Writing a post, and a blog in general, is always difficult. I don’t pretend to be a skilled practitioner in the art of blogging…or even perhaps truly understand the dark art. But my last post “The hardest game in the world” was written in a tongue-in-cheek attitude. The link to this at the end was a little clue: this.

Of course photography isn’t the ‘hardest game in the world’ - perhaps prospecting for gold by hand in an open to the elements Brazilian quarry just marginally takes the trophy - but perhaps as we all know, what we say, whether vocally or visually, is always open to subjective interpretation and the audience will undoubtedly find their own meanings.

Perhaps then, in the end, the construction of meaning and one’s eternal need to express it to the world, will always run the fine dividing line between understanding and the risk of being lost somewhere within the ether of translation.

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Photography is hard….there is no question about it. At times it is a lonely endeavour where you seem to be struggling more against one’s own self doubts and insecurities than the actualities of image making.

You dedicate your life to something that most people do not value and financially you know you’d be better off working in a call centre…or perhaps flipping burgers (in my case). People shout obscenities at you in the street and others think you’re a little weird for peering at meaningless objects with your strange looking camera.

You turn for solace into the arms of those who ‘think’ like you only to find you can’t break into and get in the know with the ‘photo establishment’ - where of course you so richly deserve to be - and end up becoming bitter and twisted doing ‘commercial’ assignments that you loathe (and yet are lucky to get) but pay the rent. And yet colleges and universities churn out yet more fodder each year in search of their dream…the dream of occasionally getting a show, or getting an image published here or there.

So why do people do it; why do you do it?

Whilst you ponder that, and dwell on my passive-aggressive sentiments, I’ll leave you with my photo of the day….oh and with this.

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This is a quick link to a number of my current slideshows:

All that it was..all that it is (Latest SA images that examines Cape Town and it’s spaces).

Beyond The rainbow (Images from first SA visit examining the ‘Born Free’ generation).

The spaces in between (current exhibition).

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It’s two years today that I found myself in South Africa for the first time and in a mind equally now distanced by time, as it is by geography; the distorted, looped and stretched memories of images and sounds live on. As, at this precise moment in time, as I sit here typing this; the vision that I would see from my window of the gently swaying leaves of a palm tree, still resides in the same mind that is also attempting to process the intricacies of the QWERTY keyboard.

This is where South Africa lives; in flashbacks that rise from nowhere and then dissolve into nothingness and within the iconic and indexical nature of images that have been sorted and sequenced into a slideshow; that if nothing elses remind me that I was once 6000 miles away from where I sit.

These are the images that take me back to 2005…. here.

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On the first day of this year I awoke on a friend’s couch, fully clothed and with a hangover, thinking to myself where was I? This, you may be surprised to know was not the first time that this has happened to me.

But as I looked around the room at the other sleeping bodies and finally at the bright sun that illuminated the outside world I felt quite sad.

Cape Town January 1st 2007 was a beautiful place full of beautiful people. Warrie my friend who had helped me so much, driving me around town and introducing me to people filled the empty glass next to me with the final remains of a bottle of some African liqueur that I had attempted to consume - and failed - at the party last night. Then I and all of the remnants of the party went and sat out in the garden and enjoyed the world.

I sat there, semi comatosed, and watched these friends play fight in the sun knowing that soon I would leave here and that I’d never see or speak to any of these people again. Not because I didn’t want to but just because this is life. Paths cross and then diverge as projects end and then people move on as the thing that brought you together was now over.

Seven months later of course I was right but wherever they all are I wish them well and thank them for their help. And thank them too for allowing me to sit in the sun and spend time with people I hope are still out there somewhere.

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