Back in black

Some days, when I go down the tube on the escalator, I start humming "Highway to hell" by AC/DC, in a low enough voice that will not raise suspicion. The parents and teacher meeting went well yesterday. Right until the start I was snapping away and this is some of it. 

coming back in a good mindframe

...the possibility of returning to what has already happened is phenomenal...it is specifically human... it is art, isn't it? That is what listening to house music induces on me.

...the bloody crippling doubt came on at me again, and I went digging in one of my negatives pick and mix boxes looking for this photo I took with my Olympus MJ. This is from around the time where I started to finally admit  that good photography was essentially good when the main subject was light, the rest comes after. I have always liked this photo. A couple of years after taking it, I saw one  very similar by Juergen Teller; see it here. Ironically, in typical Teller, his doesn't have much light but that is what make it good; its gloom. I like feeling that the people I have long admired seem to be in the same head space as me. very reassuring. This hasn't been happening for a long time. The snowy light in London at the moment is like the one in this photo: a mix of blue and yellow on a milky dust, very difficult to replicate. It is beautiful.

I'll kill you, creepy doubt.

Cerulean

All flat now!

The straw hat

This morning I read a fairly interesting essay by Mark Greif on the Hipsters in The New York Time Sunday book review, dated 12/11/2010. I live in London and there are a lot of hipsters. In fact, since reading Greif's not so flat platitudes, it appears I use to be one; Mr Greif, referring to Pierre Bourdieu, establish that one type of hipster is "the middle class child who moves to large urban area to work in the creative field". So nicely and bluntly said. I think the hipster is the city guy who categorize the provincial youth in social type because they all wear the uniform of globalization whatever the trend of the year. close. Who cares about stereotype  anyway. We all know crystal-meth is not good for you.

I have done a bit of thinking today, about improvement and series. and the dream and  understanding what people want to see in acknowledging what I want to see. Then I decided it wasn't time on a tuesdayto fight with myself and left the house . The bitter cold helped me forget immediately about all the gibbering my hip-self come up with. Tonight I had me self a bit of fun. I haven't got a clue but I'm enjoying.

p.s: the plastic white chair was bought for a photo-shoot a few weeks ago. I have spent such a long time hating those god damn thing', I had to resolve the matter. Now, I'm stuck with the thing, I can feel the pressure building... it's wicked.

White on white translucent black capes

Post tittle from Bella Lugosi's dead by Bauhaus.

but where is everyone?

I like iPhoto, it is scarily easy, I just scroll up or down and pick and mix and it's tidy and mostly the good enough to be published pictures stand out from the mediocre more rapidly than in my head. There is no time wasted shifting through boxes of prints and then more boxes of negatives. I could never guaranty that my negatives would stay with their contact-shits. And I never need to find the magnifier again, a double click and I have a 14x11 in image in front of me. Still yesterday I felt hatred for all things digital, I just wanted to hold some prints, move them around, align a little story, look at some color pigments and not some brightly lit pixels. I can not remember the last time I got something printed. Now there is too much. My anger at the digital mainly came after looking at the result of a portrait session I did recently and being certain that the result would have been so much better if I had used one of the film camera. My world has become flat. I long for the depth, the richness of traditional prints, I want a black with detail, a highlight with detail, may be I don't want to scroll endlessly in Steve Jobs' deserted land. I know, no one is forcing me. I'm gonna start eating pasta every day again so that I can treat myself to a beautiful print.

watermelon

yesterday morning school run

the two eyed truth

Every day, I try to reconsider why I take photographs, which one are worth showing, which are best kept hidden for the time being and how much I care or not about the photographs belonging to a certain category or school or what degree of ripping off other people's work, inspiration, of being under the influence have possessed me while pressing the shutter ( thank god, so far cameras still have a shutter release even if THEY are trying to convince us that HD video  is the new photography... leave the shutter open for 5 hours you might get a good image out of it). I know, it is time consuming. It leave me no time to do something else. Sometimes, it leaves me no time to go out and take photographs. But I enjoy very much doing all this  r e c o n s i d e r a t i o n. I take it very seriously. It means, I have a tremendous knowledge of the history of photography and I have to be up to scratch with art history as well and sociology is important, so is general history and a certain amount of understanding of technology, optics and chemistry becoming things of the past but you never really forget what you learned at school. In order to reconsider, to consider objectively what I am recording, I have learned that the most important things are honesty and modesty and those two traits belongs to philosophy because they are entirely subjective. I genuinely enjoyed reading Roland Barthes and Regis Durand when I was young, it spoke to me even more so than Jack Kerouac,  Celine and Henri Miller all together; to this day, my bible is The New History of Photography by Michel Frizot. I am a photography swot; but when I shoot, I'm high on adrenaline and my entire body contract in the single effort of catching a fickle vision, my brain stop functioning under the pressure. I'm close to death. It will take my senses from an hour to many years to retrace the event. I was going to start talking about photography as a mean to step out from a situation, as in Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and probably William Eggleston and probably Juergen Teller and probably countless others including myself have saved their life by holding a camera in front of them but I do not like to brag about people I have never even met, so I'll go and make a cup of tea and start considering those shots of an 18 year old model I took on saturday.

