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Showing posts from April, 2019

blue & yellow

burn out and smudging

It took a long time to get this one pan made moving across the rooflights rather than along them, all other attempts before and after failed to complete. This single full-length effort is somewhat blown out and suffers from a fair bit of detail smudging. The blue-white bright strip at the bottom of the frame is the torn out side of the building, with light flooding in. That was directly in front of me during the exposure. The rectangular skylight in the middle of the picture was directly overhead, and the hole in the roof at the top left was behind me.

various metals on ground

Yesterday was terrific, strong light, good for sharp, deep shadows. The demoltion crew had all left the big factory site nearby that they've been tearing down for the past few months, and I'd spotted a new way in around the back of a gym that didn't involve me scaling the fence this time. Not that I had any new idea of what to do with this 'one-more time' I've been wandering these broken down places for more than ten years.  It's so easy to come back with a memory card full of nothing in particular, just taking pictures of what is there, without finding something to go beyond that. So I squeezed through a gap and stumbled in over a toppled red brick wall with the intention to do close, overhead pictures of broken materials, with a view to combining multiple frames later. Today was putting the frames together, the intention to find the point where the depicted objects started to lose their specificity, which I'm happy is coherent with the bigger pic

tarp flag

girders flag

Photography as art in the films of NY and elsewhere

Whoever was doing the production design on The Upside went into culture hyperdrive, there was art everywhere. Being set in New York it was great to see that in the billionaire's penthouse, amongst the Twomblys and Ruscha were plenty of photographs. Photographs as art , a concept that despite some lip service, never really took off in Britain.  In these screenshots, over by the fireplace is a Joel Meyerowtiz 70's street photo, the black and white gas tower is perhaps by, or is in the manner of, Vera Lutter , and the portrait with hands looks like it's of painter Georgia O'Keefe so I'm guessing it's by Alfred Steiglitz, ( yeah , it is). Imagine a set designer in a British production using photographs as art in a chic appartment location; unlike painting or a bit of sculpture it would be so unexpected as to be likely deemed too distracting to the drama and taken down.

factory demolition site with piece of cardboard on the ground

v&a of the north

in tilegiant

the visitor

remembering william eggleston

remembering louise bourgeois

The light after the dark

I thought I'd cycle home along the river after work and the route takes me past the closed down horticultural chemicals factory. On Sunday I was thinking of going back in for one last shoot of the rooflights but there always seemed to be someone around so I eventually slunk away having bottled it, reassuring myself I'd taken some a couple of weeks ago anyway so what was the point. ( Always go back , is the rule I pretended to forget.) This whole side of the building is gone now. Light floods the space where it stood for many decades.