They work as if this were the natural thing to do; they create as if this were the natural thing to do; they give birth to beauty as if this were the natural thing to do. They have entered the way of salvation through unconscious faith. It is a path open to all. And once they have entered this path, the creation of plain, natural beauty becomes a thing of ease, a matter of course. This natural, unforced beauty is the result of a kind of unconscious grace. This grace is a special privilege of craftsmen and leads them to a realm of blessed unawareness. Without consciously thinking whether something is good or bad, creating as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, making things that are plain and simple but marvellous, this is the state of mind in which artisans do their finest work.

—from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi (emphasis mine)

A Fresh Coat of Moss

You should embrace the visceral quality in reading. Read mostly fiction. Read slowly. There is a kind of marinating that happens with very good works, they are always more than their story. The goal is not to digest information, but to layer over your reality with a fresh coat of moss. Your own world becomes colored by these stories, so it is worthwhile to spend time seeking the excellent works from across cultures and history.

You should have a goal, in some sense, to be influenced by the works that you read. All stories influence you, regardless of how they get to you. A person who reads no great stories will be influenced by the few stories he does come across in life, for better or worse — and I think mostly worse.

—Simon Sarris, from Reading Well

Complicated vs Complex

Recently, I heard Arthur C Brooks discuss the difference between complicated and complex problems on an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show and it made me think about how that distinction applies to art.

Complicated problems seem difficult when first encountered, but are easy enough to crunch with enough compute. It might take a while, but if you work through the process from beginning to end, you’ll get the answer.

Complex problems often start with simple questions — who will win this football match and how? — but the correct answer, if it even exists, is unknowable. Too many moving parts. Too many unknowns. Too much randomness.

Of course, complex problems are more interesting and important to contemplate:

• why are we here?
• how can I live a good life?
• who do I want to spend it with?

I think this applies to art too. Art that asks more questions than it answers endures, both in the mind and in the canon.

The complexity inherent in good art shouldn’t be confused for complication. The key is work that is dense with meaning and mystery; not necessarily dense pictorially, musically and linguistically. It can be simple, but not shallow. I’m thinking of artists like Agnes Martin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Basho who draw power from a minimal approach.

I want to make photographs which share the qualities of the work I admire: pictures that get better over time, that contain details missed on first glance, that leave you with a feeling that you can’t shake. I’m seeking complexity.

Loved this from James Hill, via Alan Jacobs:

Eve Arnold, the wonderful Magnum photographer, used to recount a story about walking with Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Magnum office in Paris to have lunch at his apartment on the Rue de Rivoli. During the 15-minute stroll home, as he kept telling her that he was no longer interested in photography, only drawing, he took three rolls of film on his Leica.”

Week Notes 018 — W/E 6 August 2023

• A mostly deskbound week with a few pleasant exceptions.
• I’d left my VAT to the last minute, but turned it around within a day and a half. Having to sort my tax stuff four times a year is a revelation. I used to go through a year’s worth of paper receipts and bank statements in January. The ensuing Hell Week would destroy any new year enthusiasm that I’d been nuturing. Now, almost everything is digital, all business expenses go through one of two cards, and I’ve only got three months of transactions to deal with so it’s a fraction of the hassle.
• A couple of days of post work on two separate projects. Some last minute high res to grade and retouching on a handful of pictures. This year I started to use frequency separation, rather than working on normal layers when retouching, and it’s hugely improved the quality and subtlety of my results. It feels a little clunky at first, but it’s well worth learning if you’re unhappy with your skin work.
• I shot a studio visit with Alice Irwin at the end of the week. Alice works in multiple mediums: from large scale sculptures, to prints and drawings. I photographed her a few years ago as part of a series documenting artists at work. She’s since moved spaces (within the same studio complex) and is now working with screen printing, rather than etching. She wanted some new pictures to show her current space and process, so we spent an afternoon printmaking, shooting, and catching up.
  • We probably spent too much time chatting — a lot of the pictures weren’t usable because Alice is mid word… This is something to watch out for, especially when photographing interesting people. You’re having a great time chatting and snapping, but you need to pause and make sure that you get the pictures that you came for. That said, there’s still a reason to work this way: while you get fewer keepers, the successful pictures have a feeling of relaxed intimacy that I really like. When people aren’t used to being photographed, the experience of being ‘examined’ can make them feel uncomfortable, especially if you aren’t talking or taking pictures. I prefer to shoot and talk liberally, so that the subject gets used to the sound and presence of the camera and it begins to disappear. You get a lot of crap pictures in the process, but you create a relaxed mood that’s hard to find if you’re precious about every frame.
• I revisited Matt Black’s American Geography this week. Recently, I’d thought about selling it, as it didn’t grab me initially, but I wanted to give it another go. It hit much harder this time and is a body of work that I want to spend more time with. There is an unrelenting austerity, bordering on grimness, that is difficult to sit with, but the dignity with which the subjects are treated elevates it beyond poverty porn. Matt depicts the subjects as individuals, not ciphers for poverty, so it doesn’t feel exploitative. And my understanding is that he spent time with them to gain their trust and learn about their stories. There’s a lot of visual variety: stark street photos, environmental portraits and minimalistic, almost abstract landscapes. The dense typologies of cigarette packets, beggars' signs, and plastic forks didn’t work for me initially, but I like how the patterns they form en masse sit with the diary page grids of text. The only thing I still struggle with, beyond the subject matter and bleakness, is the crunchy black and white grade. Sometimes it tips over into a high-contrast B&W style reminiscent of bad street photography on Flickr.
• I noticed two potential problems with my M6 TTL — the rangefinder not quite lining up at infinity and the meter not working. I assumed that a dead battery was causing the latter, but a fresh one didn’t bring it back to life. After some back and forth with a helpful Redditor, I tried cleaning the contacts with a pencil eraser. Success! …well at least for half a day. The meter has crapped out again, and now that I’ve loaded film into the camera to check that everything else is working, I can’t fiddle with it. I’m going to finish my current roll and then see what I can do.
• Six month catch-up with some of the couples from our pre-natal course. Nice to see everyone, especially those that we haven’t been seeing socially in the intervening time. The large skylight in the pub’s dining area was creating a lovely slice of sunlight that cut along the edge of our table, so I started to take pictures. I was extra grateful for thought that the designers of the Ricoh GRIII put into its ergonomics as I was balancing a baby on one hip and shooting with my free hand. I think that these pictures of friends and family are some of the most important that we take. As photographers, we can use our skills to cut through the chaos and clutter to crystallise a moment shared. I sometimes feel that my job contributes nothing of value to the world, and in those existential periods, I find it helpful to focus on a less grand goal: adding a little more beauty to the world and to the lives of people that I love.

