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Showing posts from November, 2019

the season of mists and mellow paranoia

Probably as a result of watching the  Smithsonian discussion on Diane Arbus last night and then this morning listening to an interview with Sasha Freyer about her Winogrand documentary I was out of bed early and after breakfast cycling off through countryside drowning in mist to photograph the hedges,  again .  It was frosty and as I couldn't find my gloves was reduced to wearing yesterday's socks on my hands, grabbed off the floor as I was going out the door. Visibility was poor but despite that within minutes of pulling off the main road five miles later onto the track along the side of the airbase a khaki-coloured land rover turned up and a chat happened. I've been watched before but this was the first time in five years going there that questions were actually raised. It was more awkward than tense but they were respectful and fine.  Having said that, and possibly as a result of watching too many of a certain sort of thriller, I did cycle home somewhat anxiously, w

Hedgerow, autumn 2019

Issuu

Gideon Mendel, and the Prix Pictet 2019 shortlist

Guardian coverage of the shortlist here Gideon Mendel, (b. 1959): I n the 1980s, I was part of a young generation of ‘struggle photographers’ in South Africa, documenting the fight against apartheid.   In 1990 I left a box of my outtakes (negatives and transparencies) in storage in Johannesburg, and forgot about it. A few years ago, they were returned to me and I discovered that, in their many years of neglect, the box had been rained on, and the top layers had been affected by moisture and mould.”

below and above

The 10,000 hedgerow photographers on bicycles

As everyone knows, digital set photography free and everybody is photographing everything imaginable every which way they can. So, bearing that in mind, I suspect that around the world there are probably ten million other people doing panoramic hedge photography and doing it year after year (of the same hedge, even). But, I'm wondering how many have been doing it specifically in the autumn, ( fall ), and for at least five years and a cycle ride from where they live? That extra sift probably reduces it to the mere hundred thousand, the rest obviously being fickle lightweights ,  mere opportunists, passing through sucking the juice out of one subject after the next, and hedges have been left behind. And of those still left in the equation, how many are doing it at the perimeter of a military airbase where armed reaper drones are being remotely operated, airborne thousands of miles distant? I could be wrong, (usually am), but perhaps that narrows it down to a very small, select

the front line is five miles away

war photograph, november 2019

2018 All Party Parliamentry Group on Drones Inquiry Report : The UK's use of armed drones

everything

3 sites, oct 19