Sep 2, 2024

“Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it’s possible to walk like Alice through the looking-glass, and find another world with the camera —Tony Ray-Jones

Bonus link: lovely B&W pics of Brits by the seaside by Ray-Jones

Week Notes 010, 011, 012 — W/E 11 June, 18 June, and 25 June 2023

Jul 13, 2023

Another set of week notes bundled for your reading (dis)pleasure…

I don’t think it’s worth accounting for the time week by week. The late nights, tens of thousands of images and numerous shoots of the last few weeks blurred into one amorphous endurance event. This isn’t comprehensive (I can’t talk about some of the projects), instead it’s a selection of takeaways and things that I want to experiment with or think about more in the future.

• I started with four evening shoots split between two venues. The four events were split into two pairs, with different guests at each, but following a nearly identical format. Welcome drinks on the first day at venue one and then a black tie gala dinner on the second day at venue two. It was both challenging and interesting to work through the déjà vu of shooting essentially the same job twice in the same week. Each evening I had to find new angles and approaches to keep the pictures fresh and my attention sharp. On the other hand, I could review the pictures from the first pair of days, then go into the second half of the project knowing where I messed up, what I over and under shot, where the light would be at a certain time, and how people would interact with the spaces.
• To a certain extent this is the kind post mortem I run after every shoot: What worked? What didn’t? Did I need more depth of field for the tight shots? What would have been a better shutter speed / ISO trade-off? Should I have asked for more portraits or prioritised candid moments? However, it’s rare that the review ⮂ shoot cycle is so short, and even rarer that I can apply what I’ve learned to an almost exact replica of the situation where I learned it.
• I enjoyed the scope of this project — in one evening I shot the scenography and spaces, documentary pics of guests, details of the food, two fashion shows, beauty shots of models wearing jewellery, a performance by a pop megastar, night time architectural shots of the venue’s exterior and a dimly lit after party. Despite being snobbish about photographing at events initially, it’s honed and diversified my skills more than any other photography genre. It’s taught me how to cover a variety of subjects quickly and effectively, even when I have little to no control of the situation.
• I shot two projects at the newly reopened National Portrait Gallery and one at the National Gallery. Having also shot at Tate Britain a few weeks prior, I can say that the light for ambient photography at some of London’s premier galleries is terrible. Legions of spotlights and high ceilings are a recipe for burned out highlights, panda eye shadows and luminous noses — a visual dish that is deeply unpalatable to me. I’m comfortable shooting in very low light situations, scenes lit only my candle light or a handful of lanterns for example, but straight-up ugly light is hard to deal with. The National Gallery is by far the worst in this respect. Not only does the light veer between harsh and sludgy, the main rooms are also incredibly dark.
• I had to be discreet on the first shoot at NPG, so I crossed my fingers, underexposed to save the highlights and boosted the shadows massively in post. (Sometimes using specific masks on hero shots to bring out faces.) For the second NPG shoot and the National Gallery shoot I decided to renege on my vow of purity and add a speedlight to my wide angle camera. I kept the longer lens free for ambient light images, and switched between them as the situation dictated. At the National Gallery, that meant getting safety shots/full lengths with flash and then shooting some super shallow DoF ambient portraits when in areas with nicer light. Despite the obvious differences in sharpness and directionality, the flash images integrated quite nicely with the other pictures. It helped that I shot it at a higher ISO, gelled the flash to tungsten, and used a wider f stop (f2–f2.8) and a slow shutter speed (1/15s–1/60s to mix in the ambient light) to mimic images shot in low light.
• I still don’t have a lighting solution that I’m happy with when shooting impromptu portraits or reportage in shitty light. I need to experiment more with flash on camera, to work out how I can integrate it into my style of shooting. I dislike how a speedlight makes me very obvious when shooting candid pictures. (I prefer to take the picture and move on without the subject even noticing.) My work camera + flash combo is large and cumbersome, and as soon as I take the first image, I announce my presence, changing the scene. For portraits it’s not so bad as I’m not in stealth mode. However, it worries me that I can’t see what I’m going to get through the viewfinder especially when I need to work quickly. I don’t want to hit playback to check that I got the picture, I want to see the light in the viewfinder before I trip the shutter.
• I’ve found TTL unreliable recently — I get two or three perfect shots and then a completely different lighting balance on next few images. I’m scared that I could shoot 5–10 pics of a VIP, then check the camera to find that the results are a dog’s dinner and I’ve lost my opportunity. I’m going to start experimenting with manual flash for consistency. My working distances are usually quite controlled and I can work out sensible defaults for a full length, landscape two-shot and a close-up. I’ve been practising this with my Ricoh GR III + LightPix Labs FlashQ Q20II with good results. This is my Goldilocks set-up for non-work parties — the camera is designed for one-handed operation and the flash has a tiny detachable transmitter for off-camera work. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a cute combo that people find funny… Particularly when I pop up in praying mantis stance, camera in one hand, flash held aloft in the other, grinning ear to ear. I’ve started carrying the GR in one pocket and the flash in the other on work shoots too, so that I can grab a quick hard flash shot when the opportunity presents itself. I used to hate the flash-on-camera look when I was younger but it’s really grown on me. I like projects where the photographer mixes photos using beautiful natural light with saturated hard flash pictures.

