Tragicocomedia

The following are some recent efforts, and the odd one not so recent. Warm winter, hot spring, though I do love the variability. A lot of sunshine of late, and as ever, the beach beckons…

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With the exception of the shots from the Skunkhour gig, these are all taken over the past few weeks. All of them are from the city or the inner west of Sydney. Slowly I’ve been warming up for an impending trip to England, Greece and Italy – leaving first thing Thursday morning. We’re flying into Londres : ) then, after four or five days in Cambridge, flying out to Rhodes. From there we are island hopping via Santorini and the ruins of Delos to Athens over ten days, before flying to spend a week in Rome. This trip is not about new discoveries but catching up and refreshing old favourites, and I’m especially excited about revisiting two places I’ve lived in previously – namely Cambridge and Rome. The last time I was in Rome was February 2008 – five years after I lived there. It seems about right, therefore, that I should head back there in 2013.

Thusly, I’ll be away for roughly 25 days and hence may not contribute a great deal to Tragicocomedia. I’m not ruling out contributing a hell of a lot either, but judging on previous form, there’ll be too much amazing stuff to look at and photograph and I’ll be adequately distracted. Either way, life goes on.

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This is a collection of recent shots from around Sydney, mostly taken along George Street, a regular haunt of mine for better or for worse. Been trying to work angles a lot more recently, something evident in this bunch of shots. As the title says, in a nutshell, this is just some stuff wot I saw : )

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Since returning from India, now almost six months ago, I still haven’t really fallen back into the habit of shooting a lot. It’s not so much a case of the cup runneth dry so much as the well runneth over, for I’ve got a daunting backlog of photographs to get through. Much of that work has been earmarked for travel writing and is being held in reserve. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I get it out there. In the meantime, here are some of the photos I have taken recently.

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Last Saturday, my buddy Paul (Dr Fantasy) and I did our first job together as the team Celebrius. Celebrius is the name of an event photography and video business we are in the process of forming. The plan is to cover any and all events – weddings, parties, anything as it were, providing tasteful, arty stills and innovative video editing. Paul and I have a lot of amateur experience and some small amount of professional experience in these areas, but either way we feel confident we have the capacity, without being cocky or arrogant, I hope : ) In this case we volunteered to work for free – it seemed like both a good cause and a practice project, though there was the slightly mercenary motivation in having our names attached and promoted.

Anyways, this collection of photos is more a mood piece than anything else. I wanted to provide dreamy frames to use for montage and thus focussed more on emotive portraits and evident thought. We were at first somewhat disappointed that there weren’t more people, and that the sky was overcast. Indeed, for a while, at the beginning, there were more people photographing the event than participating in creating or affixing art to the wall. Yet, everybody was lovely and pleasant –  a good-natured and likeable bunch.

As to the event, it was the first Sydney incarnation of an international event called Wallpeople.

Have a look at the blurb below:

Wallpeople is a collaborative art event that happens in 45 cities around the world at the same time. A street wall will become a makeshift outdoor gallery where all participants may exhibit their own works and collaborate to create an improvised open-air museum.

This year, Sydney joins the global network of creatives for the first time and invites all city artists & creative enthusiasts alike to join us next 1st of June in Newtown.

Created in Barcelona in 2009, Wallpeople leads people to create, and be part of a unique moment in a certain urban place, with the intention to set up a unique and street work done by all.

Wallpeople 2013: Music Edition

The guiding theme for 2013 is MUSIC. We want everyone to express his unique relationship with music, no matter what genre or style. The participants have two possibilities:

1. Reinterpret a song in an artistic format of your choice: illustration, photography, text, painting, collage, canvas…
2. Create any work related to music in a general way: For example: a tribute to an artist, a concert, a musical moment of your life, your favourite style, musical origins…

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This collection of photos dates from 2004-5 and were all taken using my second digital camera – an Olympus of some description. It was hardly a very professional camera, clocking in at around 3.2 megapixels, but with a decent 10x manual zoom, it gave me a degree of flexibility I had never had with a camera before. Prior to this, my first digital camera had been purchased just a year before, in 2003, before a flight to Venice. It was a neat little Minolta with a 3x manual zoom, which I truly loved for its design and ease of use. Sadly, however, it died a sorry death when a Gatorade opened in my bag and drowned its circuit board.

I owe a great deal to both of those cameras for being just good enough to give me the confidence to take photography more seriously. The images seemed excitingly clear and impressively accessible and available. This was, of course, when digital cameras were in their early phase of expansion – going from a novelty item to a technology commodity that everyone owned. It was also before mobile phones could offer anything like the same level of quality as a compact.

Prior to this I’d used a range of compact film cameras, never having owned an SLR. I certainly enjoyed taking photographs, though I understood very little about the craft. It was, after all, difficult to experiment without access to a dark room or committing to the cost of developing regularly and immediately, so I mostly focussed on taking snaps of people. I did, however, have a strong yearning to record the many places I visited when I was first travelling around Europe and, later, doing the same whilst based at Cambridge. These photos, whilst ambitious insofar as what I hoped to achieve, were technically naïve and taken using cameras that weren’t quite up to scratch.

