 'Young mothers outside a Print Club photo booth, Tokyo', with Birmingham passers-by.

And Richard Kalvar's 'Tired dog, Paris, 14th arrondissement, Rue de l'Ouest, 1974' with newspaper headline poster and passer-by.

Sunday morning

2011-04-18T09:46:00.001+01:00

'The Photographer'

2011-04-11T12:19:00.008+01:00

I've just bought a copy of The Photographer -- a book I had never heard of, by a photographer I had also (shamefully) never heard of. Published by Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, The Photographer combines the graphic novel with the photographs of French photojournalist Didier Lefevre, who died aged just fifty in 2007. Lefevre photographed Afghanistan over the course of about twenty years, including the Soviet war.

The Photographer is a sort of photography book-cum-graphic novel. Once you see it -- and it isn't a small floppy comic book: it's as large and as well-printed as many photography books -- you'll wonder why no one thought of combining the two mediums before.

You can download a great press briefing about Lefevre, his fellow graphic artist Emmanuel Guibert, and the book that became a phenomenon here. There's a 'Sunday book review' of The Photographer in the NY Times here.

And it really is superb. If you're put off because you're not fanatically interested in photography, don't worry: it isn't really about photography. It's about human willpower and determination -- it's about journeys, it's about 'mending what others destroy', it's about.... Well, read it. That's the best advice. It certainly isn't quite what I expected. If you wonder what MSF expeditions in war zones entailed twenty-five years ago, then this will tell you. And if you want to know more about Afghanistan during the final years of the Soviet occupation, this will tell you. And if you want the shortest and most succinct history lesson about the twenty years that led up to the 11th September 2001 attacks, the brilliant little intro to this book will tell you.

In fact, for someone who has never before read a graphic 'novel' of any description, I can't recommend it highly enough.

And of course, in many respects the saddest and most touching thing is that this book is largely responsible for whatever public profile Lefevre now has as a photographer. He died in 2007 having only published one collection of photographs in his lifetime -- now out of print, of course -- and with the vast bulk of his work unknown.

Birmingham mods

2011-04-06T10:48:00.003+01:00

For all the scary looks, these guys were incredibly patient while I dogged their footsteps (and tire marks) taking pictures...

Lion/boy

2011-04-04T16:57:00.002+01:00

Irish faces

2011-04-04T16:41:00.007+01:00

This must be the fifth or sixth consecutive year that I have photographed Birmingham's St Patrick's Day parade. It gets bigger and bigger. This year I wanted to try and capture something different: focusing on people as they gather and get ready produces by far the most interesting pictures to my mind anyway, and here the occasion has the atmosphere of a small town festival.

Watt/Madin/McLauchlan

2011-03-25T14:55:00.006Z

Further to this post, here's another of Birmingham statuary -- James Watt with John Madin's brutalist central library in the background, currently adorned with Lucy McLauchlan's artwork. Worth taking, I think because this particular conjunction won't be observable for all that much longer -- if Madin's masterpiece does come down. Interestingly, as I noted in the earlier post Madin still seems to feel that it will be saved...

UPDATE: Amazingly, I just stumbled across this -- a September 1973 (74?) issue of Birmingham's Grapevine, the free press pre-cursor to What's On, devoted to a very critical assessment of Madin. Fascinating stuff. With thanks to Brian Homer.

Winter light

2011-03-14T19:58:00.003Z

Winter graveyard/winter rush-hour

2011-03-11T18:09:00.003Z

A beautiful winter graveyard..where we are all headed, I suppose.

Two scenes in Chinatown

2011-03-11T18:02:00.002Z

The River

2011-03-11T17:46:00.005Z

I have hung around photographing the floozie in the jacuzzi -- Dhruva Mistry's The River -- off and on all winter, hoping that something in this much photographed scene will translate itself into a worthwhile picture.

Finally, I got a picture I love. For me, this reinforces the idea that sometimes you just have to keep plugging away at something until you finally get to photograph it as you see it. It may be just a detail, it may be in particular light, it may be a specific moment -- the interaction with people, a split second's drama -- or it may simply be finally catching an otherwise 'well-worn' view in a way that finally coincides with what you had in your mind's eye.

