Farewell to Woolies (rearranging the deckchairs)

The UK version of Woolworths has gone bust after 100 years of trading in the UK.

I visited a branch couple of weeks ago, expecting to feel a rush of nostalgia for the old place, but I couldn’t feel much attachment. I popped into another branch on New Year’s Day and did feel very sorry for the staff on the tills at least – it must have put a curb their New Year's Eve festivities for a start. And for what? The store was more or less devoid of customers but the three of them manned their posts in case of a sudden onslaught, despite the empty aisles. The shop had been reduced to a vast aircraft hanger space of empty shelves and fittings (all for sale).

In the absence of anything else to look at, I found myself noticing all the jolly overhead display photographs for sweets and toys for the first time. A tiny smattering of stock remained in one corner of the shop but a few staff were busy rearranging it, in case any gaps made it look untidy. Deckchairs ... Titanic, and all that.

An excuse for some Nanci Griffith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwevqcForgM

Happy New Year

I’m quite behind in updating my website, with November and December photo diary pages to be updated, and I desperately need to upload some more themed collections, once I have sorted them out. A few people probably wonder why I add the photo diary pages for every month, but I see it as a useful discipline that FORCES me to whittle down the hundreds of shots I’ve taken every month to anything from half a dozen to 30 pictures. These photo diary pictures are shots that I feel might come in handy for future themed collections – they are shots that, believe it or not, have passed some sort of basic quality control test. Behind the scenes are usually about a hundred or so shots for each month that I can’t quite bring myself to bin though... I think that without the discipline of updating and culling a sizable proportion every month that I would end up with a truly terrifying backlog.

Anyway, as it’s the end of the year, I’ve picked out 10 of my photos from 2008 that I liked...

Last-minute presents

I’ve been following Slinkachu’s ‘Little People’ blog for a few years now. The London-based artist leaves his tiny characters and props around the city to "fend for themselves". A good idea plus a free blog and – hey presto – he (?) has a book out in time for Christmas. Probably at a Waterstones or Borders near you for a tenner. He also has a new website.

Tony Ray-Jones and the white (-ish) cliffs of Bournemouth, part 2

A brief note concerning my previous post! It’s been pointed out to me by several people during the course of my scanty and slapdash ‘research’ that Alum Chine Tropical Gardens in Bournemouth is the likely location for this photo. And that certainly ties in with the original caption.

Geologist Dr Ian West has suggested these Tropical Gardens as the location, noting that “the cross-bedding shows that the cliff is not Chalk, but is probably Branksome Sands. The stone walling is typical Bournemouth Purbeck Stone walling.”

I have visited the gardens within the past year, and they were an obvious candidate due to the plant life. The reason that I ruled the location out was my probably mistaken belief that the cliffs to the top right of the picture were massive and distant, which doesn’t fit in with any view that can be seen from the Alum Chine Gardens today.

Instead, it seems likely that the cliffs in the background are quite close, and now covered in vegetation, so the view is different. What appears as pure white cliffs in the black and white photo is probably orange-tinged sandstone, now hidden. I think these cliffs are either to the north at the ‘back’ of the gardens and have degraded slightly over the years or, more likely, are beyond the gardens and are the ends of the main cliffs that run down to the beach. In other words, Ray-Jones was facing eastwards in the direction of Bournemouth Pier when he took the photo.

Maybe the diagonally running wall that stretches across the photo still exists... The next time I’m in the area I’ll try to find it and get a ‘present day’ shot.

Groeten van Engeland!

Hello to all my readers in Holland and Belgium – and looking at my Google Analytics report for this blog, there seems to be quite literally ‘several’ of you. I’m delighted to be featured in the current issue of Digifotopro in an article on straatfotografie by Erik Borst, so please rush out and buy it.

The article includes the photo above, which coincidentally has also just won a prize in The First Post/Photobox competition, so my Photobox account is currently £200 in credit.

Urban exploration with Will Self

After walking from his house in central London to Heathrow Airport, author Will Self boarded a plane to New York. Once in New York, he continued his walk from Kennedy Airport to his hotel. I enjoyed this quote:

"People don’t know where they are anymore ... In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?"

Source: New York Times

Tony Ray-Jones and the white cliffs of Bournemouth... PART ONE

I wonder if anyone can provide the location of this rather splendid Tony Ray-Jones photo – it’s captioned as “Bournemouth, 1969” in Russell Roberts’ Tony-Ray Jones anthology (2004). I know the area quite well and am struggling to think of anywhere that could reasonably be described as Bournemouth that overlooks these distinctive white cliffs.