Some Links to Things that Made me Happy This Week

• @aleha_84’s pixel art
• notes art — surreal and beautiful sketches made daily in the Apple Notes app.
  • See this short video for a round up of the first year and the artist’s thinking behind the project: 365 – notes art
• Learn Music Theory in 29 minutes by Underdog Electronic Music School — one of the best breakdowns of the basics that I have watched. Oscar is a brilliant teacher who breaks down a complicated subject into easy to understand parts. I’ve been messing around on the piano again after a very long break, so it was great refresher to ideas dimly remembered.
• TN:106 Mura Masa - Tape Notes — I enjoyed hearing Alex Crossan breakdown the concepts and production behind his album, Demon Time. I liked that I key part of his process on this project was to do things because they made him laugh or he thought they were a little stupid. I’m drawn to people who can keep the creative process fun, rather than letting it become heavy or pretentious.
• Yuval Noah Harari: Crisis and tragedy in Israel - Part 1 on Leading. Alaister Campbell and Rory Stewart interview Harari on the pressures on Israeli democracy and ensuing unrest. Harari is incise and passionate as always.
• Commit Mono. Neutral programming typeface. — I have been using this wonderful minimalist typeface to write this post and everything else in Drafts this week. It’s designed for coding, but it’s a joy for writing and editing too. I love its simplicity and legibility. The website is a masterclass in design clarity too. It’s been released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 license, so it can be used freely for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Enjoy.
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Navigating Finder — sometimes it’s about finessing the basics… I was looking for a shortcut to do something specific but instead stumbled on this great breakdown featuring a host of shortcuts that I didn’t know. I’ve committed a bunch of them to memory but there were three stand outs for me:
  • using shift + cmd + G to activate Finder’s ‘Go’ command bar — you can search for any folder and hit enter to go direct. (I also use Alfred with custom parameters that target specific file types, so that I can search only folders or Lightroom catalogues)
  • moving files without using the mouse (or the command line): select the files you want to move -> hit cmd+ C to Copy them -> navigate to the desired destination (perhaps using the above tip) -> opt + cmd + V to move them, rather than paste them to the new location. I’ve been using this all the time since I found about about it.
  • hit shift + cmd + ? to open the Help menu, start to type the sort order you want, select it and hit enter, and get your view arranged correctly in seconds. This shortcut works in most apps, and is a great way to quickly access an action that doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut.
• Tony Hawk: Harnessing Passion, Drive & Persistence for Lifelong Success - Huberman Lab — self-recommending
• Aphex Twin - Windowlicker mini-doc — great video essay running through Richard David James’s musical development on the way to Windowlicker. I’ve always listened to bits and pieces of Aphex’s output, but I’ve never made the time to dig into it as a body of work. I’m remedying that at the moment and have had Drukqs, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and Selected Ambient Works Volume II on repeat.
• Regrets List / Things I Did Good List — lastly after reading this post, I’ve made my own ‘regrets’ and ‘things I did good’ lists in Drafts, that I add to as things occur to me. It’s interesting how quickly patterns, both positive and negative, emerge when you are paying attention. I’m interested to see if I can convert noticing these patterns into lasting improvements and so will be continuing this experiment for at least another month.

Week Notes 007, 008, 009 — W/E 21 May, 28 May, and 4 June 2023

I’ve missed a bunch of these, so I’m bundling them up into quick summaries and kicking them out the door.

