Ten Ten Big Rubber Ducky Photo Fucky.

When I was about thirteen I had a friend called Ian who was a couple of years older than me. I say friend but in reality he just used to beat the fuck out of me. I'd put up with the beatings because he had a CB radio and for about two weeks in the summer of 1980 I was obsessed with CB radio's.

We would sit in a old Ford Escort at the end of his drive next to an old caravan that was even more beat up than me and talk complete bollocks into the handset. We seldom spoke to truckers who were trying to out run the police. No for some reason the demographic group that liked to use CB radio in North-West England at the time was fat sounding housewives with twenty Benson's voices.

They would have names or handle's like Angel  or Mother Bear, never just Debbie or Pauline. Over time you would get to hear the same names popping up again and again. A hierarchy emerged. When some people were "on air" there would be loads of other CBer's trying to talk to them, where as I would sit there lamely shouting "come back" till I was blue in the face and red in the arm where Ian had suddenly remembered to give me another dig.  Ultimately I got fed up with CB radio (and casual violence) and moved on to my next two week obsession, fishing.

What's this got to do with photography? Nothing, and everything. What with blogs, social media and photo festivals it takes me back to CB radio. "The online photo community" I keep hearing it called. Do me a favour "The online photo community" is often little better than a couple of little dicks sat in an old motor chatting shit.

This ones for SB.

Odd.

How the general public view photographers.

The Future of Analogue Photography?

Something fishy,

Actually it's nothing fishy other than this fish picture I just liked that as a post title. This is just back to that old chestnut about "copying" that the world of photography just can't seem to get it's tiny ultra conservative  head around. Great chunks of the photography world are the modern day equivalent of the Paris Salon before Pissarro and his crew went and did their own thing.
It ties in with the Mishka Henner saga from a couple of posts ago....Kinda. Take a look at EXHIBIT A, the fish on the left It was taken by THIS fella. As you can read he is not a happy tuna. He has accused fish fancier B of stealing his idea, of putting a fishes head on a plate and photographing it. Imagine that for an idea! For a second he must have felt like Picasso did while taking a shit the morning he came up with Cubism. (I made that bit up). All the crap being talked about copying and appropriation on social websites by photographers who claim to be artists.
If a painter painted a fish on a plate and then another came along and had a pop at it it would be called a "discussion". That's the problem with being a photographer in the 21st century..... It's bloody easy anyone can do it. For less than a grand (as long as you get copies of snide software!) you can get kit that would have saved old Ansel Adams years of his life twating about with his zone system. Paul graham sums it up a treat HERE. 
And so it comes down to this, ideas not plate camera's good ideas. You either have an original one or you don't. Most of us wont but we can have a good old play with the ones that are already out there and maybe just maybe we might come at something from a different angle and say something new. Now I'm off to photograph a sunset and nobody better copy me or I'll sue.

That morning Picasso was doing another fish painting... "There's got to be more to this Art lark than bloody fish. I'm off to the bog to have a good think".

Old Goat.

Chinese New year today which is always a big event in Manchester. Found out that I was born in the year of the goat which apparently makes me fun to know but prone to pessimism. imagine me prone to pessimism? Anyway suitable occupations for me include gardening which I like a bit and beachcombing. Not many beaches in Manchester but then I thought whats photography if it's not a form of beachcombing?

I was thinking of making some kind of work out of rejection letters from all the submissions, competition entries, exhibition proposals etc. But then I remembered that the arrogant bastards never write back to you anyway.

So who was he again?

I had this overwhelming desire today to start signing and dating my entire archive of prints. Not because I think this will add any value to them, it's just that I was thinking that if I got hit by a bus they wouldn't be complete orphans and if someone was to do a Google they would be able to put two and two together and at least I would have left some kind of a legacy. This is what having too much time to think and reaching your mid-forties does....

Now if I do get hit by a bus in the next couple of weeks you will be able to point to this post and say "fucking spooky".

Note to self; Start work on a MOMENTO MORI.

BILLY & ROONEY, PENDLETON, 2010.

Image copyright Mark Page

I bet THIS 'Rooney' doesn't need a couple of hundred grand a week to guarantee his loyalty.

Summut Fishy

David Icke, mad as fish.

I'm more of a miserable pessimistic old git than a paranoid conspiracy theory kind of a bloke but there's been a couple of things that recently have made me wonder.

#1 Britain's sudden Athletics success.

We British are shit at sport, or at least at sports that you can't sit down to do, "games" other than rowing or driving or fishing. So don't you think that it's bloody strange that just before we are to host the next Olympics or 'Twenty twelve' as people insist on calling it, we suddenly get really really GOOD. It's either a conspiracy or the drugs tester was off sick that day.

