Sarah Quill: Venice and the Lagoon (Online exhibition)

Chris Beetles have put up a special online portfolio of mostly black and white images taken by Sarah Quill of Venice. It’s not available as a slideshow nor is it particularly easy to move between images but it is a nice selection of images and well worth the multiple clicks it takes to get the photos in large.

There’s an entertaining mix of slightly quirky slice of life pics (a couple of elephants striding across the place from 1981), images of working life (a cleaner works in the early morning mist at Campo Santo Stefano) and diverting takes on the more traditional images you associate with Venice (the Piazetta in fog) alongside which are a few architectural close-ups. It’s all lushly realised and beautifully presented – very much a love letter to the city.

See the online gallery here

Project Unbreakable

Project Unbreakable is a breathtaking project led by photographer Grace Brown in which survivors of sexual abuse are photographed holding signs on which are written words and phrases used by their abusers. There are also sections for question and answer about the nature of abuse and overcoming it. The photographed are mostly women. Some are entirely concealed, some stare at the camera defiantly. Whatever they do it is uncomfortable viewing. A recurring comment on the site is that it has reduced a viewer to tears. It is hard to see how you could be human and not be affected.

I remember after the July 7 bombing there was a mini spate of commuters holding up signs saying WE ARE NOT AFRAID. It didn’t feel to me that people who really were unafraid would need to advertise the fact. On a less sinister level Gillian Wearing’s Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (copied by Volkswagen for an advertising campaign) used the impact of words when connected in unexpected ways to the people holding them to generate surprise, pleasure, intrigue. At Project Unbreakable, everything is necessarily more direct and I don’t feel any of the misgivings I had about the 7/7 boards – the strength required in being able to turn the words of an attacker against the power they held over you is, to me, beyond anything I can imagine. And when you read the words said to a girl who is now thirteen (“Close your eyes, this might hurt a bit”) then any critical response is switched off: you do just want to turn away and cry.

The site is here.

501 not out

This is my 501st post. Let’s keep it simple. Here’s a rather more brilliant 501.

From the top deck to the street below – views from a bus

The involuntary reflex when on a bus that’s lurching rather than moving through the rush hour grind is to slump against the glass. Stay in position and you might find yourself in a Dryden Goodwin work – taken from outside looking in. This is my response – from that position looking through the rain smeared glass considering the world outside. The umbrella-raised determined walkers, the visitors to the smoke trying to understand which bus will take them to their destination …

Review of Margarita Gluzberg “Avenue des Gobelins” at Paradise Row

It’s a pleasure to come across an exhibition, however small, whose aims are not deliberately obscure, whose influences are acknowledged and whose results are rewarding. Welcome to Avenue des Gobelins, a collection of nine works now on display at Paradise Row on Newman Street in London. Inspired by Atget, informed by surrealism and intriguingly modern.

Avenue des Gobelins is a title taken from Eugene Atget’s 19th century Parisian shopfronts – those documents for artists that have become iconic in their own right – and the theme here is of consumption and material desire. The styling is through the use of multiple or blended 35mm film exposures to pay reference to the works of the 1920s and 1930 surrealists (if you’ve seen Lee Miller’s work from this time you’ll be there) and the toning and processing comes straight of the advertising world. Glossy, rich, black and white.

The image above – The Consumystic I (face and cloths) – is a good example of what to expect. What appears to be a definitive image reveals quickly many layers. There is both connection and complete disconnection, it is easily understood and not easy to explain. The themes of longing, commercialism, style and chaos all fuse. And when shown in what appears to be an abandoned space just off Oxford Street the mixture of high end glamour advertising style and enigmatic images of the unattainable becomes even more stimulating.

Kodak and the dying of the light

Kodak is, finally, on the brink. The company that has been edging close to life support for the past few years finally filed for bankruptcy protection and as a result the media can begin performing the last rites. The laments focus on film and the focus for the company’s failure is assumed to be its inability to convert to digital. Well, in a word, bollocks.

