Join me if you can for my talk at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, on Tuesday 28th July. The talk, organised by Redeye, will be an excellent environment for photographers to meet and network. Entry is free.

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I love film soundtracks. Letters from Iwo Jima is wonderful; and sitting on the night bus with Bernard Hermann’s Taxi Driver on the ipod, surrounded by the flotsum and jetsum of the night, seems a tad fitting at times. So for no other reason that Hermannn, Eastwood and Ennio Morricone have ‘mad skills’ and that they’ve all produced beautiful pieces of music…enjoy.

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There is something about the series Mad Men that grasped me immediately. It is a show set in the wake of the American dream of the early 1960’s, within the world of advertising. Perhaps it is the subtle under current of melancholy that flows beneath the great script and wonderful acting; or perhaps it is just the honesty of a programme that doesn’t need to continually hold your hand and whisper to you that things will be OK?

It is an adult show that doesn’t pander to happy endings, a show that takes you on a journey and leaves you wondering where the hell those forty-odd minutes have gone? The third series airs in the States on AMC next month and a part of me hopes that it’s the last season.

In this segment, from the last episode in season one, Don pitches to Kodak his agency’s idea on how to sell their new gadget, the slide Carousel - it’s a great clip. To see it please follow this link here.

Enjoy.

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Here’s a small excerpt from my first short documentary film, it’s entitled ‘Fire’. The film follows the experiences of eighteen year old ‘Fire’ who lives in an area of England called Handsworth, which is in Birmingham. In the film Fire (he does not use his ‘government name’ only his street name), reflects on his life, his world, and ponders the future.

The film was made in conjunction with Beyond Bricks. The programme was facilitated by Multistory and funded by Urban Living and the Arts Council.

This is my first film and the practicalities of filming, sound recording and editing have at times proven frustrating, and well, still do. But it’s a learning curve - and the film is still a work in progress; but video is definitely an area that I would like to continue with in the future.

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Apparently if aliens are out there, in the vacuum of space, this map below shows what TV broadcasts are viewable to them.  When the news that Margaret Thatcher has won the 1979 General Election finally reaches HD 217107 we’re screwed guys….expect the UFO’s on their way to save us from her tyranny with their own brand of liberation / occupation.  For a bigger version of the map (Copyright Gizmodo 2009), go to the Gizmodo site that I appropriated from…..or just click on the map.

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Over the years I’ve always enjoyed coming back to Dziga Vertov’s ‘Man with a movie camera’. 80 years after its production, it remains a remarkable film, and a repository of visual stimuli that I continue to return to. But apart from the obvious visual artistry of the film, are the candid moments of life in the then Soviet Union of 1929.

There are moments within his film when I ‘wonder what happened to you’…you that young man sleeping rough who has been unexpectedly woken by the camera? Did you survive the coming purges or indeed the ‘Great Patriotic War‘? What happened next for you? Indeed I often think about what happened next for the people I have fleetingly come into contact with, photographed, and never seen again.

I do often think about the woman in Khayelitsha who I stood next to as she bled out over the white sheets that covered the bed beneath her as she miscarried her child. She asked me to fetch the doctor and on our return the doctor told her that her baby might live or it might die. And that was it. She has placed on a wheelchair and pushed away. I’ve written about this here before but I always remember her leaning down and whispering to her unborn child as she cried and she was pushed away I photographed the blood left behind by her on the white sheets on which she had sat.

“Yuh, yuh…how can you photograph something so terrible”, one woman asked. I wasn’t really sure.

I often think about what happened to her child and if it indeed lived or died.

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Yesterday I went down to my parents home, with a digital and video camera in hand, with the expressed intention of starting what I hoped would be a multimedia presentation about their life as migrants who came from a land far away and who had to re-evaluate their identities in the face of the one’s they had left behind and the new one’s they had constructed in its wake.  I’ll discuss this in a later post as it’s an issue that I’m exploring within another work.

Anyway, when I got there I was surprised to see numerous workmen busily hammering, sawing and singing their hearts away as they  merrily decorated the house.

Gone were any thoughts of filming the first of what I’d envisaged would be a slow, and sensitive interview that shaped their experiences.  And in a child-like huff, with my parents for not telling me they had the decorators in, I put my cameras away and instead sat arms folded watching the tennis.

But of course I was wrong.  I should have continued and filmed something - anything - and made sense of it afterwards.  Perhaps in time the symbolism of the decorators removing the old identity of the space in which they lived and constructing a new one, would have been an apt and fulfilling one. Or the backdrop of sawing and hammering and indeed singing, could have been a valuable soundtrack to my parents words.  Well, perhaps I’ll never know now.

As observers we have to be flexible, be able to roll with the punches and make it work - beyond that which we had preconceived.

Anyway I’ll go back on Monday and start afresh.

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