Week Notes 007 — W/E 21 May 2023

• I had a last minute shoot come in on the previous Friday, pencilling me to fly to Venice on Tuesday morning to shoot that evening. I was confirmed on Monday morning, which resulted in a scramble to book tickets as the prices climbed and prep for the shoot.
• The wrinkle is that Monday was also the day that we’d agreed to move everything out of our (thankfully small) storage unit and back to our flat. And the local Zipvan was booked. And the nearest entrance to our unit at the storage facility was broken. AND we have a 12-week-old baby who refused to help carry anything. This meant that we had to do three trips in a small car filled with kit, duffels full of clothes and various crates of miscellaneous crap, piled low enough that it wouldn’t avalanche the baby during a tight turn. The broken gate meant that each journey from the unit to the car required pushing a recalcitrant trolley through a near endless labyrinth, dodging minotaurs and rats as large as dogs. During any gap in the schlepping, driving or baby-placating we were checking and re-checking the rising flight prices waiting for the green light.
• I got an early cab to the airport, had an uneventful flight and landed in Venice around midday on Tuesday. I was on the same flight as the client, so I got whisked out of the passport queue, through security and onto a waiting boat taxi. God Tier airport process unlocked…
• Super intense trip with no down time. Pretty much straight out on a recce to the nearby island where the dinner would take place, then back to the hotel, 1.5 hours to prep kit and get ready, then a boat out to the venue. Helped with the table setting as time was of the essence. Fun and tricky shoot. Abiding by the rule that the key to a good party is to have a lot of great people crammed into a small space, things were almost impossibly tight. All the tables were butted up against the wall on side leaving only a narrow corridor between the free ends of the tables and the bar on the opposite side. I had to move into the gap between two tables, shoot as much as possible from that vantage point, then wriggle through the throng to the next between tables ‘trench’. I generally like to circulate through the crowd as much as possible when shooting, so I was happy that I could still come away with good pictures despite the constraints.
• I survived on the snacks that I bought at the airport for two days — Italy doesn’t have much for someone who is vegetarian and doesn’t eat dairy… Lucky that I quite like fasting otherwise I would have passed out mid shoot.
• The shoot needed an overnight turn around so I edited and graded until 0530 in the morning. And then had to get up at 0830 to go through the pics with the client before heading to the airport. I was already looking up the price of new MacBook Pros in the cab back from the airport in a bid to exchange money for speed and therefore gain sleep… My maxed out M1 Air is great for the form factor and I love the lack of fan, but it just doesn’t have the grunt required when applying AI masks or denoise to hundreds of images in Lightroom.
• Ended up going with a reconditioned M1 Max (64GB RAM, 32 Core GPU and 4 TB SSD). It’s nowhere near as elegant as my Air, but it races through common tasks in a fraction of the time. It’s a huge boost and it makes me wish I’d done it sooner. Still a millstone to carry around though…

Reading

• Atoms vs Bits — Developing an Intuition for Georgism
• Battery Ships
• Austin Kleon on Style

Listening

• Secret Life — Eno x Fred Again.. — So mellow and beautiful.
• Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes - The Lunar Society — brilliant interview with the author of The Making of The Atomic Bomb (sending it straight back to the top of my To Read List). It’s a rich and deep discussion focussed on the past, present and future of nuclear weapons, and much more besides.

Week Notes 008 — W/E 28 May 2023

• As it only happens every four to five years, I forget how annoying and long winded it is to set up a new computer. A couple of days of faffing and then a few more days of forehead slapping at key things that I had forgotten to set up. Numerous times, I would start typing the name of the application that I needed in the Alfred search bar, only to find that I hadn’t installed it yet.
• Used the laptop switch as an excuse for a digital declutter. Cleared out a bunch of junk from my Dropbox and streamlined the folder structure.
• two smaller shoots for a regular client, both of which I managed to despatch smoothly and quickly. Luxuriated in the power of the new machine when making previews and running AI processes.
• Missed the Taylor Wessing deadline like an idiot. I was working on a client project in the daytime, thinking that I would pull a few pics for the competition and enter them before the midnight deadline. Unfortunately, when I sat down to do that at 2130, I saw that the deadline had actually closed in the middle of the afternoon this year. Much swearing and then sullen acceptance. I was annoyed with myself as I had a few nice pictures to enter that may not be eligible next year. The positive spin is that it is a good excuse to shoot more for next year’s competition.
• Met my new sibling, who is a month younger than my daughter.
• Deep South London BBQ on the weekend, soaking up the sun in a friend’s garden.
• Walked out to the Kings Cross nature reserve, had a little walk around and sat out by the canal. It’s not nature in its awesome splendour, but it has a scruffy beauty that is charming. A nice place to go and sit with a book on a sunny day. Like with a lot of weekend activities, it’s a destination that gives you an excuse to walk and talk, and then walk back again.

Reading

10 Thoughts From the Fourth Trimester - Wait But Why Our kids were born days apart and he nails the feeling of the first few weeks with a newborn.

What Photography Has Taught Me About Music via Duncan Geere

24-Hour Black Screen YouTube Videos — A fun dive into a genre of Youtube videos that I new nothing about.

