Panchromatica

Doctor Who - again

The latest episode of Doctor Who (Saturday 21st June) demonstrated both the strengths and weaknesses of Russell T Davies as a writer of SF. I seem to recall reading an interview somewhere in which he acknowledged that original ideas were not his forte and it is true that he seem to cheerfully pillage ideas from everywhere. The range of references and plot ideas he drops into an average episode is huge. This works well with his great strength I think - he is simply brilliant at world building. The last episode - and the two part season finale to come - seem as if they will depend on a series of small visual and narrative clues built in to previous episodes going back in some cases over previous series and even to the old Who from years back. At the time some of this at the time seemed merely to be 'fleshing out' the story line, but in many cases they turn out to have a significance out of all proportion to their impact on the story line at the time. His juggling of these ideas as both writer and executive producer is a world apart (sorry!) from the dross of Heroes or Buffy. I suspect if Firefly had been able to keep going it might have achieved something similar. Other than that only Babylon 5 seems to have taken the world in which it was set seriously enough to make it coherent, and within the story line, believable. Let's hope Stephen Moffat proves as good.

The first rule of blogging

...is of course to keep posting, which is something I have singularly failed to do. It isn't just here. My Flickr and Ipernity accounts are also languishing from lack of attention.  I haven't been idle though. I have  been working on a much longer piece than I normally post here, and also working at getting out and about selling my pictures. I have something like 30 art or craft fairs booked between now and the end of the year and I am also promoting my work much more actively.

The fairs are useful on two counts - they give me a place to sell, but they also lead to increased exposure. Even so it is hard work. Most people going to craft fairs expect to find jewellery perhaps, textiles and knitted products, perhaps wood. They don't I think expect to find art or photography. Consequently you need a high footfall to stand a chance of making significant sales.

I really would like to see more such fairs with the primary focus on art. The downside is that you don't get the people who would never go to a gallery and are just looking for a pretty picture to hang on their wall. I'm not proud - if that is what you want I will sell it!

Anyway - here are the next few fairs I will be attending. If you are in the area, please pop in and say hello - discount for anyone producing a print out of this article.

Monday May 26^th - Cleeve House, Seend near Devizes (also Jewellery) - 10.00 am to 4.00 pm

Saturday Jun 7^th - Southampton Bargate Art Market - 9.00 am to 4.00 pm

Sunday Jun 15^th - Lacock - Village Hall - 11.00 am onwards

Sunday Jun 22^nd - Alton, Hampshire - Art Market – High Street - 9.00 am to 2.00 pm

Saturday Jun 28^th - Tetbury Market Hall - 10.00 am to 4.00 pm

Saturday Jul 5^th - Bath - Craft in the Crypt - St Michael’s Church, Broad Street, Bath BA1 5LJ - 9.00 am to  4.00 pm

Sunday Jul 20^th - Lacock - Village Hall - 11.00 am onwards

Sunday Jul 27^th- Alton, Hampshire -  Art Market – High Street - 9.00 am to 2.00 pm

Words and pictures

I have linked already to 'No Caption Needed'. Here are two more in the same vein - both well worth adding to your feeds.

(Notes on) Politics Theory and Photography

See this essay for example looking at the escapades of the infamous Blackwater in Iraq.

I am not partial to mercenaries like Prince and have made that plain here before (see this post and the links it contains). Today Prince complained that just because his employees are trigger happy yahoos we should not "rush to judgement" because they are working in a dangerous, stressful environment. A couple of things spring to mind. First, no one is making any of these guys take jobs in Baghdad. Second, they are a lot less stressed with no accountability for their actions than they will be if the Congress gets some backbone and starts to inquire into their activities. And third, they are making a ton of money shooting up the town.

Errol Morris at the NY Times

A blog by the maker of the movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara that won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004.

See this post about two photographs by Roger Fenton taken during the Crimean War and the baggage that goes with judgements about which came first.

I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the two photographs and thinking about the two sentences. [Susan] Sontag, of course, does not claim that Fenton altered either photograph after taking them – only that he altered or “staged” the second photograph by altering the landscape that was photographed. This much seems clear. But how did Sontag know that Fenton altered the landscape or, for that matter, “oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself?”

Surely, any evidence of this would be independent of the photographs. We don’t see Fenton (or anyone else for that matter) in either of the photographs bending down as if to pick up or put down a cannonball. How does Sontag know what Fenton was doing or why he was doing it? (To up the ante, Sontag’s sentence also suggests a certain laziness on Fenton’s part, as if he himself couldn’t be bothered with picking up or putting down a cannonball himself, but instead supervised or oversaw their placement. The imperious Fenton: Hey, you, over there. Pick up that cannonball and move it on to the road. No not there. A little more to the left. Or maybe it wasn’t laziness. Maybe he had a bad back. The incapacitated Fenton: Boy, my back is killing me. Would you mind picking up a few cannonballs and carrying them on to the road?)

