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...

Pub?

Pub. It has to be one of the best three letter words in the English language, closely followed by Sex, and occasionally in that order. It's such a beautiful day today that I've spent the afternoon in front of a computer, writing long and important emails and looking out of the window at the clear blue sky, listening to the sounds of the seagulls, swifts and some bloke who thinks we all want to listen to him wailing along to his guitar. All of which makes me want to be in a pub garden, drinking pints of shandy and eating crisps. And so I'm sat here briefly blogging...

This is from the garden of the Red Lion in Swanage, drawn in chalk on the wall in the kids play area. We have 10 pubs, I think, and The Red Lion is one my favourites, along with The Black Swan, The Anchor in the winter, The Ship when I want loud music, and the others when my friends are in those... This picture makes me think of hot summer afternoons when a long drink is in order before a few pints of ale... here's the Red on a map.

Where is he from, Uranus?

I watched ET with my kids on Saturday. I hadn't watched it since I was 12 and they'd never seen it before, being only 5 and 7. We all loved it, and I'd never realised what a great film it was in many more ways than I'd appreciated as a child. I'd never noticed the child-like perception of adults, where the only recognised adult is Mary, the mother, important to the children, and everyone else is seen only in part until they intrude upon the reality of Elliot and ET and impose their significance. I'd forgotten too how influential it was to me - I remembered having toys but had forgotten how it influenced my cycling style! Both my boys want to do jumps like on ET now. I'd also forgotten the use of the phrase 'penis breath' which I hope to hear my kids using real soon...

I wanted to write about this as it reminded me that I had an 'alien' love landscape picture to put up here - I'm sure I've seen this style of street art in a book before, but that was a book about Berlin and this was taken in Barcelona. It's a lovely textural piece, cut from flock wallpaper and stuck on the smooth metal side of a news-stand. It was on La Rambla, probably the busiest street in the city - amazing that somebody had the time to get this stuck up here without getting caught.

I found it after eating at a vegan cafe around the corner and I was feeling really positive about the memory. It's been spoilt now because as I type I have the news on and there are reports about a baby deer being stamped to death by some teenage boys in Upton Country Park in Poole, too close to Swanage. No doubt they were high on KFC and Maccy-D and too meated up to have any empathy left for something helpless on the ground. Really depressing. No more depressing that the millions of animals that will be killed today in the name of food, but really depressing nonetheless.

Sun, Sea & Sagrada Familia

Was it last year I went to wet Wales, sunny Spain and New York too? Seems like another lifetime, though my carbon guilt hasn't faded. For the past few weeks Vick and I have been discussing holidays, checking cheap flights from Bournemouth (not too far to drive, so better for the environment!) and then deciding to either stay in this country this year or play it by ear if the summer's as bad as the last two.

We've been spoilt by the experience of foreign travel and now we expect so much from a trip away. We crave the exotic, the unfamiliar language, the daily joy of finding vegan food where we'd least expect it, and the warmth - warm air, warm sea. Our experiences of travelling in the UK have been generally good too, but listen - we live in a seaside resort. It doesn't get better than this! Actually, it does, but you get my drift, I'm sure. We live with the sea on our doorstep, and it's wonderful, but we do feel the urge every so often (and as often as possible) to go abroad. This year, France may beckon, travelling by car. We'll see...

This picture is one that I absolutely love. Taken at La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the astonishing cathedral designed by Gaudi and still under construction - absolutely breathtaking within and without and certainly worth the wait to ascend the towers. I was amazed to find at the base of the lift, almost as you exit the building, a wall of graffiti, all hearts and names. I don't know whether the guards are just slack at guarding or whether they accept that visitors have a desire to leave their name on a wall and they'd prefer it to be all in one place, but the hearts at least are all drawn or scratched in haste so perhaps all the work is seruptitious. The accompanying photograph is a detail of the large brass doors nearby. The doors feature polished parts which are representative of aspects of Christian faith, though I'm not entirely certain who or what this face represents as it glows amidst the dark tarnished brass. It looks to me like the face of an angel.

The Sagrada Familia is here, and if you've never been, devote a day to it. Not sure of the most carbon friendly way to visit, but if you're feeling flush, a train down through France would be nice...

And so it begins

Purbeck Art Week begins today. Lots of hard work to get ready. Imagine if I ever did a major national show! Hope people like my show...

This picture is from Swanage, recently. I like this one, I like the sunlight on the tarmac and the tiny blue flower. Vick doesn't. Ho hum. One of my favourite things is reflected sunlight on tarmac, and this, though direct light and dappled, is close to that.

It was taken here.