There's only one thing to say to...

That


And that's this




(PTP is one of my fav blogs)




Edit - Kras
and this . . .

 

Biography: Why it doesn't matter

I wouldn't call the working class chip on my shoulder a chip at all, it's more of a bolder. I've not gone all Henry Moore on my rock, the rocks shaped me and continues to do so

Lets pretend for a moment that I make very bad attempts at pseudo documentary art photography( not too much of a stretch). The shots are labored, worthy, cliched & naive. Nothing worth remembering. Then lets say you find out I was a young offender that left school at 14 and can hardly sign my own name. That I've witnessed crime and drug abuse for most of my life, enough to fill the portfolios of a large number of documentary photographers. My story moves and impresses you, so much so that you start to see my work in a new light

Well it shouldn't have. My biography doesn't matter, my pictures matter. It's just as Robert Adam's said. Biography is one of the improper standards of judgment when accessing art. The only thing that distinguishes the photographer from everybody else, is his pictures. Major art can stand independent of its maker.


"be an heir and do it on the side"

Elliot Erwitt's advise on being a successful photographer.

By rights my working class bolder should prevent me from considering the work of trust fund photographers, many of the big names are/were. Why should I line the pockets of that silver spooned fucker by buying their books?


Because I love the work.



Now Ken, go put your Gary Glitter box set back on the mantlepiece next to the Michael Jackson autographed print


Sean

Images à la sauvette

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON - Decisive Moment, The from bt465 on Vimeo.

Yes-yes-yes!

SA

Hi,

My name's Sean and I'm a strobist...

Man that's a load off, a great weight has been lifted. I've been living with the shame and the guilt for far too long, it's good to share it here. It's a higher power, one higher than my 4 AA's that run my 580's that gave me the courage to do this today.

"Yeah, that's it. Lots of flash and no meaning"

Chief Wiggum


I'm not gonna get all Shore here, I'll just say that Wiggum's words rings in my ears every time I use strobes and almost every time I view strobist type shots. It plays havoc with any faith I have in doing it


You can have your faith restored.


                                                Doing it long before strobist existed

There's a debate on Strobist about it.


Having read a lot of the comments (138!) I can only say that a lot of people know more about flash than photography.

Adore

You just can't beat this.

Oh but I can, Smithy

The snaps

When you come across these glass negs  you just know they never saw the light of day. Well, here they are. And I love it when the scans appearer. I just love it, it's the best thing for me.

Kras

Some snapshots

Just won a whole box of half plate glass negatives from the auction today. I do love seeing these old snapshots from the past and here's a couple that I like so far.

 

The shadow

The woman with the umbrella 

Kras

In good company

Dog shooters that is

Angela's guest blog post

This is Angie's (my other half) first guest blog post. Thanks Angie.


So, Stephen Shore may think that Flickr is shit, well most of the photographs on there are shit,  I tend to agree. There are a lot of people that upload photos that they believe to be masterpieces...and they are in fact clichés, crap and self indulgent.  I upload many photos that I don’t think are artistic in the least but they are mostly amusing...in my mind.  Looking on the whole thing it can be taken as a diary of everyday life, an archive, perhaps a form of  ‘group therapy’.
 

Angie & Tog - 24th July 2009

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer I was offered therapy to help me deal with it....to be honest the thought of talking with other people, generally women about such traumatic news was not what I felt that I needed.  I’d rather chat with my friends and well, I have been known to talk with complete strangers that I meet in the supermarket.  A cashier in Waitrose was great, he always asks how I’m doing and once held my hand and wished me well.  Whatever, I’m over it and I’m told my attitude probably helped greatly.

Pub lunches were one of my favourite cures together with taking photos of dogs that we met on Flickr meets!  Ken, of course has been a saviour together with all my wonderful friends.

Kras

Tale of the tape

I've been thinking about selling one or two of my lenses. I've been going through metadata in lightroom to help me make my mind up on which lens should go. I've gone back to 2008 and it's no surprise to me that my 35mm is my most used lens so that obviously stays. Maybe that's the safe thing to do. Maybe it would serve me better to sell my most used lenses and start anew with lenses I've become unfamiliar with?


Nah...

I don't think familiarity breeds contempt when it comes to lenses. Apathy, now that's a killer;
I know full well you get better by shooting more, not by buying or selling more.

Finding your voice

Look no further




Sean

Before the internet

Internet daters and cyber sex maniacs don't know they're born.


We Existed Before The Internet


I'm sure there's a digital V analogue metaphor there somewhere.


(A profound question pops up at 3 mins 11)




Sean

Slightly shirty

“I went on to Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit, and I just couldn’t believe it. And it’s just all conventional, it’s all cliches, it’s just one visual convention after another.” 

