Belfast

Black and White - Street Stuff

I have started doing a bit of this sort of thing again.

Fabric in Hobbycraft

Mountains

This was a grand day out. You can see more pictures here.

Leaves

I know, I know, it is shooting fish in a barrel and I normally don't bother but this year the colours are so extraordinary, so I spent 5 minutes on the autumn leaves thing. There is more on picasa.

More Black and White

I love it.

Eva

Been doing some work with the Leica and B+W film and I really like this picture of Eva. Sometimes it is really nice to work with not quite enough light.

Polly Harvey

This was one of the finest gigs I have had the pleasure of witnessing. She was amazing. A tiny woman in a black dress that looked like a Victorian mourning gown, very polite and smiling, quite relaxed with a home crowd; then as each song began it was as if she tore an opening into another universe of pain and strange colours, then closed it again at the end of the song and said "Thank you". Each song had it's own slightly different setting, but there was not much fuss. The whole gig felt quite informal, but there is no doubting the power and authenticity of her work. In the solo context you can really see the folk aspect of the songs that might be less obvious with a loud band. And the range of her voice is astonishing. But the abiding feeling was a sense of an honest and powerful artist pursuing her work with wit and self-assurance, believing in the work and not being caught up in any celebrity shit. This is rare enough these days, and I left feeling like I had had some of whatever it is we need to live on other than bread alone.

Ikon

This is a very interesting group of people based in Belfast, who did some stuff at Greenbelt this year that was full of ideas but ultimately a bit of a frustrating experience. They said a lot of things but the best thing any of them said was this.
And this is a crap photo of them doing their thing, which was called 'The God Delusion'.

Liverpool 800 Parade

As part of Liverpool's 800th birthday celebrations there was a carnival parade through the city on Tuesday 28th August. Inishowen Carnival Group made most of the costumes and amazing constructions. The entire thing was pedal-powered which was lovely, and there was some great dancing. You can see a few more photos here:

Liverpool 800 parade Inishowen Carnival Group

Exeter

Just spent a really nice weekend in Exeter with its lovely cathedral and chavs.















This is a great shop from which Ellen bought a nice donkey picture.

Scot and Kerry's Wedding

This was a beautiful do, you can see pictures of it here and here.

Skaters

More Weston Moments

Attempts at Summer Pt 2 - Weston Super Mare

It looks alright but it was freezing, with the wind whipping sand into your face if you ventured onto the beach.

A Day on the Gower

A couple of weeks ago we spent a day with some friends on a beach at the end of the Gower Peninsula. It was an amazing day, as we tried to cram a summer into a Saturday.

Shoe Shopping

Elise and Claire Dancing While Sharing an Ipod

Eva Dancing

Elise is in Bristol

Eva - shades

I think I am going to do more portraits. I have been letting that slide a bit but I think I might be a portrait photographer more than anything else.

Blaise again

This is where I run, the estate backs onto our garden. Minox again. Because it is small enough to have in your pocket while running.

Minox GT

What a wicked little camera these are. Tiny, deadly sharp lens, quiet, great fun. As you can see I even took a little self-portrait to celebrate. £30 off ebay, can't go wrong can you?

A Crisis of Doubt

It has become clear to me recently that I am reaching a turning point of some kind; that all the new stuff that I am doing and experiencing in this period of my life is leading towards a real sea-change in how I see things and who I think I am. What happens during this time, and how I handle it, will probably have a profound determining effect on the rest of my life and how well it goes, and so I do feel a bit of pressure. And maybe because of all this, I feel a growing and genuine crisis of doubt. I am just not sure if my doubt is strong enough to see me through this.

Previously I have always had my doubt to fall back on – when times were good, or bad. My doubt has been not just deep, but wide-ranging – doubt in God, the world, doubt in myself and my fellow man. And of course in the past all of these things have let me down; my doubt has never really been tested up until now.

