Photography
My photography
I use photography to show something about where I’ve been or people whom I’ve met. As well as trying to see the beauty in a scene or situation, I’m also trying to convey ideas and feelings. My photography is about me and what I do, who I meet and where I go. All my photography tries to be contemporary and creative. I’m resistant to being fitted in to a taxonomy by categorisation such as “travel” or “conceptual” or “nature”. All image-making is political simply by the act of selection and hence exclusion but I am not campaigning for any particular point of view, except to try to see the positives and to live life to the full.
I use 645, 35mm and DX formats plus a handy little digital compact that shoots RAW files. I’ve experimented with non-lens photography - do ask!
I first worked in a monochrome/silver wet darkroom at age 7, helping my Father with scientific prints; I’ve used colour negative materials since age 21 and digital since 2005. I use Photoshop (Adobe) and Photopaint (Corel).
Two roses from Terry’s garden in Preston Park, Brighton in a glass vase. We cut the flowers as the rain started, to save them from being trashed by the latest storms. The scent they’ve brought indoors is adorable.
- Preston Park garden - July 2017
- Preston Park rose garden
- Preston Park garden - August 2012
- Preston Park front gardens
Adieu 2020 summertime as the clocks change back this weekend
It doesn’t come easy to do this to my photo of a beautiful sunset over the Thames at Hammersmith Bridge in June 2020 but I think it shows how things feel as the clocks change back an hour this weekend. Surely this can’t last for ever?
Chatting to a school friend last night we got on to this new and unwelcome vocabulary that we are learning. Furlough, co-morbidities, herd immunity, lockdown, social distancing and so on. I went looking for the word ‘furlough’ in “Men Who March Away”, an anthology of poetry from World War One that they got us to read at school: Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and many others. I couldn’t find the word. Simon tells me that the OED lists the first use of ‘furlough’ as by Ben Jonson in 1625. Those poems are not easy to read - I last consulted that anthology in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic was taking all those good friends and playmates from us.
Doing my gym at home this morning, a funeral cortege draws up at the church opposite; it happens but seeing one at this moment makes you take stock just as the clouds seem to be gathering yet again. John Donne’s words still ring clear, written amidst the plagues of the 17th century; he even mentions Europe!
Happily, the present deceased got a fine day and a good crowd for it.
Waterloo Bridge roundabout
Waterloo Road
View from the steps of Waterloo railway station, London SE1
Wide-eyed in Waterloo: I find there’s a skyscraper or a railway arch at the end of almost every street. Down Waterloo Road from the railway station and passing The Hole in the Wall pub and the LCC fire station to revisit Lower Marsh market, La Barca restaurant and the Ian Allen Book & Model shop. The army surplus shop is still going too, along The Cut between the Old Vic and the New Vic theatres. All places that I first explored on my meal breaks from working at London Weekend Television on the South Bank.
More photos: Waterloo - a skyscraper at the end of every street
A walk around the front gardens in Preston Park, Brighton. Such variety and imagination on show from these dedicated gardeners, the result of their hard work.