Stephen Shore

Lets face it, most photography is crap (that includes most of mine). The good stuffs really hard to find let alone make, so I'm not surprised Shore didn't find what he was looking for on Flickr. I have a sneaking suspicion that his mind was already made up before he saw his first reflection, flower & cat .He left with what he came for but what did he actually learn? What does anybody learn when their minds made up before they've seen the evidence

It was John Szarkowski that gave Shore his chance.  A valuable lesson to take from Szarkowski was that he never talked about work he didn't like, he focused all his attention on good work and he championed it. It's the harder path to take as talking about why photographs work is much harder than talking about why they don't.

"He that cometh to seek after knowledge, with a mind to scorn, shall be sure to find matter for his humour, but no matter for his instruction."

 Sir Francis Bacon: Advancement of Learning, Book I (1605)

Sean

Slightly dirty

Just a few quotes from Diane Arbus on why she liked to photograph :

 "It was a sort of naughty thing to do"

"It was very perverse"

"It was slightly dirty"

"It had a lot to do with not believing what I was told"

Spring 1970

Kras

Still here

That's a relief.

Gordon is not a moron

I celebrated my 40th down the local. I invited everyone but not many turned up that year. Gordon had been feeling ill for quite a while but made an effort to turn up. He travelled by bus and train to get there. He didn't eat, he'd not swallowed anything for the past 4 months but he could still sink a few pints.

This is my last ever shot of Gordon, I did not know he would be gone ten months later and I don't know why he he came back to my thoughts tonight, maybe it was a mention of Beefheart and 40ths.

That year Gordon was too ill to join us at the Rochford Beer Festival in November. He was the one who started us off for what is now a yearly event for us and to remember him. On the first year he was not with us a number of snaps I shot had his name in the background, (not cropped). He would take the whole week off work and spend it at the festival, it was one of his favourite things.

Rochford Beer Festival - November 2005

Kras

Cat photography - urban tails

Sean mentioned shooting sleeping cats (no pun intended) in his 18th May post. But when it’s done right it is wonderful.

A blatant plug for photographer Knox and his street cats. The best I’ve ever seen.

urban tails

Ken

To edit to

If like me you prefer shooting to editing, you better have some decent tunes on while you're deciding which shot's the best of a bad bunch. Every fecker thinks they've got great taste in music and  I'm a fecker like no other.

Have a bit of this, it'll grow on you

Have you ever been on a forum somewhere and read something like " I don't think anybody has the right to invade anybody's privacy, I certainly wouldn't like it!"

That statement's normally made by landscape shooters and people who shoot their cats sleeping. Not a thing wrong with shooting those things but the misguided belief that shooting somebody you don't know is intrusive/rude/selfish, is just projection. It's not based on experience or knowledge and if you're going to learn from somebody you want them to have those two things. We've got a rich history to look back on, to learn from. My photography got better when I started too look for guidance in that history rather than in forums.

It helped me get over any fear I had of shooting strangers. I just knew it was a good thing to do, even if the pictures were bad it was something worth doing, it was a good thing. I'd had that proven to me, I'd seen the work, seen what it could do, I believed in it and still do. I will defend it and have defended it to strangers I've shot, there is no hiding place when you're open with what you're doing. There's nothing to hide from, you don't get "busted" when you're seen, you get busted when you're up to no good.

I shot this girl at 1:48 am on the 22/Nov/2005. It was Diane's birthday and we were slaughtered, we will have been drinking for 12 hrs by this point. I spotted the girl in front of me, she looked a little lost, she wasn't joining in with the conversation with her friends round the table. I am drawn to people who look lonely, don't know why that is.

Anyway I shot her and she noticed

I'm really glad she did. She ended up coming to sit with us, turns out she was from Portugal and hadn't known the girls she was with long, she met them in local church (church goers love a drink). She lit up when I shot her (pardon the pun if it is one) she turned out to be a real fire cracker, a good laugh and a warm human being pretty much alone in Manchester. Sadly we lost her number, we were already blind drunk.

There's a couple of reasons why its one of my favorite photographs. I do think I caught a little of how she was feeling in that moment, I can't know for sure. One thing I do know is that she liked  that I tried to.

17th May

A big day for Norway is the 17th May. It's their independence day.

I celebrate it in my own little way, eat a bit of brown cheese and Mills Caviare and sink a few beers.

Last time I was in Norway for the 17th was visiting my Dad back in 2007. He was in a care home and no way was coming back, so I lit a bonfire on that night.

He never made it back home.



On this same day is my niece Sigrid's birthday.

Today I miss the family and I miss Norway.

Ken

Edit Sean

Beautiful, Kras

I've not been to London for a couple of years, now. We're at home in most cities, you'll never see me sat on a beach, it's just not me. We love London and I'm really looking forward to the expo and seeing THE SMITHS

London's a street photographers dream and though I don't shoot the street like I used to, I recon I can still bring it...

                                                                  My bus stop home

 

I'm sat on a bar stool here and shot this kid through the window asking the girl for change.She grabbed her phone

                                  I'll tell a tale about this sad looking girl tomoz

I knocked a pint over with my camera one time in this bar, the glass shattered and broke the chilled out vibe. Everybody starred

    Me and Dee shared the other sofa, I had three lenses on the table out of shot

               Same bar

 

Another of my bus stops home

Fecking shot this one in jpeg like a twat. It really does look close to how you see it

And this one too on the same night & bar. They're hard to edit as I was already dragging every bit out of the camera and lens I could get and jpeg was a real mistake. But It's a good example of how you can hide in plain sight as these guys just forgot me

This track would have made Ansel Adam's want to shoot the street

Come together

I like this, and I like we are finally coming together after all these years. I  remember when we became friends over the net, got to be like some many years ago, many years ago!

Ken

Shot of the day

  Sarah Mei Herman


Banksy or what?

First camera

I think everyone remembers their first camera, the first time you got a set of prints, slides or screen shots.

I've had this camera for a very long time, since the start of me taking pictures. What made me go on was Tony Ions who showed me how to develop film and learn to print.

Tony has long gone and I never thanked him for showing me what I love. I never got a shot of him and like Sean says it exists in my memory and nothing to prove it.

Ken

Dead Man's Bay

Walking along Canvey Island's  sea wall last Friday I was told the story of Dead Man's Bay. An affectionate name given by the locals for Thorney Bay. Bodies from the Thames would be washed up on the beach due to to strange tidal currents. Ten minutes on I saw a lone sunbather in this bay.

Ken

The games afoot

Where'd my last post go?

Sean

It's official

The reason why I'm going grey

I'm 40 in September, Diane's 40 in November. We both left school at 14,
it doesn't bode well for us does it?




I'm just popping off to the British legion and then for a hair cut as it's OAP day at the barbers

While I'm gone...

Folk this

I do love Irish folk music (the good stuff)


But Jesus Christ,  English folk music is as beautiful as you'll find

Last by The Unthanks





Sean

The other seldom seen Kid

What I didn't mention yesterday was that Ian spent some of those six weeks in Strangeways during the riots.
Most kids I knew knew of somebody that had been there. It's about 1 1/2 miles from the street I grew up on,
Ian lived next door to me.

If anybody was going to end up in Strangeways it was going to be me. Though he lived next door to me
my history was very different to Ian's. His father was a hard working man, his mother a house wife,
none of the family had known trouble with the law. Not so for our family, we were born in to trouble,
that's the only way I can put it.

First time I found myself in a police station was in 1977 at six years old. I was with my mother who had
been caught steeling a box of chocolates for my sisters birthday. She was drunk and well known to the
officers of bottle street police station.

MY Da used to say that your first 50 years are the hardest. For me it was the first 20, I've spent
a lot of the last 20 trying to make sense of the first. MY own memory and the memory of others
is all I have to go on. I hadn't seen Ian in 21 years before his photograph was sent to me,
I have no photographs of my first 21 years.


There's BD-AD (Before Diane-After Diane)

The first time I left HMP Hindley was in Jan 1992. I had spent Christmas and New Years Eve there, managed
to break my jaw on the 16th of Dec and spent three days in hospital with a guard by my bed. Two of them
over the three days, they were my only visitors and decent guys. I drank protein shakes through a straw
on Christmas day in Hindley.

I had broken my Jaw on the same wing that Ian had hung himself on. After hospital I stayed
on the hospital wing of the prison and can recall to this day, the fire works going off on NYE
in the sky over the prison. My mother had taken her life 4 months before, but then nobody knows for sure,
it was an open verdict, that or she was killed.

I came back home to Manchester in late Jan 1991. I was back by march but only for three weeks,
in those three weeks I'd  lose my flat and the girl I'd been seeing for a year. When I left Hindley
for the last time In March 1991 everything I owned was in my property bag.

My mind set at that time was, this is how life is, Sean. Not a complaint, no self pity
it was just all I knew and had known for a long time. I could cope with it, I was born
in to it. Ian wasn't; Maybe that's why he took his life I don't know. Things got bad
for him pretty quickly, his relationship with his family deteriorated and his life became chaotic
he must have felt he was alone and just couldn't cope with it

When I met My Wife, Diane I was sleeping in the toilet of a burger bar. I knew the owner
and he knew I'd lost my place. He even gave me £5 a night for looking after the place
and all the food I could eat. It was a hassle free deal while I figured out
what to do next. You might wonder why I didn't go to my family, truth is
we all had our lives to deal with and I was used to dealing with mine.

I met Diane in a club, I was well known in the Madchester days in clubs
I was wearing designer gear, I had plenty of cash, I was cocky but friendly.
You wouldn't know I was sleeping on a toilet floor. Turns out she didn't care
and she actually spent the odd night on that floor with me rather than going home.
She would sleep on a toilet floor if that meant being with me.