The ones that did

Any length of string or ribbon would be saved. Any wrapping paper. All buttons and zippers would be removed from garments before the clothes became rags for cleaning, blocking, signaling if not turned into new garments such as children clothing or summer version of themselves. The lace works of shirts and underwear would be removed to be used again. The products of years of careful collecting will be thrown away. Colors and manufacture's quality of past clothing will be forgotten, unless miraculously inherited by a museum that will charge us the rate of half a day work to have the privilege of admiring what was once in our grand-mother chest of draws or in our great-grand-father garage.

The ones that didn't make it

Hampstead Heath

Du regard en reconnaissant

through your hand

no shield

In 1997, I had lived in London for may be a year and I still believed in the magic. I used to work behind the bar of a Charing Cross nightclub and in a menswear shop in Covent Garden. British Journal of Photography used to have their offices above that shop and the editor at the time was a regular client. When he learned that I had come to London in the hope of breaking through as a photographer, he offered to include my profile in their young photographer section. I was thrilled...I thought my time had come. Then came....I'm going to let Thom Yorke of Radiohead say it, because he says things the way I mean them:   

            Prove Yourself
 I can't afford to breathe in this town
 nowhere to sit without a gun in my hand
 look back up to the cathode ray
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off...
 Prove yourself
 Prove yourself
 Prove yourself
 I want to breathe, I want to grow
 I say I want it, but I don't know how
 I look, I bleed, I beg and pray
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off dead
 I'm better off...
 Prove yourself
 (why.....?)
 Prove yourself
 Prove yourself

 ©Radiohead- 1993

and because I didn't know how to prove myself to content the editors, the art directors, the art buyers, I became really confused about what being a photographer was about and I stuck to serving Southern Comfort and selling hooded tops. Luckily, I kept on taking polaroids, and printing very dark portraits of friends or dead baby rabbits and enjoying myself. I got better at understanding what photography was about. But most importantly, I stop caring as to getting published or receiving a pat on the shoulder. I glued hundreds of photos in scrap book, until I got so bored of my own self-obsession, I rang a friend and suggested that after 20 years of trying to build a pyramid on my own, I would like to build a shed in the back garden and would she help me to nail the boards. I'll spare you a long blurb about the philosophy of failure and success. I have a few 6x4 prints to glue. 

a

goldpeg

 I download my 11 photographs of the week. I choose 5, I upload them; one of them is accidently deleted. I leave it at that. I choose the sequence at which the images are being seen. I leave it at that.

I'm listening to Indian music from a beautiful documentary being played on C4, which you can see in full length but really bad quality here Dhrupad a film by Mani Kaul .

Before that I watched Exit through the gift shop, the first feature film by English street angry but nice artist Banksy. and that blew me away (I'm a bit tired from this afternoon swimming). That film sure woke me up. It's pure genius in the way that Being John Malkovich was. It made me so happy to see something that was not about money. I have great admiration for filmmaker who have the insight of giving us much more than what they said they would. This is not only a documentary about street art, a comedy about a childish selfish bohemian nouveau riche but an acid self-critical mockumentary about selling out and the contemporary art market. I wish I could sing.

easy does it

Just as I'm running out of patience and wondering what I have done with the spool of string that will take me back, here come my little collection of brown bottles, laughing away and patting me on the shoulder, as if to tell me to just put the lid on it.

territoire

server

I have just signed in for one year of web hosting with some dodgy american company, and I have a domain name,  to try and not feel a fraud when I say I am a photographer. I just have no idea how I will get from here to there but I'm pretty good as an electrician (if it goes in somewhere, it has to come out somewhere... brown wire , blue wire, yellow and green, it's all a big circle). let's hope I will be able to go from linear to binary without much damage.