Marilyn Monroe, Love Hearts & Guerrilla Advertising

A week today and I jet off to New York. I'm only there briefly, but I plan to use my time to take as many photographs as my camera can manage, as well as seeing everything, doing everything, eating everything (vegan) and supporting my good friend Rachel in her bid to run the marathon in under four hours... I'm sure she'll manage as long as I run alongside, shouting supportive things as I munch on a vegan burger, waving an Obama flag and photographing all I can see.

I had a nightmare the other night in which I'd been there 4 days and hadn't found a single heart. I can assure you, dear reader, that will not happen! It must not happen! I will not allow it! And even if it does, I'll return with a thousand 'very New York' photographs to pick from, as I'm already planning a show of sorts. No idea what, but it'll include graffiti, skyscrapers, taxis and a hotdog seller, I'm sure.

The picture above felt a little New Yorky - it's from an alley in Bournemouth, my local metropolis, and makes me smile. I really enjoy finding witty graffiti, and I really love this type of sticker street art. It can look fantastic and it eventually rots away, so it's eco friendly too. The stencilled graffiti I find interesting, but I have some problems with it. This can be found in a few places around Bournemouth - check out the website it advertises if you like. It's an unusaul and economical way to promote yourself, but it is vandalism, just as any graffiti is. I'm happy to see graffiti in many places, but advertising.... not so sure. And isn't it inviting the local authorities to look you up and prosecute you for defacing a public space? If it isn't, you may start seeing http://www.love-landscape.co.uk spray painted around the place... though I don't think it would make me very popular.

I Love Barcelona

I've just got back from a long weekend in Barcelona. Carbon guilty. And we flew with Ryanair, which makes me doubly guilty, as not only does Michael O'Leary treat the environmental issues associated with flying with contempt, he treats his customers and staff in a similar fashion. I hope never to fly with them again - it's worth the extra expense of travelling to a different airport and flying with a mid-cost airline just to have nothing to do with his miserable low-rent business.

But apart from that:

Dozens of hearts! Tons of graffiti! Hell for vegetarians!

Barcelona is a fantastic city, and one I hope to go back to soon - there is way too much to see! I photographed hearts outside Joan Miro's gallery, around the huge ghost-town of the Olympic buildings, on the subway, in the lift to our apartment, on several streets and in several parks, and even inside Gaudi's Sagrada Familia! Graffiti in a church! Crazy!

It is the first city I've been to where I was actually shocked by the amount of graffiti - they7 really do have a problem. The type of graffiti I photograph tends to be small and innocuous, though I do enjoy the artistically stunning 'illustrations' that can be found here and there. What I can't abide is tagging - fair enough, you can write your name, but why write it on the shutter of every shop in a street? If you want to prove you have a bigger cock than the other guy, get it out and show him - nobody else is interested! One of the largest tags on the motorway out of the city was in the shape of a coathanger. Maybe coathangers are cool in Spain - I don't know.


The people everywhere were fantastic - we'd read all sorts of warnings to be wary of taxi drivers, pickpockets, bag snatchers, muggers, but we found people went out of their way to be helpful. I want to learn the language now, too - possibly to help out with plans for a trip to Cuba... Food was a problem - we took a list of vegetarian restaurants in Barcelona, but they weren't often in the same place as we were, and even self catering is hard as food isn't labelled very well. Had we been there for longer we would have found it easier I think, but the Spanish have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to catering for people who care about what's on their plate. I think that's why people have opened specifically vegetarian places to go - to compensate for the lack of understanding of 'sin carne' elsewhere!

Enough about my holiday... I plan my trips now around places where I think a heart or twelve might be found. I fly to New York in a month... I alone will be responsible for an extra degree of global warming. My children will have every right to curse me. I'm going to look at carbon offsetting the whole lot (I know it's knocked, but it's better than doing nothing) though surely being vegan counts for most of it!

The picture above was taken in Joan Miro's park, which was suprisingly run down and rough, but due to be refurbished. I found the face first, and the light on it was delightful, then I looked for a heart. I was determined to find one as I was so pleased with the 'landscape'. This stunning little carving was on a bench right beside the stone ball, as it turned out. It was only later (and too late) that I realised that the camera was still set to 1600 ISO after photographing the Magic Fountains the night before, so these images are very noisy, close up. If it were grain, I'd be happy, but noise adds some ugly colourful speckles. I need to do a test print to see how it looks at full size... and then I'll pretend it was deliberate. Don't tell anyone!

first post - here is the love:

with each post i want to introduce a new love landscape image and tell you a bit about it, or at least what i think about it. i'll start with some of the pictures people seem to like the best, and i'll add new ones as i produce them. at the moment i have around 2,000 individual photos to pair up, from all over the place over the last year. i hope this blog will make me get on with them!

this first image is called untitled 33 - it was taken in an alley next to the odeon in bournemouth, and with any print should come a scratch and sniff panel of urine, sick and bins. the red heart is one of the most pouplar i've done, and people like the pairing (this one's over my fireplace downstairs), though they often miss the darkness of the full graffiti piece.

i don't do the graffiti, by the way, i just record it. usually the landscape on the right is more landscapey, but it is there to describe the location/situation, so might be an interior or an urban scene, or anything that puts the heart in context.

i've only spoken to a few graffiti artists about what i do, and i know some will be put out at having their art recorded and made into a piece of interior art. one guy asked me what gave me the right to photograph someone else's art and 'frame' it as my own. well, firstly, their art is often vandalism of a public space, so ownership is questionable, though i'd respect the right of any artist to ask me to withdraw a piece. secondly, as a photographer, anything i photograph becomes my image as a result of the way i compose the picture and by the very fact that i chose to compose the picture. if this were hung on my wall and another photographer were to photograph my wall and publish it, apart from the issue of it being a private space that they've photographed, i believe that the artwork is the their own... if anyone ever reads this, comments are welcome!