On the 31st of January we attended a marvelous concert of world music at the Jubilee Library. Above, Polina Shepherd & Slavic Voices. Below, Jo Ema, Isaace Jengwa (Zimbabwe), Bashir al Gamar (Sudan) and Peyman Heydarian and Sattar Chamanigol (Iran). See www.bestfootmusic.net for more information on upcoming events.
Jazz on a Sunday evening in a local pub. Hear them at SoundCloud.
After dinner on my final night in New York with primary school classmates, we exited the Baylander and were met with a dance video being made.
Well, at least the lamp is straight in this one, but I look like a deer caught in the headlights and that shirt just has to go! The one below has a yellowish color cast to it and we’re the wrong size compared to the one above. Nothing yet ready to add to Modern Romance.
In my Modern Romance project I have tried to show both the companionship and solitude of a long-term, aging couple. As I experiment with extending it, I thought of showing the couple pursuing individual pastimes. I’m not sure…
The Farnborough airport is not far from us here in Farnham and I have sometimes posted pictures of it taken on walks to Caesar’s Camp (an ancient Roman camp an uphill march from here). Annually they host an airshow and a couple of weeks ago we hiked up Folly Hill to Caesar’s Camp to see what we could see. We caught the tail-end but still some remarkable displays (click any of the images below to see them enlarged).
From the Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine we walked to the newer Serpentine Gallery North to see Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth, an immersive AI animation based on visual data of coral reefs and rainforests. See more below:
One room featured beanbag chairs in which you could lie and gaze at psychedelic projections on the ceiling. Looks a bit like a Victorian opium den (click any image to see them all larger).
Following up a recommendation from one of my tutorials, I went to see Jake Elwes’ Zizi Show at the V&A. While it was a dazzling video display, I’m not sure if it highlighted the inequities of trans representation in AI creation so much as simply the shortcomings of AI.
If you’re in London either of the next 2 weekends you can come see some of my new works as part of Sydenham Arts’ Artists Trail 2023. Here’s a link to their artists page (I appear in alphabetical order by my first name with full details of times and venue) and the event main page. Below are images from the series that will be presented at the show. (Unfortunately, I’ll be in the US over both weekends so I won’t be there myself.) Click on any of the pictures below to see them full-screen (you may need to click through via the post-title, above, if you’re reading this in an email or on social media).
Our week in Edinburgh coincided with the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival and we were lucky enough to get great seats for the Norwegian Mona Krogstad Quartet at the Jazz Bar on the evening of July 19th (over a month ago, now!) to hear this excellent ensemble. A great time and rather than describe the music subjectively and inaccurately, I can recommend you listen to them. Click any of the pictures below to see them all bigger (you may have to click the post title first if you’re not seeing this directly on the web site already).
For those interested in technical details, these were difficult shooting conditions as it was dark and I was just shooting with my walk-around zoom lens from my seat so as not to disturb those around me. Needless to say, they were shot at a very high ISO and were reasonably noisy as well as sometimes not that sharp at low shutter speeds. I used DxO’s Pure Raw to recover as much quality from the raw files as possible before processing in Capture One, simply using the default settings.
There were music festivals going on everywhere we went in Belgium. This one was in Bruges’ Grand-Place or Grote Markt. All the bands we heard sounded like American bands but when they announced songs or players it was all in Flemish. This band played My Sharona, among others.
We wandered away from the beach into the town and came upon a plaza that had been set up like a beer garden where a Flemish band were playing American reels to an attentive audience.
Another set of postcard pictures taken at the above-captioned cathedral which was stunning. By chance we arrived just before a concert was put on by an English girls’ boarding school (Badminton School).
The same Rock Choir we say marching in the parade the day before (and the same one we saw at the Museum of Rural Life a month or 2 ago) performed as part of the carnival on Sunday. Here they are covering Dolly Parton’s Jolene.
This week was a great one musically although no cameras were allowed in either event. We spent a couple of days in London. On Wednesday evening we were at the Hammersmith Apollo for Shakti’s final London appearance. They gave a rousing performance that brought the audience to its feet after nearly every number (a tiny taste below – if viewing this in email click the post title to go to the browser and see the clip). And to make things even better, the show opened with a performance by Gary Husband and Nguyen Le.
Then, Thursday I was fortunate to be included in a group of English photography students invited to a discussion in a small theatre at the recently re-opened National Portrait Gallery between Stanley Tucci and Paul McCartney about the just opened exhibit of Paul’s pictures from 1964 (you can pay to view a recording of the live-streamed event here until July 6th). Here the secrecy was even greater and we were made to turn off our phones and seal them in envelopes before being granted entry. Tucci conducted an excellent discussion and McCartney was his usual charming, entertaining self. Interestingly, the discussion centered far more on photography and the Beatles’ experience on their triumphant initial US tour than I had dared hope. Below a shot from his Instagram. Two tremendous experiences.
We had chanced upon Plymouth’s Pirate weekend! If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.
This past semester my photographic practice has been exploring the subject of inequality: wealth and income inequality as well as gender and ethnic disparities. I have been incorporating text from signs into scenes using Photoshop. For the summer, my tutor suggested placing text-based images I create into the landscape and rephotographing them. So before departing on this trip I prepared 3 images. One simply says “Broken Promises,” a famous graffito from the Bronx, another shows mathematical symbols for inequality, “<>” and “≠,” and I also abstracted a sign I saw in the car park of the Palm Springs Art Museum on a trip several years ago that simply says, “Imagine Art Here.” Then I asked Margaret to hold them for me while we were near Golden Cap. I also found places along our walks to place them in the scene. I’m not sure they’re really doing that much for me. Click any image to see them enlarged.
Last week we conducted some group tutorials on our projects. I showed various things I was working on, including some of my seesaw inequality images and explained why I was dissatisfied with them and not sure they were worth continuing. Suggestions from my group included:
I’m not sure any of those is really having the desired effect but I took a stab at them in Photoshop, crudely lengthening the seesaw and then inserting a shot I had taken of skyscrapers in London last spring into the background, a couple of different ways. It was fun to play with, though still not quite as clear as what I was hoping for:
