Umbra SumusAmateur Photographer Magazine recently asked me what image that I’ve made, had had a profound effect on me. I told them about photographing a deeply disturbed boy forced to commit atrocities by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Here’s the full piece …
Yesterday, I was delighted to learn that Prince Charles and family – surely Britian’s most celebrated benefit claimants – were visiting his very own bejewelled architectural confusion, Poundbury. Three years ago, I visited the same town – a kind of Daily Mail wet dream of Middle England, to write about it for a special edition of the German magazine, Brand Eins. I found the place mostly deserted with a chill wind whipping through a stage set of architectural pastiche and folly. Charles, a fan of the work of Albert Speer, has overseen the creation of a fantasy land: a reimagining (from a lonely castle window) of a ‘former’ but entirely fictional Britain well suited to the Brexit generation (British homes for British people…) – an airbrushed past of classical architectural tropes masquerading uncomfortably as an (upmarket) housing estate.
You can read the piece called ‘The strange Death of the British Utopia – or how Britain live in her own past’ here (warning: it’s long…).
but I leave you with an image of a deserted street and a Neo Classical … errr bus shelter.
Here’s a recent commission – images and words – from Thai Airways magazine about Delhi’s burgeoning street art scene. A million thanks to ST+Art India, Anpu Varkey and Harsh Raman. A really interesting and colourful piece to photograph – and write.
Here’s a rather lovely tear sheet from this month’s Digital Camera Magazine. They asked me to write a piece about how to put together a photo essay so I deconstructed (and greatly simplified) the classic Life Magazine formula using several of my old stories to illustrate the idea.
As I say in the piece, the Life formula is much derided these days but I teach it (and use it myself) because it’s so useful.
Just as there are rules in grammar which enable us to convey meaning, this ‘formula’ allows you to use a narrative structure that ‘reads’ in a similar way. There’s a logic and a simplicity to it. In any case, if you know the rules, you can break them – but it’s good to know them first…
Even before we met a couple of years ago, I’d long admired the blog and books of Mayank Austin Soofi AKA The Delhi Walla. He has a forensic eye for all things Delhi (and Proust for that matter). Here’s a recent picture of us in the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi – a place that has been – and remains – important to both of us.
So goodbye to the Independent on Sunday Magazine… In the late 1990s/early 2000s, I had a few lovely covers – thanks to the wonderful picture editing duo of Susan Glen and Victoria Lukens… my favourite I think however remains this one (apologies for the terrible scan) that I made with the brilliant Peter Popham about Arundhati Roy‘s Kerala. A marvellous assignment and great memories.
There was some inevitability about it of course but after thirty years, The Independent Newspaper has decided to close the print edition(s) and move online. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked on quite a few stories for the excellent Sunday Magazine picture desk that was Victoria Lukens and Susan Glen.
Susan, now a respected photography consultant is featuring some of the Independent’s work on her site and has just published my story about the mental landscape of war amongst child soldiers in Africa, The Lord of the Flies
You can see the full set here