While I was wrestling with these questions, it occurred to me that there was an even deeper question. How did Sontag know the sequence of the photographs? How did she know which photograph came first, OFF or ON? Presumably, there had to be some additional information that allowed the photographs to be ordered: before and after. If this is the basis for her claim that the second photograph was staged – that the landscape was posed for the second photograph – shouldn’t she offer some evidence? Fenton takes one photograph (OFF), oversees the scattering of the cannonballs and then takes another photograph (ON).

New blogging

While I intend to continue blogging here on all the usual topics, I have also started blogging at a new group blog, "Man in the White Suit", about photography the old fashioned way with film. You can see my first post here.  I haven't lost my interest in digital manipulations, far from it, and if your only interest in photography is family and holiday snaps, then digital cameras are ideal. However digital media cannot, so far, capture the subtle tones possible from medium and large format film.

I've invested therefore in a new 120 film camera - like most modern technology these days, made in China - and I'm looking forward to trying it out. For the non-photographers out there, 120 film produces negatives 6cm square, although with some cameras you can get other formats. The normal 6x6 format is about four times the size of a 35mm negative.

Actually 'invested' is probably too strong a word for spending  twenty quid on an overpriced toy, but the images I've seen from  Holga cameras have been captivating. There is perhaps something liberating about not having a few hundred pounds worth of high tech goods round your neck. Even taking processing costs in to account, you would have to take an awful lot of pictures on a Holga to spend the equivalent of a top of the range digital.

Holga#15, originally uploaded by thorburn.

Given that the Holga is indeed a toy, I've also bought a S/H Lubitel 166. This also uses 120 film, but is an altogether more serious - if still cheap - camera. It is an obsolete type really, known as a Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) using one lens to focus and a second to take the picture. The two lenses are linked, so that as you focus the one, the other adjusts too.

Using cameras like this means a change of pace. Winding on the film is a process of slowly winding the knob until the number of the next frame appears in a small red window on the camera back. This takes at least 30 secs. In the same period, my digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) can rip through 50 or 60 pictures. You can't capture rapid movement with these cameras so there is no point in trying and you begin to concentrate on the details of what is in front of you - perhaps seeing it for the first time.

I'm looking forward to the experience.

Ipernity, the new photosharing site I am moving to, also includes provision for a blog (alongside video and audio files). So far it shows no sign of turning into a Myspace or YouTube clone. My blog space ay ipernity will I think also be devoted primarily to photography. This post, about my personal involvement in photography over the years, recycles various bits and pieces already blogged or published in some way.

Guest Blogging

I have a guest post over at Ronni Bennett's blog, Time Goes By with a more personal piece than usual, a reflection on my approach to 60.

Excellent...

Guide to Punctuation. (Thanks Fred)

National Novel Writing month

God knows why, but I've signed up for this again!

At midnight, local time on November 1, begin writing your novel. Your goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight, local time, on November 30th.

Last time I tried I think I managed about 20,000 words - which was about 19,000 more than I had ever achieved before in fiction so probabl;y not a complete failure. It was rubbish though...

Where next?

When I set up this blog, I intended to focus on issues to do with community involvement in regeneration and to a lesser degree on urban design matters - hence the tag line of 'People Places and what makes them interesting'. In practice it hasn't worked out that way and I have tended to cover the  'anything else that catches my eye' part instead. I'm still not sure if that is good or bad. I'm writing about the things that interest me, which is obviously good, but so far I don't have a strong focus for my writing.

An important part of blogging for me is the idea of dialogue. That hasn't happened here, although I know from the referral logs that there are a number of regular readers. At least once I've been accused of looking for a fight, which says more about the inability of the commenter in question to understand the difference between argument and conflict than it does about my intentions then or now.

As it has panned out in practice, the blog seems to have reached a bit of a dead end and I'm not sure where to go next. There are too many political opinion blogs for me to want to add another and that isn't my forte anyway. I still have many interests from photography to philosophy. I'm strongly committed to - and involved with local democracy. By this I mean communities taking control of their own futures not simply  local government. I still find the extreme individualism of the right libertarians distasteful and frightening in their blinkered view of the world and I want to explore the left alternative.

I could write I'm sure about all of these. What I'm not sure about is whether I should, or assuming I do if it should be through a more or less daily blog. Even short pieces take time to prepare and while I could write longer pieces at less frequent intervals I know from the logs that after a couple of days off, the numbers visiting plummet - and they are not huge in the first place.

It would help me to hear from you - either in comments or via e-mail.

Clive James

I recently bought a book of essays by Clive James. I knew of his TV work and also that he was a poet, although I haven’t knowingly read any of his work. I say knowingly, because I was a great fan of Pete Atkin when he was a performer and the two of them wrote many songs together.

I didn’t realise however what a good prose writer he is. Whether writing about Orwell or Fellini or about personal experience – like learning to sing in his late 50s or meeting Princess Diana - he is always entertaining. He also displays a surprising (to me) depth of learning, something not evident in his persona as a TV presenter.

I’m not going to write an essay about a book of essays though – just go and read.

How to be high-brow

Brilliant!

[via the Virtual Stoa]