Great article in the Observer on how books have lost the plot.
Monthly Archive for May, 2006
As a supplement to my article on the Channel art show, here are some more photos from that night. I’m not especially pleased with this set but, hey, I was very, very drunk.
I wrote a new article for the FAD blog, on the Channel art show opening in Sheffield last week and my rather patchy memories of it, plus accompanying photos. Read it here.
Weird, Google seems to think that I’m German.
I can surf to google.co.uk no problem, but if I try to reach .com then it redirects me to google.de. And now I’ve noticed that when I’m served Google ads, there’s usually a smattering of German ones among them.
I can see various ways in which this might have happened. Most likely theory is that the Germans who stayed here recently flicked some switch and it stayed switched. But I’ve also done a fair bit of Googling in German, and other stuff in German (including installing a browser plugin which translates words to German when I hover the mouse over them). Somewhere along the line, Google must have picked up the idea that I’m German.
Well, if nothing else, this demonstrates that the day when Google knows everything there is to know about us is still some way off.
Meanwhile, this morning I’ve been reading in the Guardian about
the German sense of humour (yes, there is one).
Update: After visiting Worldpay and getting a page in German, I finally realised what the problem is. I recently started using an (excellent) proxy service set up by The Future’s Perfect. The proxy server filters out all known viruses, trojans and other nasties before they even reach my (woefully inadequate – yes, I still love IE) web browser. However, because the proxy server is based in Germany, and some websites serve different content depending on your IP address, they sniff the German server’s IP address and serve me their content in German.
The Clock’s Loneliness’ poem for the day today, Education for Leisure by Carol Ann Duffy, a corker:
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
Great article (and some fun comments) from Vice Magazine on the Dos and Don’ts of Photography.
This is what happened right across the road from us on Saturday night. First I heard about it was when I policeman called at our door at around 6.30pm and said “I presume you’ve noticed that there’s been something going on over the road”. I honestly hadn’t noticed a thing. Looked up and down the street to see that we were in a police cordon. Gill had gone to the off-license, and had some difficulty persuading them to let her back in.
I presume this was the same man who, some time ago, came running at me from the other side of the road once (I think I saw him go back into this house afterwards) when I was walking down the street with a camera. He accused me of spying on him, and got quite agitated when I denied it.
As a follow-up to my earlier post about Tom Hunter’s Living in Hell, here’s a photograph I found on my camera after a very drunken Friday night, and a picture by Hogarth which may have inspired it (but didn’t). Enjoy.
More bitchin’… (originally posted on the FAD blog)
I went to see Tom Hunter‘s exhibition of photographs Living in Hell and Other Stories at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield this weekend.
I’d seen this show before at the National Gallery in London (Hunter is apparently the first photographer to have a solo show there). At the time I was impressed by some of the ideas, the compositions, and the lighting in the works, but not that happy with other technical aspects of the photos. A great many of them seemed slightly soft, mainly because of movement during the long exposures but also the focus seemed a bit out here-and-there (admittedly two metre wide prints can be quite unforgiving, but still…). Also I wasn’t sure that he’d best managed the large dynamic range of some of the pictures (from white-out halos around streetlights to hidden darknesses in the shadows).
Seeing the show for a second time, I was even more disappointed. So many aspects of Hunter’s work seemed not quite right. I wondered whether the many imperfections might be deliberate, but I’m sure this is not the case.
As well as Hunter’s interpretations of local newspaper headlines in the style of the Flemish masters, the show included photos of Hackney landscapes which weren’t present in the National Gallery exhibition. These seemed eerily similar to some of the landscapes which I’ve tried and failed to photograph recently. Hunter failed in similar ways and for similar reasons to me. And here’s a clue to what annoyed me so much about this exhibition: I was overwhelmed with feelings that “I could (and do) do that”. Not that I claim I could do better (for one thing, Hunter’s handling of light is on the whole better than mine, although I wish he’d pay more attention to the notion of white balance). But Hunter’s mistakes seem to be exactly the same as the ones I make as a journeyman photographer, and I would expect the National Gallery to only offer such a great privilege to somebody with a far greater mastery of the medium.
While I was there, I also picked up a copy of the (excellent) magazine Photoworks. Inside was Ian Jeffrey’s review of Living in Hell and Other Stories. Once I’d got around Jeffrey’s writing style (Jeffrey needs to, as he might himself say, eschew the essentially obfuschatory constituent of his esoteric argot), I realised that Jeffrey wasn’t very impressed either. He touched briefly on the technical aspects of Hunter’s works, and concedes that Hunter’s sloppiness may be “nothing more than a contemporary manner”, but Jeffrey takes great issue with the inspiration behind these “New Masters”. Copying the old masters is nothing new (neither is it unique to photography: plenty of old masters themselves copied older masters), but Hunter does not do it terribly well. Jeffrey scents a hidden purpose: perhaps this is all a cynical marketing plot by the National Gallery, a way of getting the general public to take more interest in their collection of old paintings via the slightly sexier medium of modern photography. It’s a moot point, and one argued in a slightly clumsy manner, but the fact remains that Hunter’s works feel immature and not fully formed.
On the plus side, the photographs are beautifully printed on metallic paper (a current obsession of mine), hung well, and are well worth a look at if only to see whether or not you agree with me. Plus while you’re there you can see some of the other wonderful works in the Graves Gallery’s collection.
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