Listening

Dr Andy Galpin: How to Build Strength, Muscle Size, and Endurance — Huberman Lab

Week Notes 009 — W/E 4 June 2023

• a full week of stressful pre-production for a four day mega shoot starting the next week. Lots of last minute changes and mountains of emails.
• had a lovely weekend day out to celebrate my wife’s birthday early. My shoot the following week sandwiched her birthday and I knew that the edit deadlines would make it hard to do anything fun on the day. We went to the brilliant Ai Wei Wei exhibition at Design Museum. Wei Wei is one of my favourite conceptual artists — unlike many he combines powerful ideas with a strong visual aesthetic. A lot of conceptual work falls flat for me because the artist forgets to make it interesting to look at or experience. I don’t want to be told why something is good or thought provoking, I want the work’s form, content and presentation to encourage discovery and conversation. Also, the exhibition was one of my favourite things — a one room show… There was this incredible density of visual interest and meaning to be deciphered in the space — each of the pieces talking to and presented in relationship to all the others. The only downside was a Gallery Bore, who was expounding loudly about What It All Meant to his date. We had to strategically navigate the space to stay out of earshot.
• Nice collection of work by and that inspires Yinka Ilori on the first floor balcony too.
• We went for a brilliant lunch at Akub, a Mediterranean restaurant in Notting Hill after the gallery. The food was delicious and presented beautifully, but without fuss. We sat upstairs under the skylight and felt like we were on holiday.
• I’m sure other things happened during the week but I was swimming so hard to stay afloat in the email ocean, that I’ve blanked out everything else.

Week Notes 004, 005 & 006 — W/E 30 April, 7 May & 14 May 2023

I missed the last three weeks of weeknotes. A weekend ran away from me, followed by two more weeks… I’m rolling them all together here so I don’t break the chain. And now they are so late, I have to write another one almost immediately!

It’s hard to find the time during busy weeks, but weeknotes feel like a productive practice so far. They’re clarifying to write and I’ll feel that I’ll value having snapshots of my life and thinking week by week.

I want to avoid a pile-ups in the future, so I’ll be heeding James Clear’s advice for future issues:

When in doubt: keep the schedule, reduce the scope.

W/E 30 April

• Shot at the private dinner to celebrate the launch of Alexi Lubomirski’s new book in Claridge’s new art gallery. I loved the way he presented the prints without frames, mosaic-style, playing with scale and juxtaposition. I massively overshot, given the magazines needs (~12 pictures), but the extra coverage helped with the tricky lighting conditions. Due to bad planning / mixed messages about deadlines / desire to work when the flat was quiet, I worked late on both the on-the-night preview edit (0200) and then the final grade a few days later (0400). I love working in the early hours as I feel so peaceful and focussed, but I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution to distracted days. I get a huge amount done, particularly on projects I’ve been putting off, but it pushes my clock around, leading to a cycle of late waking and late working that getting more and more extreme. I often wish I was one of those larks who can jump out of bed at 0500 and get 3 hours of creative work in before the world wakes up.
• I really enjoyed My Life as a Courgette, a beautifully animated film set in a children’s home. It’s dark, funny, and philosophical, with an ease that is inimitably French. It doesn’t shy away from tough subjects but never slips into lazy pessimism or unrelenting bleakness. The visuals are a treat, with great attention paid to gesture that reveals character. I loved the styling of the vehicles, with their boxy, low-slung silhouettes and tiny wheels.
• On Friday, I walked past a small crew taking pictures of a model against the wall of my block. I thought that the background was a bit dull (photo snob!), so I invited them into the building to take pictures from the top-floor walkway and interior staircases. They had come to London from Japan to shoot for their fashion brand. The photographer had studied at LCF (or maybe somewhere else?) so she knew London well. I grabbed a quick pic of them, directed them to a few nice spots, and left them to explore.

W/E 7 May

• First trip out of London with baby last week — to the South Coast near Rye to visit my mum. Worked over the weekend before so that I could relax (hence no weeknotes). The day we left was particularly stressful. I worked until 0400 the night before to finish an edit. Then I spent the next morning locating every picture from my old site in my archive to export out in high res for my new site to upload while away. Of course, I did nothing of the sort. Time just dissolved into the aether throughout the week… It wasn’t totally in vain though. Going away was exactly the kind of artificial deadline that I needed to stop procrastinating and get on with the one thing that had been holding up work on the site for weeks.
• The trip was good, with mostly pleasant weather. Baby T gained a new nickname, Yuri, as she looked like a little cosmonaut in her car seat. We walked at an acute angle into strong winds on Camber Beach. We visited friends and had a tour of their House of Many Staircases. I ate veggie pasties and we drank all the drinks at the new cafe on Rye Nature Reserve. We marvelled at the wild orchids, tulips, and mega fennel at Great Dixter. We graciously accepted any and all compliments directed at our Cute Baby. We ate excellent pizza (while standing up and soothing T) at bucolic hipster paradise, Tillingham. We were mildly devastated to arrive at The Fish Shack at Dungeness to find them out of their famed fried potatoes. We drove home. We accept that this chronology is deeply garbled.

• Back to London to shoot street pictures around the Coronation. I’d hired a Leica M10-R to trial over the long weekend. I’ve been obsessing over the idea of buying a Leica digital rangefinder for a while now, but I wanted to try one out to avoid a very expensive mistake. The last film camera that I used was an M6 TTL, so it’s a way of working that I’m familiar with and enjoy, but I didn’t know if my desire to re-adopt that approach was pure nostalgia or G.A.S.. In any event, I picked it up on the Saturday morning from Leica Mayfair and then headed further south in search of action. I was a bit nervous at the prospect of taking a multi-thousand-pound camera and lens out into the soggy conditions, but my worries were soothed by the Leica rep. He said that the only reason they can’t call the camera weather-sealed is because there is no gasket to seal the lens mount and that they are otherwise pretty hardy. I still made an effort to keep the camera out of the worst of the weather and wiped it down regularly like Macbeth trying to wash his hands of imagined blood.
• The M10-R held up brilliantly in the rain and I enjoyed working in the rangefinder mode again. I love the RF viewfinder experience — you can see the action around the frame and there’s no mirror black-out to hide the moment that you captured. I also love the physical skills and mental acuity required to shoot with the camera — no AF, manual/range focussing every frame, guessing distances, making decisions about depth-of-field, framing, positioning, and exposure compensation to anticipate the needs of the next picture to present itself to you. It’s a very embodied way of working and it’s brilliant for sharpening your attention. My only frustration was with the slow start-up time. I was keeping the camera switched off and turning it on to shoot like I do with my X-T4s and GRIII. But the Leica’s slightly slower wake-up window meant that I missed a few nice opportunities. I think if I owned one I would just buy more batteries and leave it on while shooting, but as I only had one battery to last all day I had to baby it.
• I shot for a good few hours, before rain and Union Jack-induced burnout hit. I started at a small screening party in Grosvenor Square to get warmed up and get used to the camera. Then I walked down to Green Park, along the marshalled route to Hyde Park, down into the screening area near the Serpentine, then along to Piccadilly, and finally down to Trafalgar Square before wending my way home. I didn’t get anything amazing, but I really enjoyed the process and still got a nice set to document the day.
• Bumped into my friend Georgia by Tottenham Court Road tube on the way home. We sat outside a bar, huddled under the table umbrella, and had a catch-up. Then I shot a quick portrait of her at the base of Centre Point.

• I tried and failed to organise some more test scenarios for Sun and Monday. I wanted to use the camera in circumstances that reflect my usual working environments and was feeling grumpy and frustrated for not planning further in advance. Imogen sensibly kicked me out of the house on Sunday afternoon to shoot some street stuff to combat the aforementioned grumpiness. I walked into town via Regents Park and picked up my sister on the way. We walked down Portland Place to Oxford Circus and then curved down to Leicester Square via Piccadilly, before walking up to Tottenham Court Road to get the bus home from near Warren Street. I got a nice pic of an older Asian couple in Piccadilly and then one of my better street portraits — a lady and a young boy selling plastic children’s toys on the pavement near Goodge Street station. So even though I was bemoaning leaving late and missing the best light, it was still well worth it. The magic of street photography for me is that even if you get nothing but crap you’ve still had a good walk and spent a few hours paying closer attention to your surroundings than you would have otherwise.
• On Monday before taking the camera back, I went for a walk around Regents Park with Imogen and T, as well as Imogen’s friends and their kids. I’d been annoyed that I hadn’t had a chance to use the Leica in a documentary situation. But trying to manually focus on two children under 7 years old as they dashed around, rode on shoulders, demanded to be aeroplanes, and bedecked a buggy with picked flowers was the perfect test of whether I was fast enough to work with the M10 in a fast-moving situation. These were some of the nicest pictures of the weekend (and much appreciated). More and more, partially inspired by this post on The Online Photographer talking about the photographer’s responsibility as a documentarian, I believe that one of the key responsibilities of the photographer is to make pictures that document the lives of you, your family and your friends. Don’t sweat the arty shit for a day, forget your worries about ‘authenticity’, and release your aspirational desires. Make pictures of the friends, family, cute kids, great dogs, evil cats, and loveable oldies that are woven into your life. Everything is changing all of the time — and everything that you think is integral to your life will be gone forever soon enough.