It's possible that it was taken in a different part of the country altogether. In Ian Walker’s interesting essay on Tony Ray-Jones’s Tripper Boat picture in Source magazine (issue 40, autumn 2004) he describes how much of Ray-Jones’s work was wrongly captioned after his death:

“painstaking research by Ruth Kitchin at the NMPFT [National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, UK] has shown that much of the captioning in A Day Off is wildly wrong; of the first fifty pictures in the book, only thirteen are correctly captioned, a success rate that seems almost wilfully low.”

In fact the Tripper Boat picture that Walker examines in detail in Source magazine was incorrectly captioned “Scarborough” in A Day Off – scrutiny of the contacts reveals that the location was Beachy Head, as the unmistakable Eastbourne Pier appears in the sequence.

I don’t own copies of A Day Off (1974) or Richard Ehrlich’s Ray-Jones book (1990) to chart the progress of all the captions (you’ll be relieved to hear), but many have been corrected as we come to Russell Roberts’ Tony-Ray Jones’ anthology in 2004.

Possibly the above photo has slipped through the net. Are these cliffs Beachy Head? The Isle of Wight? Somewhere else? Answers on a postcard...

The poetry of Alex Webb

A couple of quotes from Alex Webb, shamelessly cut and pasted from the Magnum blog:

"I respond to what I find – that is one of the things that I find most exciting about this kind of photography. I never know what I will find when I step out the door. It's like embarking on a journey with no clue as to where it will lead or end."

and

"For me, photography affirms reality, but does not explain it. Part of its strength lies in its ambiguity, its suggestiveness. I embrace that strength of photography rather than worrying about its weaknesses. If I was predominantly interested in explanation or analysis, or if my goal was to present what people are thinking, I would choose another medium – film or discursive writing. I like to think that sometimes still photography can, through suggestion, get at complicated, inexplicable notions, much the way poetry does. More discursive forms like essays may not deal as well with these more elusive notions."

I've thought for a while that Webb's explorative approach is at the opposite extreme to Martin Parr, who often seems to have an "agenda" or concept, and is looking for pictures to illustrate his world view. I've seen criticisms of some of Webb's assignments that were done in a short timescale, and that surely is the downside to Webb's suck-it-and-see approach when it comes to producing the goods in a short space of time.

Webb seems to have to immerse himself in the subject matter, rely on a little luck, mood, feeling and instinct. And sometimes for a great poet like Webb, that just doesn't happen in a weekend or a week. Whereas Parr is the ultimate pro who has a box of tricks and techniques up his sleeve to fall back on when the going gets tough...

Birds, trains, and the War on Oddness

I’m excited at the prospect of seeing the Eagle Owl that has set up shop in Bristol, near the University’s Biology department.

Owl

It’s thought to be an escapee from a private collection rather than a wild bird blown off course, but a creature with a wing span of up to 2 m sounds like a pretty impressive beast. The BBC’s Natural History Unit is based nearby, so perhaps it has got its beady eyes on a walk-on part on an upcoming production.

Not that I know much about birds, but generally I know what I like, and that’s the impressive, gaudy showbiz birds. Herons, spoonbills, kingfishers, that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I can watch a flock of sparrows buzzing around for hours – their behaviour is interesting – but I don’t really share the twitcher’s urge to tick relatively mundane birds off the list just for a glimpse. When I see a flock of birdwatchers set up in a car park, because one of those birds in that huge pile of gulls just might be a rare Mediterranean gull – identical to all the other gulls apart from a minor detail of plumage – it leaves me pretty cold.

In the same way, I enjoy seeing the odd steam engine and nicely designed Intercity train, but don’t feel the need to get out the notebook and record the details of every diesel locomotive that passes through the station. Then again, the world needs obsessives, so good luck to them. It’s interesting to note that Martin Parr (him again) has at various times been a birdwatcher and a literal trainspotter, so maybe it’s the same species of obsession that drives on the best documentary and street photographers.

Unfortunately, street photography and trainspotting are both minority activities that fall outside the government-approved-behaviours-for-hard-working-families [list to follow]. Hence photographers, trainspotters and bus-spotter have had a tough time recently trying to pursue their interests in a climate of suspicion and paranoia.

Conversation in Jessops concerning Martin Parr

– Can I help you, Sir?

– Yes, I'd like to try out this camera please. [mucks around with camera for a few minutes]

– Hmmm, the focus seems to be a bit slower than I expected. Hard to know if it's just the low light inside this shop. Not worth going outside though, it's even grimmer out there. And raining.

– Yes, no way you could do any photography today.