Yes, Kodak is associated with film. In particular esoteric hues such as Kodachrome and black and white so sexy you want to lick it in the form of TriX. They also made box brownies and other easy to use compacts. In defiance of the conventional wisdom they also were first off the blocks to launch consumer digital cameras and have made sensors for pretty much all the main players (this latter part is not unusual, one of the reasons digital cameras produce very similar results regardless of brand is the shared technology being used). What has gone wrong here has nothing to do with the usefulness of film or a company coming to the end of its natural life and everything to do with an organisation that simply misjudged the market and no doubt (I haven’t seen the figures obviously but I’m willing to follow this line of thought) pissed away money on ill-advised misadventures.

The market it misjudged though wasn’t film/digitial. Fuji appears to still be able to manage both after all. Kodak never established itself as a serious camera maker in the digital age. Its cameras were always about being easy to use and gave the impression that they were for people not seeking top drawer results. This worked when talking about film because high quality photography really was expensive but it doesn’t work when your competitors are (misleadingly) selling cameras on the basis that digital superiority now means anyone can take pro quality snaps even with an compact sensor. I’ve used entry level Kodak and Fuji compact cameras, the latter was all about how it had manual over-ride and multiple functions. It was fundamentally rubbish and produced horrid sharpened images. The Kodak was mostly auto but magnificent – and if I hadn’t been a klutz and dropped it on a marble floor I’d still be carrying it round now. But it cost £50 and was about the most expensive Kodak out there – who’s making money on a company that’s only selling £50 auto cameras?

So, yes, let’s mourn the passing if that’s what it turns out to be. But let’s keep the flag flying for a photography world where there are differences and diversity. And bonkers Kodachrome colours because the world looks boring without such insanity.

The outer limits … or welcome to West Ruislip …

One of my slight quirks is that I have a particular fascinations for the end of train lines, for what lies at the final stop. Aside from the fact that it was a 70 minute journey, I used to find it peculiarly enjoyable to live in Chesham and know that not only was I alighting at the end of the Metropolitan Line but also at technically the furthest end of the London Underground itself. That Chesham was reached by a single line branch line and (at the time) had only two through trains a day in either direction was part of the pleasure. And so to West Ruislip …

This is one of the ends of the Central Line and it also intercepts with Chiltern Railways (which is why I was killing time on a northbound platform wondering where all the trains had gone). TfL reckon it would take 83 minutes to get to Epping at the eastern end of the Central Line. By tube it takes almost exactly the same amount of time to reach Ruislip underground station on the Met Line – but you can walk that in about quarter of an hour (this is worth bearing in mind for when asked for tube stations you can walk between faster than you can get there on the train).

There were apparently plans to further extend the Central Line as far as Denham (in the manner of the Met connecting Chesham and Berkhamsted, the Northern Line doing funny things in Edgware, and the Victoria Line reaching Calais) but for now, and apparently forever, this is where the Underground ends in this part of the world: above ground and on the fringe of the green belt, with London squashed to one side and Buckinghamshire unwinding on the other.

Remember Grandstand? The BBC doesn’t.

This weekend across all platforms this is the sum total of BBC television’s sporting output: Football Focus, Final Score, Match of the Day, The Football League Show, Match of the Day 2, UK Masters Snooker, Ski Sunday. The presence of the snooker will at least mean they can say they’ve put in the hours but for the national broadcaster to be reduced to showing a sum total of three sports and two of them in magazine-style programming suggests something gone very awry indeed.

So the question is: remember Grandstand? I ask because it feels like it was from a bygone age rather than one which lasted until 2007. Grandstand was what I watched on the Saturdays when, for whatever reason, there was no live soccer for me to go and watch. It’s because of Grandstand that I saw hockey, speedway, ice-hockey, horse racing, bowls, swimming, athletics, rugby union, darts, rugby league, figure skating, touring cars, synchronised swimming and no doubt many other sports besides. Very rarely did they get comprehensive coverage (except for the Five Nations rugby union and even then you’d likely only get the country you were viewing from) but they did get shown to an appreciative audience of a couple of million people.