W/E 14 May

• shot a quick job at the beginning of the week. Turned it around in good time. Apart from having very little time to shoot and some tricky mixed lighting, all went smoothly.
• Great day out at Photo London with Mathieu Chaze. I went for the first time last year (also with Mathew) and I’m not sure why I left it so long. Even when most of the work doesn’t resonate with me it’s a great place to wander around and bump into old friends or legends of the UK photo scene. We had coffee at a table next to Martin Parr in the morning and in the afternoon I nearly collided with Julian Marshall, a photographer turned painter who I used to assist when I was starting out. It’s a shame the weather was crap, as it curtailed the courtyard people-watching that was a big part of the experience last year. Lots of attendees were ostentatiously carrying cameras to let others know that they were phototographers. And to my eye, there were far more Leicas on display than seemed representative of the UK photo community…
• I saw a lot of individual nice pictures and some beautiful photobooks, but a lot of the work felt either obtuse, derivative, or corporate/cheesy, particularly in the central tent. There were still plenty of black and white ‘fine art’ nudes of a type that I thought died out in the 70s. High contrast T&A clearly still has a market.
• I’d already seen them at COB gallery, but Jack Davison’s incredible etchings printed from his photos were a highlight for me. I also liked Finnish photographer Aapo Huhta’s project Omatandangole and thought that Michael Christopher Brown’s post-photography, A.I. ‘reportage’ project, 90 Miles about the Cuban boat people and the conditions in Cuba that prompted their journey to Florida was a more interesting approach to generative imagery. Too many good single images to mention by name (shout out to insane talent coming out of Japan, as always). On the book front I really liked the light and mood in Nemurushima (The Sleeping Island) by Kentaro Kumon. It’s a series of quiet and contemplative pictures made on a small island that only has a dozen or so residents left. I also liked the Secret of Light catalogue from a Ralph Gibson retrospective show. (The person manning the store said Gibson found the show a little odd, as it felt like he was already dead). I really like Gibson’s moody and surreal B&W work from La Trilogie which is included in Secret of Light. But I enjoyed seeing his new-to-me contemporary colour work. It’s clean and minimal, and a little uncanny. All the trickery and symbolism of the work I was familiar with is gone, replaced with incisive attention to form and texture.
• Imogen swung by Somerset House with Baby T at in a break within rainstorms for Mathieu to meet our new addition. She slept through the entire process, so it wasn’t much more than ‘Look! We made a baby.’ I made my way home after Mathieu did his signing for his brilliant book Rock, Paper, Scissors
• Lovely social weekend. Breakfast with family, then a friend of Imogen’s came around in the afternoon for a baby viewing on Saturday. Coffee in perfect sunshine outside Italo in Bonington Square with one of Imogen’s authors, then on to Camberwell for an impeccable lunch at Imogen’s friend’s new flat. Light filled and suffused with calm.

Music

6°30'33​.​372"N 3°22'0​.​66"E by Emeka Ogboh — Ambient techno, experimental electronica, and dub sampling the day to day bustle around Ojuelegba bus station in Lagos.

Cendre by Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto — elegant and beautiful interweaving of Sakamoto’s piano and Fennesz’s electronics.

Shebang by Oren Ambarchi — delicate, intricate, and hypnotic.

Watched

Two great episodes of Paulie B’s Walkie Talkie series:

• Poupay Jutharat — written about here
• Melissa O’Shaughnessy — Melissa is such a brilliant interviewee — she’s great at dissecting her process, talking about her mentorship from Joel Meyerowitz, and advocating for new perspectives in street photography. She’s got some great quotes in her pocket too.

Read

Alice Zoo — Photographing Childhood

Austin Kleon — The Thing that Sticks Out — Perhaps the things that make you or your work weird are the most important things?

Listened

Two great interviews: Emma Hardy - A Small Voice

Mentors & Marketing w/ Zoe Whishaw

Avoid confusing the editor’s cold detachment with the inner critic. The critic doubts the work, undermines it, zooms in and picks it apart. The editor steps back, views the work holistically, and supports its full potential.

The editor is the professional in the poet.

From The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

Week Notes 003 — W/E 23 April 2023

Work

• Shot one small commercial job. Finished the edit over the weekend and just dispatched the grade [on Monday]. (I was battling spotlights throughout the shoot — they’re the bane of my photographic life.) I tweaked some of the shortcuts on my Loupedeck CT which really helped me speed up a few common processes.
• Lots of progress on my new site — though it’s sadly invisible outside of my computer. I’ve created Lightroom folios to mirror the site folios, so that it’s easy to process new images for the site without hunting in my archive for images from individual projects. I’ve recreated the folios from the old site almost exactly to use in the short term. I’m going to refine them once the new site is live. There are so many updates to make that if I wait until I’ve finessed each sequence to ‘perfection’ before launch, it will take months. I’ve learned that it’s better to get things out of the door and then iterate and improve, rather than taking forever to create the canonical output (which is almost always outdated on release). In particular, a website is a garden to tend, not a sculpture that is fixed in its final form. I’ve added a film section too and need to populate it with embeds, thumbnails, and summaries.

Be prolific, not perfect

• I’ve been posting at least a picture a day to this micro.blog and I’ve enjoyed diving into my archive to find an image that resonates. While I have to turn around most work shoots in 1-5 days, I’ve shot personal images that I haven’t seen since I downloaded them from the SD card. I feel like I’m discovering some of these pictures for the first time. I have a sense that if I continue to shoot more, without looking at the images that I’ve made in the past, I’ll be working blind. If I don’t revisit old work, I’m likely to miss themes and subjects that I’m drawn to subconsciously and won’t be able to strengthen my work by developing these hidden threads further. I want to set aside at least a few hours a week for editing personal work, to tie the pictures I’m making now to the images that came before.

AI

The speed at which AI is improving in different fields really hit me in a visceral way over the last couple of weeks. In photography, there was the first viral AI image mistaken for a photo, Pope in a Puffer; the AI ‘portrait’ that would have won a Sony photography prize if the creator hadn’t revealed its provenance, and the first AI ‘photo’ to fool me in the wild. I tapped on the latter in my Discover feed so that I could check out what seemed to be an excellent doc-style portrait of a young woman in a diner. It took reading the caption to recognise that it wasn’t made with a camera and that the woman and the diner don’t exist.