Winter catacombs

2011-03-11T15:46:00.002Z

Purple/Elvis

2011-03-07T10:37:00.002Z

Ian Berry's Whitechapel

2011-03-07T09:47:00.002Z

There was an excellent piece in yesterday's Observer -- a huge double-page spread photograph taken by Magnum photographer Ian Berry in Whitechapel in 1972. It captures the changing look and feel of the streets during that period and was taken as part of a project commissioned by the Whitechapel gallery to document life on the gellery's doorstep.

What in many ways is most interesting about it is Berry's assessment that it just misses being a 'great picture' because the overall composition is spoilt by a 'white car'. Now, Berry doesn't say which white car -- the one exiting the frame left (and which to me seems to balance the black cab entering the frame right), or the VW, just visible behind the head of the woman on the left... Which car convinced Berry he hadn't quite nailed it?

It also reinforces the fact that with street photography, luck, judgement and subsequent editing are everything -- the difference between great and enduring, and not quite...

Misha Erwitt

2011-02-24T13:08:00.005Z

Elliott Erwitt is probably one of my favourite Magnum photographers. In recent years his pictures have been well very published -- Taschen and others have done some superb productions of his books and new and rarely seen work has come out in considerable quantity.

His austere B&W photos are often funny, charming, witty -- and always humane. There's virtually nothing he can't do with a camera. From the simplest, most classical composition -- like this, in which there is just a beautiful object (Pablo Casals' cello) and the careful rendition of light, tones and textures, the art that lies at the heart of B&W photography; to this, a smudged, slow, melancholy river-side moment in NYC -- Erwitt's pictures give immense pleasure.

Amongst his most famous -- and touching -- pictures must be this one of Lucienne, his first wife, with their daughter and a rescue cat in their Manhattan apartment.

There's a lovely article about it here written by Misha, Erwitt's son. And no, as Misha is at pains to emphasise, he is not the naked baby in the picture: that's his sister, Ellen.

This is family photography as public history.

And a quick update (15/09/11): I've just discovered a great Erwitt slideshow on the Time blog here. This is a lovely selection, the scans are good and there's a full screen feature (don't miss the button top-right like I did). But best of all the pictures have Erwitt's own gruff, laconic, no bullshit captions.

I never look at Erwitt pictures without coming away feeling slightly better and lighter of heart. How many photographers can you say that about?

Networking

2011-01-24T13:26:00.003Z

Sometimes the overall mix of colours when photographing indoors -- clothes, lighting, complexions, furniture, decor -- can all serve to be a bit distracting. But B&W simplifies and takes away and can do an awful lot to make indoor photographs more elegant and 'timeless'. And sometimes less is more... I like this one a lot for its energy and expressions.

Dappled light

2011-01-24T13:18:00.003Z

The late summer, with interesting stuff going on on the streets and lovely dappled light to take advantage of all seems an awful long time ago...

William Bloye

2011-01-07T15:55:00.003Z

I've long been fascinated by some of the older civic buildings on Gt Charles Street -- such as the old Birmingham Chest Clinic. They have a sort of pea-souper, inter-war atmosphere about them.

I thought the relief work on the chest cliic might be Eric Gill, but it isn't -- it's by William Bloye, who was born in 1890 and died in Italy in 1975. But until that time, and especially in the 30s, 40s and 50s he was Birmingham's unofficial civic sculptor, working on an extraordinary range of civic and commercial commissions from his studio on Golden Hillock Rd in Balsall Heath.

And interestingly, he did study lettering under Eric Gill.

Anyway, this is how I see the chest clinic -- in grainy monochrome, the light failing. If I turn around I know that men will be hurrying past in trilbys and tightly belted overcoats, pre-war Austins and Humbers creeping along Charles St in the rush hour traffic.

Running man

2011-01-06T18:48:00.003Z

In a swirl of silver thermal blankets and blazing late-autumn sunshine, the first runners in the half-marathon came home...