Getting my first digital camera, however, opened up the opportunity to experiment as much as possible and it wasn’t long before I grew in confidence. Another great leap forward for me came when I first printed a digital photograph using my own inkjet. I was absolutely astonished at how perfectly clear and glossy the reproduction was. I sat staring at it in wonder for some time, and kept going back to take another look. The capacity to shoot and print my own photos for so little cost and with such ease turned into an obsession, and soon my walls were covered in prints. This fuelled a strong desire to get out there and shoot as much as possible, and so I did, starting the habit I’ve had ever since of never leaving the house without a camera, and was often to be seen carting a tripod around in the hope of some good long exposures.

These photographs all date from that period of great enthusiasm, when I saw how I might tell stories just as easily through photography. Prior to this, I’d seen photography primarily as a means of recording, rather than a means of expression. I was, at the time, writing novels, poetry and short stories with a furious passion. Photography added the much needed colour and a pleasingly easy adjunct to what I considered those more difficult arts. I don’t mean to suggest that photography is easy,  especially not for those who agonise over setting up compositions and technical exactness, yet as someone whose photography has mostly been opportunistic, I’ve always seen it as a refreshingly easy and fun means of creating a vignette or narrative.

In retrospect, these photographs aren’t all great by any means and, coming back to them, they seem disappointingly low-res. Yet there are some here which I dearly love for their compositions and the memories they bring me both of how much I liked them at the time, and where and when I was in life when they were taken. Everything here is from Sydney, and many were taken near to where I was living at the time – Glebe. Either way, I hope you enjoy them!

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This collection of photographs comes from spending the last month mostly going through older folders and picking out things I might have missed. They’re all shots I either ignored or overlooked the first time around, and so, whilst I don’t consider them the cream of the crop, there are a good few I like all the same.

This is also likely the last post I’ll me making from Australia for seven weeks, as I’ll be heading to India with V, via Bali and Singapore. The first stop in India is Thiruvananthapuram, which took me a few days to learn to say correctly, and the last is Kolkata. As to what happens in between, we are really not sure.

Inevitably, I’m totally pumped about the photographic opportunities that will present themselves and, of course, the holiday itself. I’m don’t know how much I’ll blog while away, though I will certainly be taking my laptop – despite travelling light again with just a carry-on bag and a pair of thongs.

Finally, I’m moving house tomorrow. I’ve written about how much I love this place in the past and my deep affection for it has not diminished one whit. However, I am moving in with V, so I suppose that constitutes an upgrade : )

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Lately, I’ve been cleaning up. This might sound boastful, but really I mean it in the humdrum sense of organising my life. Not that my life isn’t organised, but my files need sorting. I want to have everything backed up and archived before I move house then head into Asia in December. There is a special type of phobia about the possible loss of digital files which I’m sure already has a name. Anyway, the important thing is that I have lots of work to do and am rather enjoying being busy.

Work has genuinely been enjoyable of late as I’ve been teaching Genre this term to year 10 high school students, and the last few weeks have focussed on military science fiction. It’s an odd early focal point for a study of genre, it makes a degree of sense in that it’s quite an easily classifiable genre, so far as its salient features are concerned. This subject was paralleled with a look at the “going native” narrative, prevalent in films such as Dances with Wolves, The Emerald Forest, The Last Samurai and The Mission. Winding up with a close look at the mixed genres of Avatar – military science fiction, going native, fantasy, western, romance etc. all rolled into one – made for a clean lead into the MSF material.

It was satisfying to find myself standing in front of a class showing clips from Aliens, having been such a fan of the movie as a teenager. It’s a testimony to the post-modern world we live in that we treat these popular works with the same intellectual rigour as high culture products. It is indeed satisfying to know that the cultural context in which I grew up has become a part of the global cultural and intellectual corpus. This week was a look at the parodic elements in Starship Troopers and its apparent subversion of the novel’s happily fascist narrative with a futility of war twist.

Right, definitely rambling now. Above are some photos. I’d like to think I’ve also been cleaning up with the camera as well, but judge for yourself.

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The weather of late has been a titillating mix of dry heat and cool, crisp sunny days. There has been a lot of good eating and plenty of outdoors adventures, an especially indulgent start to spring. This last week also heralded the first two swims of the season. The first at what we like to call “the Resort”, which is the part of Bronte Beach immediately next to the ocean pool where the water from the pool spills down onto the rocks in a wide, continuous fan. It acts like a splendid water feature, and adds a certain luxuriousness to what is otherwise swimming in a large natural rockpool with abundant swaying seagrass.

So, a good start to the season on every level, with a lot of work to be done and plenty of things to look forward to. The good news is a coming holiday of seven weeks in Asia with V. We plan to fly via Bali and Singapore to India and spend the bulk of our time there. The local budget carriers make for a very surprisingly cheap round trip, which is, to say the least, very fortunate. Anyways, enough said, other than best wishes and an invitation to enjoy these photographs.

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