I watched Lost when it first came out, and enjoyed it, but found it frustratingly paced. I think I stopped watching it regularly somewhere around the middle of the second season (or maybe it was the third). This video has convinced me I should probably give it another go:
The most consistently interesting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns published on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the individual installments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recommend taking a look.
I found Pete Brook’s thought-provoking Prison Photography blog via consumptive (another thought-provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s definitely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask pertinent questions:
If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the photograph as social document, therefore, what social and political powers are at play in a photograph’s manufacture? And, how is knowledge, related to those powers, constructed?
It’s implicit, I think, that these are questions we could — should, even — direct at all photography, not just the photography of “sites of incarceration”.
On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read something that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:
[…] I think photographers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice photography these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]
I think other people do notice photography, and I think that some will notice the aesthetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of contemporary photography (and likewise contemporary poetry, contemporary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appreciation within a quite insular, self-contained, elitist milieu.
I drafted this back in October, and then promptly forgot about it (it’s been a strange couple of months):
I took this photograph late one morning, or maybe early one afternoon. I was with another foreign teacher at the time, and while we’d been eating we had both noticed that we were being watched by a group of waitresses and waiters in the restaurant opposite. It is quite common in China for Chinese people to watch foreigners, but this group of young people were notable for the intensity of their curiosity: they watched us the entire time we ate our noodles, from beginning to end, unflinching, indefatigable. So, immediately on leaving the noodle restaurant in which I’d been eating some very good beef noodles (it was a Muslim restaurant, I think), I dashed over the road and took a few photographs of our audience. This frame was the last one, and I’m happy that after the initial shock of me walking straight towards them, camera in hand, snapping photographs, they each quickly accepted their sudden metamorphosis from observer into observed, relaxed, and smiled.
Past installments of MCMP Redux can be found here.
Yinchuan, 2008.
So, 2010 is here. We’re not quite at manned missions to Jupiter, yet, but NASA does have a few interesting missions planned. On a related note, I like io9’s 15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years.
In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.
The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:
I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm impermanence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.
I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting year.
Around a year ago pH and I encountered Mr. Chu. Mr. Chu seemed to be present, albeit in different personas, in six photographs I had taken around that time: he was an Everyman, one single meta-man who represented many others. The idea was to present his story in Acts and Scenes, the first set of images the six scenes of the first act. The plan then was for more to follow, and more may yet follow; but for now Mr. Chu inhabits a place, a floating world, that is currently off limits. This post is a memorial to Chu, wherever he may be. The captions below each photograph were created during the Gtalk chat that led to the creation of the set itself.
Scene One — “ONE, two, three, four, Mr. Chu thought as he walked the alley to the Bureau…”
Scene Two — “The headlights silently approached and Mr. Chu wondered, for a moment, if they were coming for him…”
Scene Three — “As usual, on these nightly trips to his fate, Mr. Chu felt deeply the pain of the infinite commute towards darkness.”
Scene Four — “Mr. Chu had powers, he realised; it was just a matter of deciding how to use them.”
Scene Five — “He stood in the station as he always stood, Mr. Chu to himself, Mr. Chu to the rest of the world.”
Scene Six — “Later in life, Mr. Chu would look back on his failures and try to find out where he had wrong, how he had become the pianist who always hit the wrong keys.”
More on coral over at Google Books:
Ever since European explorers began to rove the tropic oceans, the Western world hs vaguely discerned the phantasmagoria of coral isles rising, palm-fringed and surf-ruffled, amid the blue desolation of the sea. As the centuries passed the image sharpened; new details emerged — of island necklaces ringing bright turquoise lagoons, and many an arched beach of pastel sands. Below the sun-spangled satin of the waters there loomed a fabulous world of living creatures, more prolific and colorful than any known to man, a magic glimmering realm of flowerlike animals, giant clams and gaudy fish with iridescent scales of gold and silver, ruby and emerald, glinting among the groves and grottoes of the coral gardens.
People wrote differently in 1954.
More news to remind us of where we’re heading:
The prospects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.
A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.
Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen. That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.
There are several books in my bag at the moment, but the one I’m dipping into the most is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a novel by John le Carré. Reading it reminds me that I should read more, as I immensely enjoy good fiction, but over the last few months I haven’t read enough. Here is a snippet:
It was almost four o’clock on the afternoon of the same day. Safe houses I have known, thought Guillam, looking around the gloomy flat. He could write of them the way a commercial traveller could write about hotels: from your five-star hall of mirrors in Belgravia with Wedgwood pilasters and gilded oak leaves, to this two-room scalp-hunters’ shakedown in Lexham Gardens, smelling of dustand drains, with a three-foot fire extinguisher in the pitch-dark hall. Over the fireplace, cavaliers drinking out of pewter. On the nest of tables, sea-shells for ashtrays; and in the grey kitchen, anonymous instructions to “Be Sure and Turn Off the Gas Both Cocks.” He was crossing the hall when the bell rang, exactly on time. He lifted the phone and heard Toby’s distorted voice howling in the earpiece. He pressed the button and heard the clunk of the electric lock echoing in the stairwell. He opened the front door but left it on the chain till he was sure Toby was alone.
I took this photograph in the summer of 2008. It must have been in the evening as that window faced (still faces) west. Liu Bing was playing with her phone. Hugo was in the other room watching a film (Apocalypse Now Redux, probably — I remember us commenting on its beautiful colours and wondering which film stock they used). Afterwards the three us ate — dumpings, possibly, or barbecue bought on a street near the apartment. I can’t remember the context with crystal clarity, but the photograph helps me to remember.
Hanzhong, 2008.
Prints of this photograph, and of other photographs in Singles, are available on request — email for details.
One night in the autumn of 2007 I was in a net bar editing some photographs when out of the blue I got a call from a Polish guy asking if he and his girlfriend could crash at my place that very same night. It isn’t very often that requests are made by strangers for emergency accommodation, but I’d been in similar situations myself and didn’t hesitate in allowing the two of them stay. And it turned out they were incredibly close: five minutes away on a bus that was bringing them from the train station to the Bell Tower. I quickly closed down what I was doing and dashed out to meet them. And so began my adventure with two new Polish friends, an adventure during which I took this, the seventeenth photograph in Singles.
The location is one I pass through almost every time I return to Xi’an, but the billboard, as far as I can tell, is no longer there.
Xi’an, 2007.
Prints of this one are available, if you’re interested — email for details — and earlier episodes, if we can call them that, of Singles can be found here.
It’s time again for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I don’t think I will ever tire of this superb series, and I say that having seen it dozens of times. I’m hoping that watching it now will ease the soreness of my sore tooth. I should probably read the novel, too. Although maybe I’d be better to wait a week or so: lately I’ve been promising myself I’ll read this or that novel (Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom each come to mind), while not actually getting around to devoting time to any of them. We will see.
(I just read on Wikipedia that Tomas Alfredson, director of Let the Right One In, is planning on making a film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: very interesting indeed. I need to watch Let the Right One In again, but this time with the English subtitles turned on — last time Liu Bing was concentrating on it the most, so we were using the Chinese subs, and so I didn’t have much of a clue as to what was happening.)
This work is published under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
RSS Feed. This blog is powered by Wordpress and uses Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.