I’m sure the response from the BBC would be: look at Sky. Okay, I will. Sky took the Premier League but Grandstand never showed top division football live. All of the other sports I’ve listed are not regularly shown live by Sky for the competitions that Grandstand used to show. Sky is excellent at a surprisingly broad range of competitions but it is not the reason why the BBC sports department is now obsessed with Premier League (for which it doesn’t have live rights) and a few other big ticket, big event happenings.

Maybe my head is in the sand but I simply cannot believe that resurrecting Grandstand would be expensive compared to the obsession with sending a team of 8 to a Football League match or a 6 Nations international (or keeping Alan Hansen in golf clubs) and I know personally that there are many people out there who would love to switch on and be surprised by Fife Flyers against … some other team in the ice hockey. It would also be an easy way of hitting that public service remit in a way that endless repeats of Cash in the Attic just don’t quite manage.

But enough of the present day misery. Let’s end with the joyous past …

On BBC One: Sherlock

There’s not much to say about Sherlock that hasn’t already been said by people who know what they’re talking about but having now seen the finale of the second series I cannot stand idly by in silence nodding at the critical consensus. Sherlock manages to be about the most frustrating thing on the television whilst simultaneously being one of the finest works ever made by the BBC. It’s not that the BBC, or anyone, hasn’t made anything this good in a long time, it’s that they haven’t made anything like this before.

Some of the frustrations. The actual stories this series have been weak, paling even next to the sometimes slight Conan-Doyle episodes from which they have drawn inspiration. To take A Scandal in Bohemia and somehow make Irene Adler even more dependent on men is a bit disappointing, to throw in a side show of corpses loaded onto a plane to fool some terrorists and we’re into ridiculousness and yet it was still ninety minutes of bravura televison. Similarly the conclusion to The Hounds of Baskerville was bizarre and throughout there has been a move away from observation and logic that anyone should be able to deduce if only they could see to a reliance on Sherlock’s instinct. Too much Mycroft as well is what the purist in me thinks but the television viewer could watch and listen to Mark Gatiss all day. Like I say, frustrating.

And so to last night’s Reichenbach Fall. I lost count of the number of times Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott in a performance that at last made perfect sense of the character) said it was the final problem although I missed the part where they raced across Europe and then tumbled in a man embrace off a big waterfall. This final problem involved journalists (Katherine Parkinson, swoon), rigged juries, some toss about keycodes and Martin Freeman proving that when called upon he can actually act. And Sherlock struggling to keep up. That it was all done with a flair and intelligence you just don’t seem to see anywhere else now goes without saying. I particularly liked the trope of sending Watson off on a fool’s errand so Holmes could get on with moving the plot along (so often used in the stories) and Sherlock struggling to even understand the purpose of a deer stalker hat. Holmes, of course, had some corking lines and, seemingly, a mighty great fall.

There is to be a third ‘series’. All of the issues the majority had beforehand – dicking about the stories, updating, that bloke from The Office – have fallen away. There is still the occasional charge of ‘Who-isation’ of Holmes but I think such folk miss the point. This is a labour of love. It’s a love of the intelligent mystery of Conan-Doyle’s works, a love of storytelling and staying half a step ahead of the audience, a love of television and how to really use it and, finally, a love of showing the bromantic bond between a sharp sociopath and a wrecked soldier. We will all, of course, be back and then we will find out that solution to how a man who fell to his death from a building could be seen watching his own funeral is all so absurdly simple.

The perfect pop song (5 + lots more than 5)

It’s been doing the rounds for a while but Four Chords by Axis of Awesome is always good for a fun assessment of the interconnectedness of all things pop …