I was round an art exhibition the other week with some friends. Some of it was unmitigated toss, some of it was OK, and mostly it was the building that was the star. But here’s a shot of one of the better works. Still if I’m honest, my photo of this piece appeals to me far more than the piece itself did. This is another shot where I knew exactly what effect I’d be post-processing for, removing detail, and replacing it with heavy shadow, before I even took the shot.
If anyone of this parish happens to be the sort of person who might pick up a copy of Bizarre magazine now and again, then you could do worse than pick up this month’s issue, as one of my photos is in it, alongside their review of the Amanda Palmer gig I was at the other month. I sent them a choice of photos, so naturally, they’ve used the one I like least, but still, that’s one of my photos in print that is. I am now an internationally published photographer. (I’ve previously been published in Sweden, some years ago.) Which is nice.
It’s a photo of someone else’s art, that, on the one hand doesn’t entire do the piece justice. On the other, I shot this working in the pitch sodding black, with a tiny light source, and a less than ideal lens, and it came out as more or less exactly the shot I was after. Go me.
Specifically, Jon Boden’s completely superb new album “Songs From The Floodplain”. I have owned it for slightly over a week, after a friend recommended it, and I thought “it’s that chap out of Bellowhead, I ought to see what he does solo”. And as a result I appear to be developing a worrying obsession with this set of 12 songs. A quick look reveals that I have listened to this album more than any other in the last 12 months, and I’ve only owned it for a week. To be honest, I’m sort of hoping that writing a bit about it might allow me to let it go, and listen to something else.
It’s a concept album – all the songs are folksongs from a post-apocalyptic England. Never mind just songwriting – much like say, Tom Waits “Mule Variations” this is an album that contains some of the finest writing of any kind I’ve heard so far this year. Really stellar stuff. I appreciate that folksongs about a landscape of dead motorways and crips packets are very much my thing, but even if you don’t have my particular combination of Ballardian futurism and hippy mythologising wired into your brain, it’s still a must-buy.
There are a number of absolutely stand out tracks – on another album, pretty much any of the first six tracks would be the single stand out track, and here there are six of them, culminating in the utterly ace “Beating The Bounds” which is a superb synthesis of ancient myth and post-collapse storytelling, an old folk tradition recast as an invocation of Britannia in the guise of a chav goddess. (And a couplet from another track, the phrase “the sweet perfume of petrol / like a lover’s parting kiss” from “Days Gone By” is just about the best metaphor I’ve heard so far this year.)
And having written this, I’m off to listen to something else for a while. Because otherwise the novelty is going to wear off.
So, as most of you probably know, I’m a bit of a photography nerd. There are few things in life that make me happier than wandering about London with a camera in hand, and most of those things that do are not things I can do in public without getting arrested.
So I get a little exercised when people try and tell me I can’t take photos when I know I have that right. I am of course, profoundly fucked off about all the anti-photography measures that have recently become law here. But the other day, I have an amusing experience with a security guard who told me that I did not have the right to take photos of the building that he was security guarding – The Shell Centre on the South Bank.
Well, I say it was amusing. It was, but that’s because I’m a six foot skinhead in a biker jacket. People tend to pay attention when I assert my rights in a calm and reasonable tone of voice, so when I said that actually, I was completely allowed to take photos, whatever he said, he went off to get his supervisor. By the time they returned, I had taken the few snaps I was amusing myself with, and was on my way. Had I been someone smaller, or less sure of themselves, their assertion of authority might have worked on me, and it would have been much less funny.
Honestly, I hadn’t really planned on putting the photos on-line. They’re hardly great pictures. But I’ll be fucked in the ear with a rusty butter knife if I let some jumped up little shit with the fake authority of a petrochemical giant tell me what I can and can’t do.
So there’re three shots up on flickr, under the widest Creative Commons License I could find. In the unlikely event anyone needs images like that, please, use them and become very rich.
Yeah, in the grand scheme of things this is hardly sticking it to the man. But still: if anyone fancies passing the link to this entry around, that’d be very kind of you. When photographers rights are being encroached left and right as it is, I think it’s important to take a stand, however small and irrelevant for those rights that we have left.
So: if you’re passing The Shell Centre, stop and take a few photos, why don’t you?