Umbra Sumus
Just returned from a lovely week in Jersey opening the Human Rights week with my exhibition. Great response and a pleasure to be involved in Amnesty’s work and education programme. I spoke at half a dozen schools and also to BBC radio Jersey about my work. You can hear the interview here.
Prints by John Cleur at Metro looked extraordinary. Many thanks to everyone that came along, listened and looked.
Here’s a triptych of some images made during a recent four day commercial job for Ben’s Cookies – a rather wonderful bespoke biscuit outlet.
Lovely client, Lovely biscuits.
Earlier this year, I was commissioned by Smithsonian Magazine to photograph a really interesting story – an opera based on the life of Albert ‘Lal’ White an Olympic cycling champion in the 1920s.
Because of the magazine’s schedule the rehearsals were photographed long before costumes or props were really ready and unfortunately, none of these images (some of my favourites) were included in the final spread.
I work vary rarely in England and have never been to Scunthorpe (or Hull for that matter) but had a wonderful time largely due to James Beale‘s great company, Sue Hollingsworth‘s boundless enthusiasm and Kirsty Halliday‘s great organisational skills. Lastly, I should thank Smithsonian’s Associate Photo Editor, Jeff Campagna for sticking with me when I expressed disbelief that they actually wanted to send me to Scunthorpe… (which was pretty nice to be fair) when I was convinced he must have meant Sri Lanka…
The Broadway Homeless charity have just reported that London has seen a 43% increase on people sleeping rough in the capital from last year. The only glimmer of home in this figure is that 70% of those aren’t sleeping out for the second night due largely to the actions of charities like Broadway and increased work from outreach teams. This, despite Boris Johnson’s pre-election pledge to ‘end rough sleeping by 2012’. According to a Guardian report in April this year, £5m – underwritten by central government – was diverted from the Mayor’s budget for rough sleepers, to ‘other purposes’. Expect worse to come if proposals to remove housing benefit for under 25’s come to fruition.
There is a clear link between London’s rents becoming more and more unaffordable for large sections of the population and these figures. London is often referred to as a divided city. It isn’t. It is now many cities. Extraordinarily wealth in the centre, guarded and cosseted by technology and private security (tested and honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan) swimming in an ocean of increasing poverty – material and aspirational – that finds its dreams impossible. All of this underwritten by a facetious, poisonous narrative of unfulfilled personal responsibility and fecklessness.
According to Stuart Hall, cities of the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries were monuments to Imperial power: motors of industrial production and trade. Globalisation has significantly reshaped London and the people sleeping on its streets (or the thousands a breath away from it) as inconvenient dislocations from an industrial to a service economy dictated to by modern day robber barons fixated on personal wealth and profit. I write so much about the Developing World, Delhi in particular (and recently Athens) that it is easy to neglect what is literally under my feet.
Some weeks ago I was invited by the Dart Centre, an extraordinary resource for journalists who cover trauma in their work, to participate in a long weekend retreat in peaceful hotel the English countryside. The Dart Centre is a project of the Columbia University Graduate School Programme and seeks to promote best practice in the fields of reporting and understanding of trauma, human rights and conflict world wide. I was accompanied by a lovely group of very experienced journalists from amongst others, the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, The Sunday Times and The Associated Press. It was an honour to be part of this and my thanks to Dart for inviting me on such an informative and helpful weekend.
My special thanks to my colleague Lefteris Pitarakis who kindly provided an image of me during my presentation talk.
I’ve mentioned before about people finding private space for themselves in busy cities so here was a nice little thing – a meditation flash mob – perhaps a couple of hundred people or so came to sit by the stone lion in the great Court of the British Museum on Friday evening… shame I was photographing rather than being a part of it as it looked rather interesting…