Breakfast conversation

2011-01-06T16:04:00.003Z

This was taken at an event I photographed for a local voluntary organisation, but I liked the atmosphere and intimacy of it sufficiently to regard it as a 'personal' picture.

Pope's visit

2010-12-09T15:12:00.007Z

They waited in gardens, on the pavement, and in upper storeys where the view would be better.

And they waited outside bars.

Some came in jubilation...

And some in anger...

And they came with messages...

All in all, it was one of the most curious events I think I have ever been present at.

We buy gold

2010-11-24T12:10:00.003Z

Flogging our gold: it's something we may soon all have to resort to.

Time travel

2010-11-22T18:02:00.003Z

At the tail-end of the summer I went again to the open day at the Museum Collection Centre. The nicest thing is that you get to travel there and back on an old bus. This one was a 1960s bus, I think. I suppose it would have been in service well into the1970s -- it's certainly how I remember bus travel being in the 70s.

On the day I went even the parked traffic seemed obligingly in character too.

Remembrance Day

2010-11-22T16:39:00.006Z

I'm no great fan of the Remembrance Day set-pieces. Unless you've got a really good vantage point -- or access to the ceremony itself -- and good long lenses, they are very difficult to photograph. But what I like more and more is what happens before and after the event, the small things going on in the margins as people prepare or as they leave....

Is it art?

2010-11-22T15:09:00.002Z

I think it is. I'm catching up with some long-stockpiled film which has just been processed. This was in September and I rather think it was some kind of street performance as part of ArtsFest.

Or maybe it was one of those strange glitches when people forget that they are out to shop and slip into a dream state?

Matchgirl

2010-11-22T14:52:00.004Z

I love this. She almost was a real, live matchgirl -- except what she was selling happened to be street art, handmade silkscreen prints taken, I imagine, from Indian designs.

Anyway, it has a lovely, slightly out of kilter feel to it -- simple, but on the other hand puzzling.

And then once you start to look, street art seems to be all around you...

Memento mori

2010-11-22T14:45:00.003Z

I was walking through the Jewellery Qtr one Sunday morning. This looked like a pre-prepared religious allegory, a memento mori.

Polish Prayers

2010-09-16T19:15:00.003+01:00

Taken some while ago at a Polish Community Centre where everyone was very welcoming and patient -- even when I somewhat mistakenly (in retrospect) carried on photographing as prayers were said.

Another from the same event -- song sheets are handed out for guests to sing traditional Polish folk songs and hymns.

The Big Pride

2010-09-15T18:13:00.005+01:00

Another from a few months back -- Pride in the rain...again. I love photographing at Pride and the chance juxtapositions that happen on its fringes. The rain adds a different atmosphere.

Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats

2010-09-03T17:58:00.004+01:00

There is a great two-post article by Peter Turnley on The Online Photographer website about Voja Mitrovic ('Voya'), master B&W printer to many of Magnum's photographers, including Cartier-Bresson. If you ever wondered what role printing plays in the production of photographic masterpieces, and why -- and how -- some people can coax finer images out of a photographic negative than others, then wonder no more, just read the article.

Part 1
Part 2

Expressions – again

2010-09-03T16:36:00.003+01:00

Hat girl

2010-09-01T18:44:00.003+01:00

I remember when this was. There was a Latin American festival just starting and I was attracted by this hat stall and hung around photographing for quite a while, hoping something might fall into place. This exchange, the fleeting gracefulness of the young woman's gesture, can hardly have taken more than a fraction of a second. But the strange thing is, I have no recollection of taking this picture specifically.

Maybe I didn't. Gueorgui Pinkhassov, the wonderful Magnum photographer, has said:

Good photos have come when I least controlled the situation. The process reminds me more of fishing than it does of shooting. I look through the lens; I create my composition – banal, boring. Get tired, get distracted – click and success. As though the photographic angels, upon whom it all depends, had begged, 'Don't look through the lens, let us work in peace.' Sometimes I have not even recognized my own photographs.

