All I Want for Easter is a Beetle

"The zoo's just rung, they've been donated a beetle found in some packaging...Can we get a picture?” Deep joy, I get to photograph a bug.

Climbing up Dudley Zoo's seven thousand steps to get to the bug house, I wheezed to the keeper “what is it, and what have you called it?” knowing that every little beastie has to be christened before it can be photographed. I assume it's to make them more cuddly, less alien, I mean you wouldn't squash something with your size elevens if it was called Tabitha, would you?

“Clive” is an Asian long horned beetle, which arrived in a consignment of paper from China. Another keeper, the keeper of bugs no less, dived into the back of a small enclosure, and emerged with something dark brown and horny safely enclosed in his giant mitts. I was less than impressed.

I was even less impressed, when, taking advantage of a slightly relaxed grip, Clive took to the wing and headed straight for me. “Oh, you should feel honoured, he doesn't normally do that!” Feeling thus honoured, but desirous of a quick finale to our little intercontinental encounter, lest the horny monster should require a further investigation of my camera bag/trousers/earhole, I took a quick light reading, set the shot up and twelve frames later said tarrah and all the best.

Skipping gaily down Dudley Zoo's seven thousand steps, I mused on the missed opportunity of giving Clive a name that actually had some meaning. If Clive had been an Indian beetle, his name would have been perfect. But Chinese? A Chinese beetle? Surely Wing Ho would have been just the ticket. He would have been a star beetle - Wing Ho. Star.

Oh all right.

I'll get me coat.

Phil

http://www.thesilverimage.co.uk/

Snaps in the city

About fifty years ago I went to London for the first time, with a bunch of classmates from Sledmere Junior and Infants School ( we didn't do Primary then, I don't think the word was even invented..) Sandwiches smelling of the plastic container in which they were enclosed, orange squash smelling of the plastic container in which it was enclosed, a great big plastic camera dangling from my young neck, and the prospect of hurtling at previously unknown speeds down a newly opened M1 motorway, are memories that have possibly never been surpassed.

I vaguely remember walking on the surprisingly solid deck of the Cutty Sark, I couldn't believe a river could be as wide as the Thames, and I had no idea that Spam was going to be my main source of nutrition for the next decade.

And somewhere there's a clutch of snaps that I took with the eyes of a ten year old.

I still get excited now at the thought of a city visit. The spaces are different, bigger, wider, and filled with a greater variety of people than our everyday norm, but it never quite matches that first time (as with so many things) nevertheless I still take pictures.

You can find many interpretations of this image of the turbine hall at Tate Modern on the internet, it simply has a scale and quality of light that draws photographers.

Tate Modern, London

One thing that strolling around a city gives me is an even greater sense of anonymity than I'm used to in my everyday life, and that's about as anonymous as you can get anyway, without totally disappearing. On the one hand such total insignificance could be a tad upsetting, considering it's taken me over half a century to get here, but there are benefits to being near invisible.

And anything that helps to hide my six foot frame and nosey parker camera is very welcome. So, a bunch of other folk doing exactly the same as me, in a space where gawping and pointing is expected, is perfect camouflage.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris is a magnet for tourists, with camera toting visitors crawling all over, under and around it. And up it, obviously. The difficulty is snatching a photograph that excludes all the other sightseers.

I found this young girl practising her handstand on this stage of stages, with myself and the young man on the wall her audience. There were a thousand people there, somewhere, but for a fraction of a second, there were just the three of us.

Acrobat, Eiffel Tower, Paris

As a birthday treat last year I squeezed myself into the wonderful old city of Prague, where both agoraphobics and claustraphobics are somehow catered for in equal measure. I spent four days there, (midweek, avoiding the weekend invasion of visiting, vomiting Brits.) Helen Mirren was spotted on Charles Bridge – it's a structure, not a person – and I took hot chocolate in the cafe where the Velvet Revolution was planned.

There must be ten million pounds worth of photographic gear in use at any given time in that city, with most of the clicking taking place around the Old Town and castle. It's a good job camera shutters are quiet these days, or it would sound like mass tinnitus.