#2 Chats with the Taliban

Now I don't claim to be a four star general although I was a sixer in the cubs so I could have been but. My understanding of warfare is that the idea is to find the enemy and then shoot or blow the fuck out of them, not find them and then make a documentary about them. If SKY NEWS can find them how come the Army can't ? I don't imagine that during the second world war that PATHE news sent a newsreel crew into the bunker to see what Hitler had for his tea.

I packed in the 'skunk' years ago but these two make me wonder.

I'm Glad.

So they've scrapped the money for the Victoria station refit. I'm bloody glad. Now of course it needs a good clean up. Kick out McDonalds and the shitty Hotdog stand, clean the toilets and get rid of 'The cottagers' and heyho you are left with a building designed by George Stephenson and not some hybrid steel and glass fuck up that looks like every other station, which lets face it that's what would have happened. Check out the green and red railings in the middle part of the station thought to be the original boundary of an 18th century cemetery. Now come on that's got to be worth more than a 'COSTA COFFEE' and paying 30p for a piss.

It's going to be a proper scorcher tomorrow. I shall be walking about town with some of you coz it's 'OPEN CITY' workshop day. Bring water or maybe cold beer in a cool bag......

Clearing the palette.

Is too much photography messing me up?

Why do I find the Mary Shannon Johnstone series 'BREEDING IGNORANCE' the hardest most disturbing set of photographs I've looked at in a long while? Is there something wrong with me? All the shocking images I've seen already this year Haiti & Chile, I've flicked through but dead cats? Not wanting to take anything away from Mary Shannon Johnstone's pictures but these images shouldn't affect me more than photographs of human suffering should they? I've never seen pictures like these before compared to the thousands I've seen from disaster zones. Is that why? Did the shock of the new remove the blinkers from my eyes for a moment?

Similar-ish Shit Different Century.

Image copyright Mark Page

I ride past these Gasometers on my bike twice a day as I make my way to and from work, as blokes have no doubt done for the last hundred years or so. I may wear a plastic helmet instead of a flat cap but I bet like many of those working men I set off this morning with a job and returned tonight without one. As I looked up at them Gas towers I felt a connection to those fellas on them old bikes.......

Fucking hell cheer up I got redundancy money. I bet all they got was an old pie or a mouldy clog or something...

Ying & Yang Is........

Loosing your job at URBIS and getting your book stocked at IMPRESSIONS all in one day.......

Two Tales From One City.

Tale One.

Tale Two.

Lest We Forget, (The futility of Art)

DULCE ET DECORUM EST by Wilfred Owen.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

8 October 1917 - March, 1918

Tomorrow as we stand there for two minutes of silence and contemplate decade after decade, century after century of corpse mountain making, it might also be worth realising that neither photography nor painting music nor poetry have ever managed to prevent it happening again and again. In this circumstance Art clearly has no power to bring about change. So that begs the question, why do we bother still making it?

Image copyright Pieter Hugo

Heavy discussions going on about whether or not Pieter Hugo's work is racist. HERE, and HERE. Of course these things need to be discussed and there's far cleverer people than me doing it so I don't want get involved in the back and forth. Too much rhetorical rigour for this numpty I'll just end up shouting arse or something.

No I don't claim to be an academic I tend to work via gut instinct which is fine as an artist that's as important a trait as anything. I know I'm not black and I'm sure I can't begin to understand all the issues but I really like these pictures always have. Maybe I'm a bit odd but far from seeing something derogatory in that image I just think "Fuck me a hyena on a lead that's top, that blokes the bollox"

A Nigerian (black) friend of mine who now lives in Manchester thought the same when I showed him. He was positivly proud and started to take the piss out of local scallies and their piss poor Staffies.

The other thing I'm confused about is this. Lets pretend that these images are never going to end up in a gallery and lets pretend that Pieter Hugo has no ambitions to be an artist, what if he was a pure documentary or reportage photographer, would that be OK to photograph the Hyena men? The speed things change in this world the Hyena men may not be around 50, 100 years from now. Surely photographing them for posterity is worth while? We can always remove them at a later date if we still don't like them Orwellian style. These are questions asked HERE. I guess I'm so used to constantly seeing pictures of Africans being portrayed as victims that I only saw the positive in this work. I thought it was a refreshing change.

Thomas Paine

What we need now is another drunken pamphleteer, ( a pamphleteer, that's just an olde worlde blogger ain't it?) to draft us out a constitution and start a brave new world in British politics.

Wise Words.

Via UNKNOWN WEBSITE.