See photography by Nigel Chaloner and others at The Dirty Pint in The Sidewinder, Kemp Town, Brighton on Thursday, 5th January. 9pm to 1am. Admission Free. Courtesy of Art Noise.
The Dirty Pint. Gritty Photography and art from the streets of Brighton with a soundtrack of hip-hop, Jazz, Funk, Electro Swing and Chilled indie. Thursday 5th January 2011, The Sidewinder,
Poppies
Canadian Snog
In Greece they riot about the economy, in England it’s globalisation, while in Canada…….it’s Ice Hockey. Yes, thats right, the nicest country in the work have just had horrendous riots over an Ice Hockey game. Odd that the world view of Canada is generally fairly positive but rioting over Ice Hockey? This puts them in league with English football supporters.
However, something else occurred during the recent riots. Either a wonderful photographic moment or a cynical example of how the media manipulates us all.
Robert Doisneau's kiss
In 1950 Robert Doisneau created an iconic photograph of a couple kissing in Paris. Fantastic! Yet in the 1980s he revealed that the photograph was, in fact, posed – What a let down.
Now, in Canada, a wonderful photograph has emerged by Richard Lam depicting a couple lying on the ground in the middle of a riot – kissing.
But is it real? – The rumours are already percolating through the International press.
I find painting and photography a phenomenal art. Take an oblong of flat space and splash some colours over it. Surely there can only be so many patterns? So many images? But no. The patterns and images are endless. In fact there are an infinite number of patterns but more than that there are an infinite number of ways to interpret the image. The iconic aspect of photography is interesting. A photograph can grab the public imagination and crystalize an idea or an attitude. Think of the photo of the nakend Vietnamese girl injured by napalm by Nick Ut or the picture of Saint Paul’s cathedral amidst the smoke of the London blitz by Herbert Mason or even the recent photo of President Obama and other United States leaders watching the demise of Osama Bin Laden.
These images are burned onto the global retina and yet, like a painting, if these images are shown to be fakes then they somehow debase the very subject they depict.
Let’s hope the Canada Kiss is authentic.
I'm a phtographer not a terrorist
In the UK the police continue to stop ordinary citizens taking photographs in public places yet they feel free to take pictures of us any time they like. Police in Brighton have taken to parking a special CCTV van on the pavement. It’s interesting that there has been criticism of Google for their Streetview project yet we are complacent about police collecting similar information.
If I were a IT systems manager in the police force I would consider creating a system collecting all photographs taken by the police into a single database. I’d then reference police computers and online information such as Facebook, Google and Flickr and use automatic face recognition to allow police CCTV equipment to automatically identify people. Add a head up display to police car windscreens and you have little floating tags over members of the public as they go about their business.
Are the police working on such a system? – How would we know?
George Orwell must be turning in his grave
Prosecuted for flashing his lights
Open Email to Keir Starmer via CPS web site
Sir,
I just heard on Radio 4 that the CPS have prosecuted a driver ( Michael Thompson ) who flashed his lights to warn motorists of a mobile police speed gun. They charged him with wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties.
This is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. The speed gun is to catch people who are actually speeding NOT people who may be INTENDING to speed. By flashing his lights Mr Thompson could not have affected anyone who was actually speeding.
More and more the police are taking authoritarian stances and feeling that they are entitled to harass individuals. Often this takes the form of stopping ordinary people taking photographs in public by pretending that there is some terrorism threat.
From the point of view of the general public this clashes dreadfully with the police inability to prosecute their own officers even when they have been photographed in the act of assaulting a member of the public.
I have been critical of police tactics at various demonstrations but had been sympathetic during the recent student demonstrations because of the obvious violent intent of some demonstrators (fire extinguishers etc).
However, incidence such as the prosecution of Mr. Thompson, merely reinforce the negative image of the police as an oppressive organisation who take advantage of their position and are unaccountable to anybody.
I suggest that you remember that you are British officers in a country with a long tradition of civil liberty and not mindless officials from some soviet satellite state.
Stop harassing ordinary people and start effectively disciplining your own officers.
Regards
______________________________________________________________________________
I understand from this What’s On Xiamen that the presiding magistrate was Jean Ellerton of Grimsby Magistrates Court.
Why not email them and register your disgust? You could use the text above as a template.
Here’s a great idea. Get a load of people with cameras. Sit in a circle and all take pictures at the same time of people jumping around in the centr.
New Yorkers
Today I wandered around the financial district of Manhattan. The place is very up beat and alive (he said as if revealing some hidden truth that had previously gone unnoticed). I think what I like about New York is the street life or “Leben auf der Straße” as they say in Germany. New Yorkers sem keen on uniforms; the businessman has a crisp clean shirt and tie the delivery guy a white apron, the postman a blue hat and a trolley, the construction worker a vest, hat and a plethora of contraptions dangling from his body. Consequently it is easy to identify what’s going on.
At the World Trade Centre a new building is finally going up and the Americans are taking to the task with zeal. One thing that impressed me was that I photographed all the WTC in front of the police and nobody bothered me. This stands in stark contrast to Great Britain’s paranoid policy on public photography where they harass amateur photographers with bollocks about it being illegal.
There appears to be a lot of yellow about in NYC these days. The taxis of course but also the trucks. I noticed an “organic dry cleaners” down near Battery Park, something I have not come across before.
Barby
Also near battery park hoards of immaculate dressed businessmen and women ate their lunch, many of them queuing for bar-b-que. This is another thing that almost dumfounds me. How can New York business people remain so sharply dressed in the heat and humidity while eating bar-b-que.
To be honest I was told to stop taking photographs by a security guard when shooting directly into the vast good entrance. I approached the guy and told him that I didn’t think he had the authority to tell me to stop taking pictures and he said, OK, and that his supervisor had told him to tell me to stop.
I should investigate what the rules are in the U.S.
Barba-Q'ed businessmen
This is a link to a track named Evidence by La La and the Boo Ya. It is about the fact that the police have CCTV watching everything we do yet the police are now exceeding their authority by trying to prevent ordinary people taking photos in public spaces and specifically taking pictures of police.
As they say: “My life is captured on CCTV, I can’t hide from society”
So why do the police think that they should be allowed to hide from society.
La La & the Boo Ya live
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Photography
travel photography – Objectifying the subject
Tags: Andaman Islands, Art, cameras, developing world, flickr, human safaris, India, Jarawa, Jarawa people, photographer, photography, The Guardian, The Long Way Home, Tourism, tourists, Travel, Uganda
The Long Way Home
Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.
Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.
But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.
But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?
I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.
I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.
Vietnamese Girls