– Oh, I don't know, have you seen Martin Parr's Bad Weather Series? [clearly this customer is the sort of fruitcake who talks to strangers on train]

– I think so. Was it on Sky?

– No, I meant a series of photographs. I think it was a book. Martin Parr used an underwater camera and flash to photograph people in the rain and snow.

– And what was the point of that?

– Erm, well, you know, documenting people going about their daily business in all conditions, not just photographing in good weather when everyone else is photographing.

– It seems like a lot of effort just to make a point.

– Maybe, but he's become quite a wealthy man doing stuff like that.

– Ah well, if he's rich, maybe he can afford to waste his time doing that sort of thing.

Francis Bacon and Lartigue: the ongoing characters

There's a major retrospective of Francis Bacon's work on at Tate Britain until January, and Robert Hughes' article in The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/aug/30/bacon.art

reveals an unexpected link between Bacon and the photographer Lartigue:

"... Bacon's resort to photography, both still and cinematic, was constant, obsessive and over-the-top. Its sources and results have an enormous span, from the relatively familiar – Dr Goebbels orating, terrified crowds scattering from the tsar's police, or the bloody face of the nurse on Eisenstein's Odessa Steps, peering hysterically through her broken spectacles – to the utterly obscure. There are bits of Picture Post and images from those resources of gay porn, the body-culture magazines of the 50s. Sometimes the obscure details lie within images themselves famous. For instance, there is a well-known photograph of a racing-car at Le Mans, in which the speed of the machine and the panning camera movement turn the wheels into forward-leaning ellipses, distorted cartoonwise. So striking is this effect and so dominant the machine's image that few people so much as notice the figures in the background, on the verge of the track. But Bacon did, and he stole a pair of them, enlarging them for the right panel of Crucifixion (1965), where, in their odd soft hats, they look threateningly like a pair of Australian yobs leaning on a bar."

The ‘well-known photograph’ of a racing car sounded mightily familiar, and sure enough, a quick Google reveals that Bacon had borrowed the figures from Lartigue's racing car photo for the right panel of his triptych:

All at sea on Bournemouth Pier

It's been a sad summer for English piers with both Weston-super-Mare and Fleetwood Piers being severely damaged by fire. Over the years, Brighton's formally splendid West Pier has slowly deteriorated from an elegantly wasted wreck to a bit of an eyesore. Meanwhile, Brighton's other pier, the Palace Pier, ‘rebranded’ itself as Brighton Pier. Of course, piers are inherently at risk given the large amount of wood on the premises but when closed or struggling piers and seaside funfairs burn down with regularity over the country various rumours surface.

On Thursday I paid a visit to Bournemouth's recently revamped main pier. It proved to be bit of an acquired taste, especially as you're required to stump up 50p for what at first wander seems to be a fairly mundane affair. The cafe at the end of the pier has moved upmarket considerably to become Key West Bar and Restaurant. A hoarding offered an all-day breakfast for £6.95, which I heard one lady point out as ‘a disgrace’. Later on in the warm and pleasant evening the largish restaurant had just two diners, and at least that many staff. An elderly couple peered in and muttered something about just wanting a cup of tea and that it all looked a bit posh (further menu item fact: cappuccino £2.50). I noticed that the cafe glitterball has inevitably disappeared in the makeover, although the ornate ceiling remains!

There are advantages to the low-key approach though. Much as I like the noisy Brighton Pier with Kylie blaring out of the sound system, you can forget that you're out at sea and the whole experience could be any old funfair, especially at night. Whereas on Bournemouth Pier there's no music, no slot machines, and in the near silence the noise of the waves takes over. And after dark, the underfloor lighting creates an eerie light show of changing colours.

Front - Chance encounters by the seaside

Justin Sainsbury's book "Front - Chance encounters by the seaside" is now available from Blurb:

Blurb

Blurb's 15-page preview only takes you as far as the first picture due to the lengthy introduction, etc, but the pictures can be previewed here:

Flickr

The book was laid out by professional designer, Mark Ogden (web site), and was originally printed locally as a short-run book. Hence a lot time and effort has gone into the production, rather than being a hit-and-run Blurb template job.

I have arranged an amazing 0% discount on the Blurb price. If you buy a copy, don't forget to leave a comment here and maybe Justin will buy me a Cornetto.

Street photographers – the saturated streets of London

I was walking down Villiers Street towards the Strand on Saturday when a couple of elderly American (I guess) tourists passed by me. Big glasses, loads of character, wearing coats despite the summer heat and humidity. I thought to myself – "they look like they've stepped out of a Bruce Gilden picture".