That was 19 years ago this week, I've been with her longer than Ian lived.
There's no picture in existence of me and Ian together. Both those kids are long gone,
they only exist together in my memory, I've no picture to prove it.

Somewhere to Disappear

I've been following the hype with interest. I have the Broken Manual and it took me by surprise. I'm not a man of words these days but it's something I should get back in to.

Anyway, here is a snippet of Alec Soth, a teaser the trailer says. Either way, I just can't wait to see this film.

SOMEWHERE TO DISAPPEAR, Teaser, Hey You ! from laure flammarion on Vimeo.


Somewhere to Disappear

The seldom seen kid

I hadn't seen the lad on the left of this Picture in 21 years until last week.
He hadn't changed a bit. He hadn't changed because Ian took his own
life when he was 18 years old...


"Ian McKinley was transferred from Strangeways prison to Hindley. He spent the whole seven weeks between his transfer and his death in solitary confinement. During that time, he was never assessed for suicide risks by a doctor, nor was he seen by a psychiatrist. That was clearly a completely inadequate response to his needs."

The above was taken from a debate held in the house of commons in 1991



For 21 years I've been using memory alone to remember what Ian looked like. That
is until his sister sent me this photograph, last week.

"We need to help youngsters to face the consequences of their actions and make plans for their future when it is found necessary to remand them. There must be proper recognition of the problems facing youngsters when they leave remand to return to the outside world. Many have no homes to go to, no jobs to support them and no family to fall back on. It is clearly an inadequate and short-sighted response to turn the key and with it turn our backs on their lives."

18 Months after Ian's death In Hindley, I'd leave the same prison with a broken jaw and my world in a plastic bag.

More on that tomorrow

Don & Barbara

Tonight I had sad news. Aunty Barbara has died and uncle Don (uncle La La) has cancer.

Here we are together, a long time ago.

Good times.

Shot of the day

I keep saying it... And I'll keep on saying it... The best photographs are the ones closest to home.

But they already know that

                                                                  Jimmy Forsyth: Park Road 1959

Edit by Ken :
Such a good set, my fave is this one.

 

Sean

One of the things that has saddened me is how working class
people are portrayed on TV and in various sections of the media, today.
It seems that we've gone from salt of the earth to scum of
the earth. Chav, Scally, Pikey, scroungers and other sneering
judgements are made in print and on TV.

It's a prejudice as real as any other kind and just as bad. It's
why documentary photography remains important because if you're
going to see any real insight to working class life today it's likely
to come from photography but it seldom comes from the inside. That's why Jimmy Forsyth photographs are so special to me

Lines come together

About a year ago I was pondering whether to go for a voluntary redundancy. I worked in an environment that had over the last few years become starved of light and I'd come home and sit in The Garden watching the evening sky and would shoot the jet trails.

On the 27th April 2010 I decided to apply for the voluntary redundancy. It was a big thing for me after working for 22 years in the same place. You build a lot of strong working  friendships over that time and it is something I am missing now.

On that evening of the 27th I saw two jet trails make a defined cross and I took this as some sort of mad sign to say "go for it". I posted it on my PBase and my friend Roy commented:

"This is when you know you have pondered enough, lines come together and fall into place!:-)"

 

  

April 27th 2010

Today, one year on to almost the exact same day and from the exact same place in The Garden while I was packing up for the evening I looked up and saw almost the very same thing. I shoot a lot of jet trails, but for this to happen, just a week apart, one year on is something I think is extraordinary.

It's like a confirmation that I have done the right thing.

tonight

Or I have gone mad in a Life of Brian sort of way :-)

Edit by Sean:

Nah not mad, mate. Here's some music from the soundtrack of shutter Island

Combined Birthday

I've been lingering for far too long on what all this means. The amazing coincidences, the amazing connections we all seem to have with each other. It blows my mind.

Anyway, here we are today on Angie and Dee's combined Birthday.

Down by the riverside

Shame the images go by so quickly. A nice tribute to a place with real history and people.

(The Street I grew up on is 1.00 in)

Sleeping in the Sun

Here is Karen. This was the first shot,  then I shot another, and then another.

Always the first one is the best.

Like William Eggleston said . . .

"People say "I shoot from the hip," but that's not really how I work. What happens is, when I look at something it registers on my mind so clearly that I can be loose when I shoot the picture. I always just take one picture of something, and I've never staged a photograph in my life, and never need to because there are pictures everywhere. If I'm ever in a place I think is impossible to photograph, I remember something Garry Winogrand told me. He said "Bill, you can take a good picture of anything," and that's always stuck with me"

Two of Us

It's not often Angie and I get photographed together, as a couple.

 

(c) Dave Bullock

Thank you.