Effilee Magazine spread

Here’s a recent tearsheet from the May/June 2011 edition of the rather lovely German Magazine, Effilee with my long term piece about the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi.

Effilee is a food and lifestyle magazine who commissioned the images and a 5000-word piece from me. The English translation can be found under the Writings section of my website here.

The piece is called The Palace of Monkeys and Memory

 

 

M F Husain

It’s with great sadness that I heard this morning that the rather wonderful Indian artist MF Husain passed away during the night. I wrote about him last year as he’d taken Qatari citizenship but continued to keep a house in London. Doubtless those shrill self-appointed, hateful voices from the Hindu religious right will be celebrating his demise – and how brave they were from keeping a old man from dying in his own country. I remember him as a courteous and thoughtful subject, delightfully playful during the evening I spent with him in apartment in Mumbai a decade ago. A charming man and an astonishing talent.

 

India - Mumbai - MF Husain, India's greatest modernist painter at his studio in Bombay. Before him is a picture of his muse Maduri Dixit, a film actress

 

Sees shoots and leaves…

I was intrigued to find in a copy of today’s Tehelka magazine an article on Raghu Rai, the rather wonderful godfather of Indian photography, where he says that “Shooting a portrait is like making love by surprise”. Now, to be fair, the article is, as they say credited to ‘as told to Yamini Deenadayalan‘ but nevertheless it does strike me as profoundly daft.

Unless of course I’m doing it wrong. On both counts…

It reminds me of ‘Swiss Toni’ of the Fast Show fame – a comic character – a rather sad second-hand car salesman with a natty line in shiny suits whose metaphor for everything in life is that “It’s like making love to a beautiful woman…”. His take on making a cup of coffee is here.

Here’s a recent portrait. I did nothing more than press the shutter. Honest.

India - Delhi - a homeless rickshaw puller wakes under a bridge on a cold morning

Wonderful Machine

I’m very proud to announce that I am now represented commercially by Wonderful Machine in America.

I have a varied folio that includes work portraits, corporate, food/drink, travel and institutional.

I’m looking forward very much to working with them. Here’s some screen shots of my online folio for them.


The Word

It’s amazing what you find in the ‘papers these days. I opened the Grauniad this morning and found a cover feature on The Word.

The Word was a ground breaking (in terms of taste and errr… editorial judgement) British ‘yoof’ television show that showcased music and heralded the ‘reality’ concept that you find everywhere on television nowadays.

I was assigned by the Times Magazine to do a feature about the show in the mid-nineties. I stumbled upon the trannies (or most of them) a couple of years ago and managed to scan perhaps a dozen. I put them onto my archive. And them forgot about them. Until this morning. Now, I suppose the hard working busy picture desk on G2 could have searched for them but instead, they simply ran an entire feature with screengrabs…

Here’s a bit of a selection…

UK - London - Terry Christian in rehearsals for the cult British Television show, "The Word"

UK - London - A stage hand raises signage before transmission of the cult British TV show, "The Word"
UK - London - Members of the audience prepare to dance on the cult British television show, "The Word"
UK - London - Mark Lammar lights a cigarette in his dressing room before an edition of the cult British television show, "The Word"
UK - London - Audience members before transmission of the cult TV show "The Word"
UK - London - Mark Lammar in rehearsals for the cult British Television show, "The Word"