I love a man in uniform

2010-08-31T17:43:00.003+01:00

It was so wet I could hardly see to focus. When I saw this scene taking shape I heard an almost audible click in my head as I saw the centurions move into just the position that would reveal the further one's face, accentuate the shape and rhythm of their helmets, and catch the onlookers' expressions. Sometimes it's like that -- you know it's going to work for you. But mostly it isn't...

Spring was in the air....

2010-08-31T13:26:00.002+01:00

Certainly for this woman, who broke into a joyful, impromptu dance as some busking musicians played Balkan folk music.

Sunday drinkers

2010-08-31T13:22:00.003+01:00

A bitterly cold morning at the tail-end of last winter. This Eastern European couple were keeping warm in proven, time-honoured fashion...

2010-08-30T17:34:00.003+01:00

I quite often photograph at charities and voluntary organisations. Here's two of my favourites from a set that I took at St Paul's Community Trust, who were fantastic in letting me wander about everywhere and take pictures during their thirtieth anniversary event.

Splinter Cell

2010-08-30T17:31:00.005+01:00

Sometimes these juxtapositions work, sometimes not. But whenever you see them, trying is irresistible -- maybe the Gods of timing and synchronicity will smile.

England's Glory

2010-08-30T17:21:00.002+01:00

Colour cool/colour hot

2010-08-30T17:02:00.006+01:00

An empty Bridget Riley exhibition -- still, calm, meditative; and the clash of colour, shapes and motion on the street -- an energy drink company vying for the attention of punters.

There's a wonderful sequence of photos here taken for the British Council, which includes pictures of Riley in the mid-60s. It's not difficult to see why she was such a captivating figure -- tousled, gamine, intellectual... This one especially.

Different bowlers

2010-08-30T16:53:00.007+01:00

A reminder that that marvellous old class-signifier, the bowler hat, is alive and well and still doing its job impeccably...

Bowler hats always strike a chord with me. I think it is because of this wonderful photograph by the late Erich Hartmann, one of my favourite Magnum photographers. HIs last book, 'Where I Was' -- which he was working on when he died, and which was finished by his wife -- is a marvellous book of his personal work. 'Personal', the term photographers usually employ to differentiate between commercial work and the work which really matters to them -- describes it doubly well. Its selection of pictures are oblique, provisional, glancing, unexpected. Here's another marvellous one.

Street food

2010-08-30T16:44:00.002+01:00

I can't quite remember when this was -- Chinese New Year, I imagine. Anyway, a lovely moment when everything just literally fell into place...

Expressions

2010-08-30T16:34:00.002+01:00

John Madin: Birmingham's brutalist 'starchitect'

2010-08-20T15:08:00.005+01:00

John Madin, now 81, was key to much of the new 'brutalist' architecture of Birmingham's post-war redevelopment. His 1974 Central Library -- now slated for demolition as its new towering replacement begins to rise between the Rep theatre and Baskerville House -- remains a hotly contested masterpiece.

It has recently gained artwork by Lucy McLauchlan:

There's a fascinating 1965 BBC documentary about Madin which can be view in its entirety here. It's like entering a time capsule of modernity and optimism...

Interestingly, Madin still believes that his Central Library may be saved -- he comments on this in an interview in The Guardian here.

Lovely light

2010-08-20T12:09:00.002+01:00

There was a lovely, shaded gently lit corner during a recent veterans' and armed forces parade I saw.

Strange apparition

2010-08-20T11:46:00.003+01:00

My older daughter will shortly be moving to Lincoln to study. She'll be living in the first house on the right in the narrow little lane that runs along the bottom of this hill.

I think she is hoping that Lincoln will always be as strange and Harry Potterish as it appears to be here...

I hope she isn't disappointed.

A different kind of Sunday morning

2010-08-20T11:37:00.002+01:00

Some Sunday mornings you just happen on things...

Two more moments from the same Rathayatra festival mentioned below.

The Skull & Photographer

2010-08-20T11:34:00.002+01:00

Yes, it sounds like a fictional pub in a strange Dickensian city one has never visited (there is a Skull & Trumpet if I recall correctly in Christopher Isherwood's LIONS AND SHADOWS), but it's also what passes for photographers' recreation on a Sunday morning...

