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

The other day I joined a rock band

The other day I joined a rock band. Sort of. After a fashion. Well no, more like I helped create a rock band. Sort of.Etc.,etc.

It was certainly a quiet day in the office ('twixt Christmas and New Year) a graveyard shift if you know what I mean. There must have been eight of us waiting for the phone to ring/hoping the phone didn't ring.

The talk became idle, the mind became skitty (I don't think I know what that means) and the theme got round to photocopying body parts. Naturally.

Various below the waist options were suggested and rejected, eventually, then I asked if anyone had ever photocopied their face.. Brain tumours, cancer, blindness were all proffered as reasons to discontinue this line of thought, but I maintained that as long as eyes were closed and fingers and legs were crossed, all would be ok.

'Trust me, I'm a photographer' is a favourite lie of mine.

So I photocopied my face.

The resulting artwork convinced three other graveyard shifters that this was clearly the way forward. A fitting end to 2009, and an open invite to the nonsense possibilities of 2010. And now we had four A4 images of comatose - like journalists. Whatever next?

When laid down on the desk, it was immediately obvious that we had an album cover in the making. So Xerox, the post-punk industrial reggae-metal band was formed (in the mind at least) and a hasty email hailing our arrival on the rock scene was created and despatched to our newspaper's gig guide author Martyn Smith, who was actually on holiday and certainly not part of this cataclysmic explosion of festive fun. The band artwork was attached for extra authenticity. Rock style anagrams of our real names completed the picture. Job done, as they say. And it only took half an hour. (In the lunch break, obviously..)


When I finally left this place of fun and had a proper break for New Year, Dot and I discovered a brand new bridlepath walk around the countryside of Tenbury Wells, well away from roads, cars, fireworks, and television (although we honestly shed a few tears at the last episode of Gavin and Stacey - lush.)

And I was reminded of a picture taken last New Year's Day on a newly discovered walk near our home.



Lower Kyrewood, Tenbury Wells.

And finally, our lovely grandson Toby came and spent New Year's Eve with us. Four years' old, he wandered into the kitchen as I was struggling with Superion the Transformer while trying to make tea and toast, and demonstrating an uncanny ability to jump three feet from the spot (clearly a Jumping Joe Darby in the making) he asked 'Grandad, what is oil..?' Honestly, what chance do we stand?

We had our first holiday with Toby in September, a short break in Aberdovey for my birthday.
This picture was taken just before his first encounter with a tidal pool. Look out world.............



Happy New Year

Phil

www.thesilverimage.co.uk

Shooting stars

Last night I saw five shooting stars, and today I'm starting my first blog.

Is there a connection - who knows? I'll take it as a sign anyway, must remember not to burn out though.

I have a picture of my wife Dot and some friends on holiday in France, lying in the grass watching the midnight sky, all stars and candles, which I will post when I find the negative.

I've never seen so many people taking pictures as there are nowadays. When I first started taking photos on a Halina Paulette, probably fifty years ago, a roll of film would be bought for the summer hols in Cornwall, and I would still be using the same film at Christmas to photograph my mates building snowmen, igloos (we had drifts you could crawl into - and they did collapse, and we did get wet and cold) and sledging on the waste ground that still hadn't been built on.

But I was the only lad with a camera. And I still have prints and negatives from all that time ago.

My point is, what happens to all the photos being taken by amateurs and enthusiasts today?

I know that many never make it to the print stage, many are never archived onto hard drives or cd/dvd, they are deleted in camera or from the mobile phone once the subject has had a look and a giggle.. they are the shooting stars of the photographic world, a brief and possibly dazzling appearance, then wiped from existance in order to make space for the next digisnap.

The world is being documented like never before, but will enough of these images survive so that somebody in the future can try to make some kind of sense of it, so that whatever story is being written, future generations will have an archive of unparallelled proportions, from a far wider diversity of sources than ever before. Mr everydayman (and woman) are doing their bit to leave a mark.

Just remember to save some of it somewhere, so that we can have another look a bit later on.

Phil.

www.thesilverimage.co.uk