I’ve understood for a while that AI ‘photography’ would cannibalise the product, ecomm, stock, and maybe fashion spaces. But I thought genres like documentary or street photography, where authenticity is a cornerstone of their appeal, would be safe for a while. Perhaps that’s true philosophically, but soon it’s going to be nearly impossible to tell which bodies of work are real and which are synthetic. The ability to create consistent characters in believable environments is improving week on week.

Regarding music, I’d been predicting to friends that we would see an AI-generated hit within 1–3 years, maybe 5, but now I’m radically revising that down. I heard the pseudo-Drake x The Weeknd track Heart on my Sleeve last week. Not only does it sound like them, it’s also a solid commercial hip-hop track. I’d bet that it would be indistinguishable from tracks from the usual suspects in Spotify’s ‘Made For’ playlist. Instead of my previous ‘hmmm, cool trick’ response to most AI demos, hearing this was a definite oh shit moment.

I’ve known intellectually that AI would overtake all the drudge work, and then eventually all the aspirational occupations, but this is the first time I felt it emotionally. I want to get more hands-on experience with the key tools to gain a tacit understanding of what’s possible. Consuming breathless articles and podcasts about singularities, rapid takeoff scenarios, and the end of work, won’t actually ground me in their real-world applications or the best way to leverage them for their creative possibilities. I think that we’re in for an insane few years…

Food & Drink

Two great and new to me places this week:

• The Pitted Olive — delicious and hearty Turkish lunch of gozleme and salads for £10 just south of St Pancras
• Hakata — brilliant ramen joint a hundred meters or so from White Cube Bermondsey. Incredible vegan chocolate and coconut & lime ice cream too…

Recent discoveries added to the Want to Go list:

• Colombian Coffee Company — rough and ready coffee shop in the heart of Soho
• Loto — neighbourhood Italian in South Hampstead

Art

Saw two shows on Saturday:

• Af Klint & Mondrian at Tate Modern — I enjoyed this despite not being a huge fan of either artist. As always, it’s interesting to see how skilled many abstract painters are when painting representationally early in their careers. Mondrian in particular had a great eye and hand for rendering subtle lighting effects. I’m a sucker for botanical drawings and really enjoyed the wall of Klint’s intricate sketches of various flowers, grasses, and weeds. Such precision and delicacy. I preferred Mondrian’s work that he was making just before he found his way to the grids and primary colours that he is known for. The palette is softer and the compositions have a little more dynamism and structural looseness. The group of large-scale Klint’s in the final room were a powerful end to the show and included my two favourite pieces of hers. They were so large that the gallery recedes and you feel like you are inhabiting the paintings
• Marguerite Humeau — meys at White Cube Bermondsey — a large dim room of sculptures that have organic forms, and seem to be made from natural materials, but on closer inspection bear the mark of computer-aided design and production techniques. I loved that the artist considered each sense in order to create an immersive experience. Sounds emanate from deep within some of the sculptures — knocks, clicks, drones — and they blend into an ambient soundscape that envelops the space, and covers the noise of the visitor’s movements. The smell of beeswax creeps up on you as you move past the structures that are made of discs, covered with hexagonal cells, piled up to make a larger form (reminiscent of fungus on the trunk of a tree). Lastly, there were curved seesaws of knobbly wood that you’re invited to lie on. They pose a fun contradiction — the rocking motion is relaxing, but the ridges and mounds on the surface made it impossible to find a comfortable position.

Tools

I’ve been fiddling with Raycast all week. As a long-time Alfred user, it’s been interesting to switch out my app launcher. Alfred still feels snappier, and I prefer its approach to snippets (having a dedicated shortcut to pull them up immediately), but otherwise, I’m really enjoying the change. I like that much of Raycast’s standard functionality e.g. natural language input for calculations and currency conversions, required slightly janky workflows in Alfred. I’m signed up for the Raycast AI beta, so we’ll see how I feel when/if it gives me automation superpowers. I have a lifetime license for Alfred, so there’s no pressure to make a choice yet. I’m going to keep dialling in my Raycast setup and will see what sticks.

I’ve been experimenting with Narrative Select for culling the crap from big shoots. It’s good at ditching the obviously bad pictures, those with funny expressions or blinks for example, but it’s hopeless at pushing good pictures to the fore. Unfortunately, sometimes the best pictures also get pulled into the ‘rejects’ stream if they’re very dynamic — people laughing or moving and so on. It would be great to have help with the initial cull before I finesse the edit and select hero images, particularly while on a tight deadline, but it’s nowhere near ready for prime time. Its best feature has nothing to do with AI — I love how snappy it feels when flicking between pictures. It’s the main reason that I often use it for my first run through the images, before shipping the one stars to (slow and bloated) Lightroom CC. See Craig Mod on Fast Software, the Best Software for a refined take on the pleasures of speed.

Music

• On Giacometti by Hania Rani
• Years of Ambiguity by Kjetil Husebø
• We’re All Alone in this Together by Dave

Reading

I’m rawing near the end of The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I’m going to do a write-up of my notes once I wrap it. About 40 pages left. I’m still reading The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo too…

Read a couple of good articles over the last few days:

• Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) — the oft-repeated cycle from user focus to investor focus, that causes the decline and fall of major platforms
• In praise of pastiche - Works in Progress via #394: Pruning by Jack Cheng

…traditional architecture has always tended to be structurally dishonest. So if this is what makes contemporary traditional architecture pastiche, then most traditional architecture has been pastiche since the faux timbering of the Parthenon. Contemporary traditional architects have most of the great builders of our history as their companions in guilt.