Blessed with fire

2010-08-20T11:32:00.001+01:00

Taken at a recent Rathayatra festival.

History lesson

2010-06-09T15:43:00.002+01:00

In the quiet before the crowds arrived for the Lord Mayor's Show a couple of weekends back, this moment stood out with all the clarity of a history lesson...

The museum of curiousities

2010-05-28T12:31:00.006+01:00

Except this isn't a museum. It's where Birmingham keeps the stuff there isn't room for in its museums...

It's called the Museum Collections Centre and I mentioned it in the previous post. Here's a couple more taken there -- it was a weirdly atmospheric place, all the more so for the utter unpredictability of what one would see next.

Ghost fountain

2010-05-19T09:44:00.005+01:00

Tom Lomax's Spirit & Enterprise is the beautiful fountain which graced Centenary Square until construction began recently on the new library. It now lies amongst piles of other street furniture and storage containers in the grounds of Birmingham Museum's storage facility in Nechells.

'Ghost signs' is the term used to refer to fading hand-painted advertising signs on buildings, typically painted on the gable-ends of shops and houses. 'Spirit & Enterprise' is currently a kind of ghost fountain. I hope it will be given a new life elsewhere in the city. This is how it used to look.

The museum's storage centre was recently thrown open for a public Open Day -- more of that in the next post.

Big Wheel

2010-05-18T15:18:00.003+01:00

Another from shortly after Christmas. I spent ages trying to get a half-way decent picture that captured something of the size and scale and beauty of the big wheel when it was here in Birmingham. I must have taken dozens of pictures around and about there -- but all of them looked tacky rather than elegant, a mess rather than the clear geometric formalities I thought I was looking for. And then one evening shortly before the wheel was due to come down, I saw this juxtaposition and just about managed to squeeze a couple of very slow shots off before my bus came.

Oddly, it subsequently turned out to be exactly what I had been looking for.

Still moment

2010-05-18T11:51:00.003+01:00

Just for a split second it seemed people had forgotten why they were there, then, as quickly as this mood descended, it vanished and the crowds surged onwards.

Vaisakhi

2010-05-17T18:25:00.003+01:00

Vaisakhi marks the beginning of the Sikh new year and also commemorates the founding of Sikhism in 1699. On Sunday 25th April 2010 two processions set out for Handsworth Park for one of the largest Vaisakhi events in the UK -- one from Smethwick, and the other from the Ramgharia Gurdwara in Graham Street in the Jewellery Quarter, where this was taken.

Survivors?

2010-05-17T12:21:00.000+01:00

I haven't posted anything for a little while so I'll try and catch up. This was shot just after Christmas, I think. I like it because on this bitterly cold wintery Sunday morning these fishermen on the canal looked more like survivors foraging for food after some kind of apocalypse rather than blokes out enjoying the fresh air.

Solitary tributes

2010-01-12T18:13:00.003Z

One thing I like doing is looking for little 'sets' of photographs. Sometimes, separated by months, even years, you find groups of photographs with a common theme. Processing film over Christmas I found these three – all about 'tributes'. A toy abandoned at a bus-stop flares in the low sunlight with an odd significance. A splash of colour from a single vase of flowers in a bitterly cold and deserted winter graveyard. Flowers laid in the hand of the Sultanganj Buddha in Birmingham Museum.

One morning, three moments

2009-12-04T19:12:00.003Z

One morning, three moments...

Faces at Remembrance Day

2009-11-30T18:27:00.001Z

The extraordinary story of Vivian Maier

2009-10-16T14:30:00.003+01:00

I have just been pointed in the direction of this extraordinary story. Photographer John Maloof purchased some 30,000-40,000 negatives at an estate sale. They were the contents of a safe deposit locker on which rental payments were in arrears. The negs turned out to be the life's work of a woman called Vivian Maier, a Jewish refugee from France who settled in Chicago and from the 1950s into the 1970s photographed the streets of her adopted city.

Working through the mass of negatives and undeveloped roll film took a long time. Maloof found Maier's name written in pencil on a lab envelope and ran an internet search. He found an obituary had been placed just a day earlier in the Chicago Tribune.