My current situation is different from any I have previously faced however. It is not just that I seem to be surrounded by the faithful, the steadfast, even the devout (which quite frankly freaks me out by the way), it is not just about other people. Things are going really well in my own life too. I have never been fitter. I have managed to maintain, for over 9 months now, a healthy work/life balance with the emphasis on life, had loads of great time to spend with my family, lost a bit of weight, stopped smoking and drinking coffee, cut out chocolate and wheat, and felt realy good for it. This is the sort of thing that can eat away at your doubt.

I know that everybody has at least some faith - many people that I love and respect, even members of my immediate family have loads of faith - but I have been pretty much immune to it up until now. I have always seen faith as metaphorical petrol. If religion is a car or a motor bike, and I mean really nice ones like a porsche or a triumph bonneville or something ( maybe the CofE is a triumph bonnie: you can assign vehicles to other faiths yourself); anyway I can appreciate those machines as a non-driver, for the excellence of their design, the harmony of form and function, the poetry of the thing. But faith, faith is the petrol – people with petrol, i.e. people with faith are having a completely different experience of those things from me, they are actually driving them about, going places fast, taking risks, making nuisances of themselves, careering all over the road, shouting at pedestrians, and I am not sure if I envy them or not. But I can’t just buy petrol – the analogy starts to come apart a bit at this point. Maybe faith is like money rather than petrol, I’m not sure, I will have to think about it.

Maybe I am over-dramatising, I mean there is no danger of me rushing up to an altar or anything. For a start, I am not really a joiner and faith seems to be a team game, although strangely each team seems to have their own version of the rules. Anyhow, up until now my doubt has functioned a bit like a note from my mum excusing me from PE. I have been able to watch safely from the sidelines, while everyone else gets all red in the face, bumping into each other. It all looks terrifying and I can’t afford to lose my doubt now, I am too old and stiff to start dashing about the metaphorical pitch getting upset about liturgy or arguments about atonement, whatever that is.

It is ultimately, like so many things, a question of identity – who you are, who you want to be, who you want to be seen to be, the conflicts between those things. Which is exhausting enough in itself without trying to figure out how and why the universe was built and all that. Sometimes I just get tired, and I think that is when I weaken, and become susceptible to the temptations of faith.

Occasionally it all comes together in my mind, in a sudden blinding insight, usually when I am half-way up a mountain or something but I had one the other day when I was in the gym, on the cross-trainer. I view the world from an artistic standpoint in general, and it occurred to me that the whole artistic project, i.e. responding to the experiences of being alive by taking that raw material and transforming it with imagination into art that helps us understand the world and ourselves in relation to it, that that project is exactly the same as religion – that religion is just another version of the same thing. In fact for a large part of the past two millennia, they have been identical – the cistine chapel, the pieta, all those renaissance madonnas, were all just tiny bits of the artistic project that was Christendom. Like many of these insights it just seems like stating the obvious now, but at that moment, in the gym, the thought struck me with such force that my heart-rate, which was clearly displayed in red numerals before me, shot up from one fifty-something to over one hundred and seventy. So that must mean something.

It’ll all come out in the wash I suppose. Like all turning points, it is not exactly clear what direction I am going to end up facing, and I am feeling a bit dizzy and sick, but I will get over that. I just need to have a little doubt.

Change is gonna come

For one thing this is my new blog picture to reflect - I am not sure what exactly but we'll see. Obviously younger and more attractive than my previous picture which was actually fake. To some of my closest friends I often look like this.

Eva with camera

Eva And Lucy

Dancing and running, respectively. Eva (top) is shot on film, in a lomo. Lucy, below is shot on a digital SLR, (D200) at 800 asa. Nerdy nerd nerd. Doesn't matter at all does it? Their joy is the thing about the pictures.

Nice lomo pic

This is when the lomo is good. Which is rare. Anyway, I dropped it and of course it broke so that's the end of that. But I think I will continue to play with film for a while.

Experimenting

I have been experimenting with cross-processing and messing about with a lomo, which is a crap camera that people use specifically for crap photography. It does sometimes accidentally do something good however - I like these double exposures which were purely accidental.