Archive for the ‘Landscape’ Category

Look Right

01Feb13

The City was reliving its daily ritual, evolving since ancient times. Merchants and passing traders, carts hauling the produce brought in from outside the city walls.


Not far from where Barbara Hepworth’s bronze Divided Circle once impressed us before its brutal execution, a Peace Pillar between two Cabbage Palms with the words ‘May Peace Prevail on Earth’ – looks overwhelmed, a Hiroshima-inspired memorial being buried in the depths of a nuclear winter.


Everyday street spectacles: Tragic fires or the rioting mob, there are countless, similarly documented events in this century that bring nearer the sum total of an organic metropolis. Throughout the ages London has itself repeated – scenarios forever rewound. In the aftermath of the Blitz, bomb sites reverted to nature with species not seen since genteel Tudor times.


Wind and Waves

28Aug12

“.. Go away, madam..” Which is what I wanted to scream at the people in my pictures. But with the wind and waves, they wouldn’t have heard me.


“The first thing I remember seeing outside the station was the Zeus-scaled statue of Athens wonder woman Kelly Holmes though at first I thought my arrival was too late until I realised she was in fact being slowly dismembered – a good omen for this grand tour of Olympic Lilliput. In its place would be the steps leading up to the new Westfield shopping mall – an early example of things to come where the messages of health through sport inevitably now yields to the branding of Big Macs.”


Sacred Acres

20Jun12

“When the Norman King William commissioned the Domesday book in 1086, the land that is now Stratford was a hotbed of industry: Gunpowder; distilling and timber milling.. These are now brand havens, sacred acres, protected by Rapier surface-to-air missiles and walkie-talkie foot patrols.


Contact Sheets

06Dec11

After the success of the book Contact Sheets, it occurred to me that the very existence of this tool in the editing of film photography has been on the wane since many of us migrated to digital, side-lining the darkroom ghosts of one’s film. In the first of what may become a series of published sheets from my archive, I hope to explain what I was happening to me en route to the last frame.


To street photographers a city like Glasgow is less frantic and chaotic but nonetheless a more confrontational city than London – a capital known for its English frostiness to northern trippers.


Utopia

19Oct11

The Greenway looks less green and more white concrete these days with early sprays of graffiti on the first pillars. Over on the western border once stood the beautiful Manor Garden Allotments, the parcels of land where community gardeners grew their veg – bulldozed for a warm-up track so that Usain Bolt can work up a sweat.