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December 10, 2008 Tiny Photographers (and a knitted camera)
I've collected models of photographers for a long time. Some are very, very small. Links
October 29, 2008 The Sound of Two Songs
In late September I made my latest visit to Poland, to finally bring some closure to 'The Sound of Two Songs', which began way back in 2004. These are some of those recent pictures. But what does it mean to bring a project to an end? Why stop now? After all, there are none of the usual reasons: I'm not bored; I don't think I'm repeating myself (much); I don't yet have a publisher, nor do I have an exhibition looming on the horizon. I used to worry that I wasn't portraying Poland fairly, but I now realise this is surely impossible… I can only ever represent my own experience. Yet I still felt there were gaps in what I already had which needed filling. I wanted a picture of the huge advertisement hoardings that are a feature of any Polish urban conurbation (cross the border into Germany, where advertising is regulated, to notice the difference!). I wanted a picture from the Baltic coast and I'm happy with the one you see here; the poster stuck high on the rusty pier selling apartments in sunny Dubai is a bonus. I wanted more 'modern' buildings: the discovery of an old block of flats wrapped in a computer-generated photograph of the new one was a gift. And the woman (she's there, in the car) selling forest mushrooms and home-made honey has parked beneath a towering digital thermometer, presumably bought with European Union funding which is filtering through to rural communities at last. Other pictures might be the link I need to bring oddments from previous trips back into the fray. When a project is finished I usually feel a kind of emptiness inside, along with a sense of panic (since I'm unclear what I'll do next) and that dreadful feeling of anti-climax many will recognise. This project has, after all, been a big part of my life for the past four years. But I now have more than 2000 negatives, and because of the sheer cost of working in large format I rarely take more than one of anything. So it's time, finally, to look at what I have and try to make some sense of it. This is the difficult bit. Too much work. That's the best reason I can offer for why this latest visit will also be my last. At least, that is, until I start my next Polish project... Links
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