Maloof is processing film and posting images on a blog devoted to Maier -- a labour of love to resurrect the work of a life lived in obscurity.

There's also a good piece in the Chicagoist.

There is something about this that has the melancholy beauty of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story...but with marvellous, forgotten -- and almost lost -- photographs.

After the dance

2009-09-17T19:04:00.003+01:00

I love everything about this photograph. It's one of those shots where I think all of the elements fall into place.

Almost every inch of the lower half of the frame has a face in it. If only my timing -- and luck -- were always as good.

It was taken as the crowds milled about after a recent (successful) attempt on the world bhangra dancing record in Birmingham.

At the Synagogue

2009-09-17T18:43:00.006+01:00

Recently, Singers Hill Synagogue, Birmingham, opened its doors as part of Heritage Weekend. Built in 1856, Singers Hill is an imposing redbrick Victorian building, designed by Henry Yeoville Thomason, who later designed Birmingham Council House. I spent a Sunday morning there, trying to capture the atmosphere of the place.

The message on the streets...

2009-09-17T18:39:00.002+01:00

Sometimes the streets seem to hold a multitude of messages. Thats what struck me about this moment.

McCullin

2009-08-12T17:34:00.003+01:00

I've been looking at a lot of Don McCullin's work recently. It has reminded me that McCullin was probably one of my first photographic heroes -- a photographer who really made me look at and think about photographs, almost before I had the vocabulary to do so. A formative figure.

I remember first becoming aware of his work when it was published in the Sunday Times magazine. I can still remember those stark, grainy full-page bleeds of pictures from Northern Ireland, from Cyprus, from Biafra, Lebanon.

It now seems extraordinary but at that time, the very late-60s and the early-70s, I suppose, I knew virtually nothing about McCullin the man. I knew only what I saw in the papers. And yet somehow I still formed the impression of a haunted man with an extraordinary presence.

Now, there's a vast amount of stuff about McCullin on the internet – free for the finding: there's a a great interview with BBC's John Tusa; a splendid 1987 transcript – with photos – from Frank Horvat's series of interviews with photographers, Between Views; and a four-part video interview with Fred Ritchin on the Aperture Foundation website. To name just a few things.

And of course, in the early 1990s he published his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour.

Revisiting McCullin has made me very aware of how the internet has transformed the way we can research and pursue private passions. But more than that, it has reminded me that McCullin remains uncompromised and uncompromising. His interviews are incisive, articulate self-analyses of his own worst guilts and fears; his stark, iconic black-and-white images of suffering, of real hells on earth, undimmed in their impact.

What prompted this? Ah, yes, I remember. McCullin has just donated 100 pictures to Reporters Sans Frontieres, the organisation that campaigns for press freedom and defends the rights of journalists around the world. This means that RSF has been able to add a McCullin collection to its list of photography 'albums'. RSF's albums look great, are well printed, and help raise funds for RSF's work.

Family pictures

2009-07-28T18:33:00.003+01:00

My family understand that by and large a photography blog is no place for family pictures. And in any case, most of my family hate being photographed. But I – and they – made an exception during my daughter's graduation ceremony last week at Bangor University.

I tried to photograph it with a loose, documentary style, mixing the obligatory set-pieces with more coincidental "this is what it was like to be there" pictures…

June/July

2009-07-28T18:20:00.005+01:00

I'll be honest, I'm no great fan of summer. Give me the autumn any day, even early winter... I love September, I love the chill that comes in with the dusk. In the deep of winter, I even love the feel of my camera almost frozen to my clawed hands... No, perhaps that's going just a bit too far.

But the summer, it must be said, does offer a wealth of opportunities: strange sights seem to surprise one at every turn – strange anomalies, curious moments, weird juxtapositions that may (or may not) mean something…

And finally, this one, which I like because they look like nuns in an allegorical painting…

Expressions

2009-06-23T14:29:00.000+01:00

And expressionless...

"Pour un Congo uni et prospere"

2009-06-16T14:25:00.002+01:00