I turned round with the vague thought of getting a picture of them, when that instant a man steps up with a camera and off-board flash, crouches a little and zaps them from close up – just like Gilden.

They seemed completely unfazed by the experience.

I took the photo below a few seconds afterwards. The elderly American tourists are not featured - I thought they'd been photographed enough for one day.


Villiers Street.

The nomadic life of Josef Koudelka

An interesting article from Sunday's Observer:

Koudelka

Police state or joke?

A link from today's Guardian is hard to believe.

Experts? Bucks Fizz? Cliff Richards? Maybe it is a joke.

Guardian

"Singer Pete Doherty has been blocked from performing at a music festival amid fears his band would "gee up" the crowd into a dangerous frenzy.

The decision came after police asked an intelligence officer to research Doherty's band, Babyshambles, who were booked to headline Moonfest festival in Westbury, Wiltshire, next week. They concluded that the band's tendency to "speed up and then slow down the music" could create a "whirlpool effect" and spark disorder.

...

But Superintendent Paul Williams said the ban was designed to preserve public safety. "Experts are telling us that the profile of fans that follow Pete Doherty and Babyshambles is volatile and they can easily be whipped up into a frenzy, whereas the profile of someone that would follow around Cliff Richard or Bucks Fizz, for example, is completely different."

Time for some more backups...

Browsing through a copy of The Guardian the other day, I saw a mention of their computer editor's "Laws of Computing":

"As Schofield's Second Law of Computing asserts, data doesn't really exist unless you have two copies of it. Preferably more. And the only person who can be held responsible for that is you."

Wading through hard drives, deliberating, deleting, backing up.

Does it ever end? Probably not.

CCTV eye test

Photos of uncertain importance. Part 22. Gazza’s kebab

It’s football time again – the European championships – which means that ITV and the BBC choose a piece of classical music to accompanying the title sequence. This noble tradition (probably) dates back to the World Cup, Italy 1990

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZ5Wbrunsg

and it’s hard to imagine how Nessum Dorma could be bettered in this respect – it seems possible that Puccini had the 1990 World Cup in Italy in mind when he wrote the tune. There have been flirtations with New Order and the like, but since Pav sang, it’s been mainly classical…

The footage that’s inextricable linked to the event from the England point of view is of a tearful Paul Gascoigne, aka Gazza, one of the most naturally talented, but troubled, footballers that England has ever produced. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece about Amy Winehouse that managed to avoid using the word “troubled” – the subs must be tearing their hair out, maybe it’s time to invent another word…)

Fast forward eight years, and England boss Glenn Hoddle is pondering his selection for the France 1998 World Cup. Gazza is not fully fit and has earned a reputation for leading an unhealthy lifestyle. Meanwhile Hoddle is making some very non-committal remarks regarding the player. It’s worth bearing in mind that Martin Amis (the novelist, not the photographer) has suggested that all England managers go mad in the end, and there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of evidence to disprove that theory. Although Hoddle may have had a natural head start in the fruitcake stakes.

Just a few days before the squad is due to meet up, Gazza goes for a night out with his friends, DJs Danny Baker and Chris Evans, both known to enjoy a few drinks. The evening ends in the usual culinary conclusion – a visit to the kebab shop.

From http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1270872,00.html

Student James Eisen spotted them and quickly aimed his camera: 'Gazza had a bag of chips and another bag. I asked Chris if I could take his picture and he nodded. I asked Gazza and he sort of mumbled so I took the shot. One of Gazza's mates grabbed the camera and it went flying. It ended up under a car but I was able to retrieve it.

The picture of Gazza looking slightly shell-shocked and adrift with kebab in Soho made the front page. I have a very clear memory of seeing the picture. Although the party protested that Gazza was in bed by midnight, and Evans even claimed that the chicken kebab, being low in fat, was the natural food of athletes, it didn’t look good. The kebab – the ultimate symbol of end of night revelry and general pissed-up-ness.

I wonder what happened to James Eisen? A quick Google reveals a mention that a James Eisen has quite recently worked for the News of the World newspaper. It’s hard to know exactly what effect that one photograph had on Hoddle, but it’s fair to say it didn’t help Gascoigne’s case.

Gascoigne never made the World Cup squad, and never played for England again.

Maciej's Cardiff at night - the video

Fans of Maciej Dakowicz's Cardiff at Night series might be interested in a video of him in action on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72DIdt3oaqI

it's a bit rough around the edges, but it shows the general ribald chaos and some examples of Maciej shooting.

The video was shot by Joni Karanka, who also shoots Cardiff at night.