And you almost have to resign yourself to the fact that whatever picture you take has been taken god knows how many times before. But it's still better than buying the postcard.

Evidence of the Czech fascination with puppetry is everywhere, and quite disconcerting some of the images are too. Here is my two penn'orth, taken on the long slog up to Prague Castle. And next time I go, I'll probably try some of the absinthe ice cream, it might help to flatten out that hill.

Puppet shop, Prague

Phil
www.thesilverimage.co.uk

Jeepers creepers, what's that on the sleepers???

“The train now standing at platform number two has just dumped a double dollop of doo-dah on the track...” Not one of the usual announcements to be heard at Stourbridge Junction station, I must say, but one that could justifiably be made on a regular basis, judging by the amount of doo-dah (human variety) and associated paper products that greet rail visitors to the town.

And no points for guessing whose job it was to photograph the unusually decorated length of track, after a rail user contacted the Stourbridge News to complain. I haven't shown a picture of it here, if you're that curious, get the paper.

Someone, or possibly a small army, has apparently been ignoring the 'no flushing while stationary' suggestion in the trains' loos, thereby autographing a sizeable stretch of rail track, while also providing a popular topic for debate among waiting commuters.

InterCity. Railtrack. You'll have to make up your own variants on these names (and more,) we all did, but I don't think I'm allowed to print them!

But joking apart, this can't be the only station in the country where this happens, and what on earth are we doing still flinging out our bodily waste products on railway lines up and down the land, without even so much as a gardez lieu?

Does this happen in other countries too?

It certainly gives another meaning to the term 'bullet train!!'

Phil

http://www.thesilverimage.co.uk/

Up close and personal

I'm really interested in you. Yes, I am. I'm so interested, I've crossed over the road / changed the direction in which I was walking / ignored the people I was with before I saw you. I am so interested, with the way you look, the thing you are doing, the space you are doing it in, I'm going to walk right up to you, point this little black mechanical tool at you, study you for a few seconds, then capture your soul forever. Frightened? Offended? Perhaps, but hopefully you never really saw me.

This is how a certain sort of photographer operates. Americans call them street photographers, not a description I'm particularly happy with. I'm not sure how Europeans describe them. Us. We inhabit the spaces bypassed by tourists, generally.

The doorway, the cul-de-sac, the concrete nothingness of modern living space.

It's easy to aim your camera at a public icon, alongside a whole army of chimping gawpers, safe in the anonymity of numbers. It's almost expected.

Take your camera off the beaten track, concentrate on some little incident that tells a different story, and you are on your own, staking a claim in a minor happening that immediately raises it's importance.

Here are some minor happenings I've photographed over the years.

The child at Uttoxeter Racecourse was gazing with some interest up the skirts of the woman (who I assumed to be his mother.) I photographed them with a rangefinder camera and 35mm lens from about ten feet away.



Not too many years ago, a photographer could wander the streets and parks engaged in a shared innocence with adults, children, household pets, pretty much anything that was out there. Newspaper photographers regularly went out in search of 'fillers,' pictures to fill spaces in the paper when news was light. So pictures of children riding their Christmas bikes, families enjoying a bit of summer sunshine, real pictures of real people enjoying a slice of real time, were the norm. Just try that nowadays.

Even though more people than ever before are taking more photos on a greater variety of media, the obsessive clamp down on image makers in the name of data protection, security, and paedo-panic rationale makes it increasingly difficult to operate as a free photographic agent.

Yet we nod with approval at the announcement of more eyes in the skies to monitor our movements around shopping malls, art galleries, garden centres etc. We pay people to watch us, but we're discouraged from watching each other. How queer.

I think we should all go out onto the streets and have a damned good look at each other. Don't bother with Big Brother, there's a better show going on round the corner.

The woman in this picture demanded that it be taken out of the exhibition in which it was being displayed. The curator of the show refused. The children didn't react at all. Rangefinder camera, again with 35mm lens.