The modernist critic thus has two alternatives: either to concede that neither the modern nor the premodern traditional architect is a pastiche artist, or to claim that both are, and hence that Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque architecture – and potentially many others – should all be condemned as fake. The latter option is consistent but hard to take seriously. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, however important an understanding of structure may be in our appreciation of certain buildings, structural honesty is no more necessary to good architecture than originality is.

Marguerite Humeau — meys, White Cube Bermondsey, April 2022 📷

# Week Notes 002 — W/E 15 April 2023

• On Wednesday I shot installation pictures before an evening event in the cloisters and garden at Westminster Abbey. It was a such a beautiful environment to work in, particularly when the late afternoon light broke through the clouds, slicing through the arches and warming the stone. I loved the feeling of standing on ancient paving slabs, smoothed and rounded by hundreds of years of footsteps. Even amidst the buzz of activity, a sense of peacefulness and quiet suffused the space.
• The cloisters reminded me of my favourite Serpentine Pavilion: Peter Zumthor’s 2011 black box which concealed a garden at its centre. I love architecture that is open-centred; that wraps around a tranquil, contemplative space. Think Moroccan riads, Mexican courtyards and Zen Gardens. I particularly like courtyards with cloisters. They blur the boundary between inside and outside, creating a transitional space to rest in or pass through.
• I’ve enjoyed following Jack Cheng’s progress through the Building Beauty course, which centres on the design and architectural principles of Christopher Alexander. In another life I might have been an architect, so it’s been so fun to read about the assignments that he’s been set and how he is working through them (and of course thinking about what I would do in his place!). My favourite so far is A House for Oneself — a project to design your dream house, anchoring the plan to your ‘project jewels’, the five to seven elements of a home that are most important to you. The post covers the whole process from staking out the site, scribbled plans, and on through building models of progressively increasing complexity. I love the approach of working through ideas using models not computers. The crudeness and inaccuracy of working with cardboard is a feature that one can harness to steer their creativity. It encourages experimentation with volumes and areas in search of a harmonious whole, without getting distracted by details and precision. I think that the ideas about balancing different elements, solidifying the relationships between them and enhancing natural centres have a lot of parallels with successful photographic composition and image editing and sequencing.
• The edit was pretty brutal to turn around, even with a couple of days to do it. Lots of multi-hour straight-through editing and grading sessions. I was pretty square-eyed by the time I finished on Friday evening. Everything seems slower and harder to achieve with a baby, or maybe you are more aware of all the time that you aren’t spending with your new (beloved and sometimes nightmarish) addition, so the time spent on a project has more ‘weight’.
• lots of baby viewings towards the end of the week and over the weekend. Great reviews from all.
• ran errands in town on Saturday then walked back through the park. Decided to walk between all of my stops so that I could make use of the beautiful light and shoot some street. As it’s harder to go out for the whole day with baby, I’m trying to use the gaps between errands/appointments or the journeys to and from them, to shoot on the street and keep my eye in. A long time ago I read a (potentially Austin Kleon?) post about building margin into your day and using that time for your personal creative work. The writer gave the example of ordering food and immediately leaving to pick it up so that you can write in your journal or sketch while you wait at the restaurant. Not only do 10mins here and 20 mins there add up, but this approach has the positive side effect of making your life less stressful — you have some padding built in for life’s delays. Since I adopted this approach I’ve gone from being a pathological Latey-Matey to being early or punctual 90% of the time.
• I’ve enjoyed posting random pictures and thoughts to micro.blog. It feels less precious that posting to my Instagram grid, which has to remain more of a curated professional space. This blog is intended to be looser and more playful — a place to work in public.
• I keep trying and failing to make time to play around with the headless version of the Dirtywave M8 that I have set up on a Teensy 4.1. I’m looking forward to seeing how the tracker workflow fits with my brain. Who knows what the results will be, but I am very excited about the prospect of making some music.
• The big goal this week: not to let work drift into the evenings when the flat is quieter, but instead use that prime time for personal creative projects or reading and unwinding. Likewise, I need to carve out some time for exercise and longer meditations as I’ve been letting both slide and they keep me happy and functional.

Music

Lots of great music this week:

• NTS: Dust To Dust: The NTS Guide to Ambient Americana & The Early Bird Show w/ Spirit Blue & Lylla
• Tiny Desk Concerts: Fred Again.. & C Tangana
• Albums: Night Ride by Drumcorps, Gift from the Trees by Mammal Hands, Cheat Codes by Danger Mouse and Black Thought, The Gamble by Nonkeen, On Giacometti by Hania Rani and We’re All Alone in This Together by Dave

Watched

• You People — so bad that I can’t link to it in good conscience.
• BEEF — one episode in — not sure how I feel about it yet. It feels like it could pick up steam, but at the moment I’m a little ambivalent.

Reading

• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
• The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo

Shards of light at The Barbican. 📷

Shot at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art while visiting for the Morandi show. 📷