• I’m also looking into small continuous lighting options like the amazing new mini COB lights by Zhiyun — the MOLUS X100 and MOLUS G60. I love the idea of that much light from such a small package, coupled with a small hard source and enough battery to run for a while on low to medium power settings. Reviews are a little thin on the ground, so I might have to buy one to try out. I sometimes work alongside a great French celebrity portrait photographer. When he is shooting portraits at an event, he moves through the crowd with an assistant who carries a Profoto B10X on a pole. They locate their subject, the assistant lights them up using the flash’s modelling light through a mini-softbox and the photographer gets the pic on his medium format Fuji set-up. This approach allows him to work in chaotic and dark environments using a high resolution camera that would otherwise suffer in those conditions. I want something more minimal and inconspicuous than their gear; maybe something that I can hold myself, or light enough to clamp to furniture and bounce off the ceiling in hotel rooms/small venues. Still the idea is solid and I love continuous light, particularly if it’s a situation where I won’t have much time, control or second chances.
• I bought a new screen, my first in more than a decade, after it became impossible to calibrate my ancient Eizo CG234W with due to a software / operating system conflict. I went for the Apple Studio Display as I wanted something that would integrate with my all-Mac ecosystem without fuss. Gaining three new USB-C ports and the ability to charge my laptop via the screen are a bonus too. I bought a reconditioned VESA mount version so I can use a monitor arm to free up desk space. I needed to get down to work immediately, so I bolted its beautifully machined chassis onto the fugly grey plastic stand I salvaged from my Eizo. (Shudder) So far the screen is excellent — the extra resolution makes it much easier to assess how sharp a picture is and see people’s faces clearly in a group shot. The reflections on my standard glossy version are a little annoying (the window is behind me in my office). However, when editing/grading I like to work in what my wife and I affectionately call ‘The Cave’ — a sensory deprivation environment created by closing the blinds, turning off the lights and wearing noise cancelling headphones. In the gloom of The Cave, the reflections disappear; and when I’m not working on photography stuff, the reflections don’t bother me much.
• I had a last minute shoot at Ascot called in the night before. I scrambled to find a morning suit at 2100. I lucked out — my wife’s friend who lives 20mins away had one. Clearly, he has much fancier friends than me. I have a few suits and black tie on hand for various dress codes, but I draw the line at having a top hat on the kit shelf…
• I’ve shot at Ascot a few times and it never ceases to bemuse. It’s a such a strange mix of people, drawn together to have parallel but distinct experiences. It’s a playground for memetic desire. Everyone is aspiring, but in different directions, following different blueprints. Perhaps one year, I’ll get a press pass and attend to shoot street-style without the strictures of a commission? I want to read Wanting by Luke Burgis too, his book on René Girard and mimesis as I enjoyed his interview on The Knowledge Project.
• This has been nearly a month of complete work life imbalance — if I wasn’t shooting, I was editing at my desk until 0000–0430. I’m very grateful to have so much on, but the delivery schedule required so much computer time that it swallowed all other aspects of my life. Being so busy is great for my finances and building new client relationships, but the workload was totally unsustainable. As an assistant I used to freelance on projects for some A+ photographers who were shooting 2–5 days a week, often travelling internationally once or twice a week to get to the job. It’s mind-blowing to me that they managed to endure that pace for years on end without burning out. One famous photographer told me that his crew were the only friends he saw regularly — in his eyes they were his family. Working with him was a powerful experience for me — it made me reconsider whether I wanted to attain the specific vision of success that I had been striving for. What if winning is worse than losing?

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

Jun 30, 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

May 22, 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