Fly on the wall. Voyeurism. Socio – documentary. Peeping Tom. I suppose the term you choose to use for watching other people depends on which side of the fence you think you are sitting. Call 'Big Brother Celebrity Whatsisname Why do You Think I Should Watch This?' a fly on the wall documentary, and it's possibly alright, in some eyes. (Shed a tear luvvie, they'll lap it up..) Call it voyeurism, and suddenly it's something else.

I suppose when the BBC or whatever decide to give us a good looking at, it's immediately classed as entertainment (light or otherwise) and that makes it ok. After all, you can't accuse a national institution such as the Beeb of being peeping toms, that's what we pay the police and various other agencies for.

If you're going to go out and stick your camera up people's noses, as an individual, be aware that whereas your subject might thoroughly enjoy and expect regular glimpses into the private lives of countless worthies who parade themselves daily in the corner of your living room, they will have a raft of human rights and data protection laws to quote to prevent you from doing just that.

Happy snapping.

These butchers were trying to sell the last joint of meat to a shopper. A Black Country hard sell. Can't remember whether she did or didn't.



Phil
www.thesilverimage.co.uk

Once upon a time, all these sheep were trees...

Once upon a time all these sheep were trees... A favourite nonsense of mine that comments on passing time, transformations and certain irreversible facts of life. Change, just like you know what, happens.

Over the course of many years, working both professionally and privately, I've accrued many photographs depicting places and people in the Black Country and beyond that are now changed, or simply gone.

Sometimes a whole area is wiped out by the developers and transformed into a totally different environment (Merry Hill is an obvious example.) In other cases, it is perhaps a simple summer pastime that no longer exists due to an age trend, sociological change or an indifference to historical pattern.

So here's the beginning of an occasional series of snapshots from the not too distant past. Taken for one reason initially, history may now add another dimension to the picture.

Judge for yourself.


Cows graze near Round Oak Steelworks, Brierley Hill, 1976. The site is now the Merry Hill Shopping Centre.

For many people Saturday afternoon means football, at some level or other. I count myself among this baying, bleating, disbelieving, all knowing, ref baiting horde only in as much as I've spent nearly forty years photographing the damned thing.

But apart from four years covering West Brom for the local paper, I have operated at the corrugated tin, Mars Bar, stewed tea and one man with a dog end of the sporting spectrum, due to my choice of employer.

And to be totally honest, the game in question never held a great deal of fascination for me. I often found that my inability to capture the finesse and refined sporting artistry of the players was only matched by their inability to provide exactly the same qualities. Status quo.

But often with such events, the situation and ritual was as important as the kickabout, so spectator watching, cloud watching, and trying to keep warm held much of my attention.

These pictures were taken at Brierley Hill FC, in the 70's, when the club still had a decent following, and before the ground became Asda Superstore.


Flat caps and attitude, Brierley Hill FC supporters, 1976.


Toilets at Brierley Hill FC, with Round Oak Steelworks in the background.

At one end of Brierley Hill Black Country men and women wearing white aprons and wellies made sausages. At the other end Black Country men wearing dirty cotton and denim made steel. And dotted around an assortment of men and women wearing an assortment of things made glass.

This was the tail end of the seventies, and before long the sausages and steel would go, leaving the vestiges of a glass industry to hang in there, while on the horizon the massed armies of consumerism were biding their time, waiting for the inevitable march of change, or something like that.

Either way, Brierley Hill disappeared a little at this time. You could say it changed to keep pace with time, but it certainly ain't coming back.

You could say this change was necessary in order for Brierley Hill to co-exist alongside it's neighbour, the mighty Merry Hill.

You could say the town is on a path of re-juvenation, and once the planners have dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's it should all be tickety – boo.

Personally, I find the new road system to be a strange shape for a car park, I find the increase in stabbings and shootings in the local bars and clubs to be a tad worrying for someone with a young and growing family, I find the mind numbing artless waste of Merry Hill and it's muzak simply an insult to this area's requirements...but then that's just me.

I think there has been a sell out. Which means somebody has made money. Yippee.

And when the dollar lets you down, what will you do next?


Brierley Hill 1976, with Marsh and Baxters and Round Oak Steelworks dominating the skyline.

Phil
www.thesilverimage.co.uk