Blue Sky Thinking

It's carnival week here in Swanage and despite the autumnal weather, there's a real feeling of summer. People are in holiday mood; children are staying up late for the fireworks and normally sensible adults are wearing comedy hats and drinking beer in the daytime. I love to see the town I'm so esconced in filled to the brim with holiday-makers - it saves me going anywhere myself, as I can just pretend I'm one of them. If the weather were better I'd pretend I was abroad as well - though, actually, this feels like the winter I spent in a New Zealand summer, if that makes sense. Damp, predictably unsettled, bit dissapointing, but fun anyway.

The picture above says summer to me, though it was taken one October. It has the colour of summer. Looking out the window now at a leaden sky over damp grey roofs it says October to me, although it's late July. So there we go.

Last weekend saw me at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. It was my first time, despite years of left-wingishness and Tolpuddle being so close to home. It was a windy but wonderful day. I spent an hour behind a stall extolling the virtues of the Transition movement while listening to some great music from across the folk world, then wandered with Vicki and my boys among radicals, revolutionaries and really sound idealists before listening to the always fantastic Tony Benn address the crowd. I picked up leaflets galore and signed petitions a-plenty and came home with two tired children who won't appreciate for a while why such a place should be such a rush for their two idealist but realist parents.

I think of it now because I spent some time talking to a woman about the joys of the Solidarity Brigades but the difficulties of being a vegetarian in Cuba. On a grey English day like this I think of travel and Cuba is a place I've long longed to go to. Talking to her I was aware of an irony, though. I wandered past other stalls campaigning for democratic reform in the UK and against dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere, and yet there we all were, waving little Cuban flags and helping celebrate 50 years of Revolution there. Cuba cannot function as a democratic entity while the US still interferes in elections across Latin America - the CIA would never be able to resist funding the right-wing anti-Castro parties that would spring up and with a US funded campaign there's a good chance they would win. I suppose too that while the centre-right West declares certain dictatorships to be acceptable and friendly for financial reasons, then it's understandable that left-wingers can have a friendship with Cuba.

I think that's what I think, but then again maybe it's the beer in the afternoon that's talking.

This picture was taken here.

Eggleston and the Genius of Snapshot

I'm going to keep this brief as I've just typed about 500 words in this box before the browser crashed and I lost the lot. Last night on BBC One I watched a fascinating documentary on William Eggleston. You'll find it here if you read this before the 5th August 2009. It was wonderful to see him at work - he literally snaps his pictures. 50 years of knowing, even dreaming, perfect photographs means that he can see the picture before he even lifts the camera to his eye. I try to work like this for my landscapes, try to forget the formal composition, but looking back through some yet-to-be-put-together love landscape work just now I can see that I'm still thinking too much.

I think what I enjoyed most (and I watched it alone so only had the dog and my ukelele to explain this to) was that I hadn't realised that he was genuinely influenced in his formative years as a photographer by the snapshot. This revelation brought tears to my tired eyes. I've tried to explain before my belief in the genius that exists in entirely naive photograph, and sometimes in the accidental snap. I've listed these as my key influence, alongside names like Eggleston, Shore, Meyerowitz, for 15 years or more. I'm sure readers of photographic theory have known what I know now about Eggleston for years, but it's reassuring to know that if I share my love of the accidental perfection of snapshots with a true genius of photography.

I'm posting this with a newly put together shot taken some time ago in London - somewhere around Holland park, roughly here.

And then a man in a gorilla suit strolled past...

A quick post: way back when I was a photography student I used to go up from Bournemouth to London as often as I could, visiting galleries and taking bleak black and white photographs of the city. I still go as often as I can and I can still find bleak even though so much has been tidied up.

This space, beneath a railway bridge between Waterloo and the Southbank, used to be populated by homeless people. They lined this wall with cardboard shelters and begged change or slept as you passed through. I used to give change to one or two as even as a student deep in debt I had more to spare than they did - at least I had access to the debt I'm still in!

Now this tidied space is populated by commuters and tourists and the graffitied, smog-dirtied walls have been lined with wipe-clean photgraphic version of what is underneath, complete with a couple of small, polite pieces of graffiti. The paper cups that used to be held out for change are now held by people passing through and are filled with cappucino, mocha and latte. It is so much nicer, so much cleaner and less threatening, but as I think this I know that the problem of people without homes hasn't gone away, it's just been tidied up. I wonder where those people who used to sleep in cardboard homes have been tidied to?

Interestingly, since photographing this in 2008 the wall has been tidied further - these concrete blocks are now coated in wipe-clean paint.

The bridge is here. And it was just as I put my camera back in its bag that the man in the gorilla suit walked past. His friend was holding his cappucino for him...