ITS ONLY THOSE THAT DO NOTHING THAT MAKE NO MISTAKES...

I forgot where I seen this image, and who made it, but I love it...!

VISURA MAGAZINE

Some great work here, in particular Anna Lehmann Brauns (above) with her fine array of spooky interiors.

MOSQUITOE BITTEN THOUGHTS..

After a long weekend of barbecues and sun burn and my giant apple like head attracting all the midges in the UK. I thought it time to reflect on what might have been.
When climbing through the ranks of photography over the years I would often come across the most amazing and spellbinding images. When I was at college about fifty years ago I was overwhelmed by the amount of fine imagery my college buddies were producing all of whom tended to be older than me with more life experience and maybe the odd grey hair. A lot of the students often complained that there was no worthy subject matter in Blackpool, when in fact there was oodles. But these people where never destined to succeed with that kind of attitude, of this I was certain. It was the people that used Blackpool in there subject matter and chose to look within their surroundings that came away with the most glorious images, be it documentary, landscape, or even still life. The sad thing is that these people are not the ones I hear about today. Somewhere along the way they either became lost, disheartened or simply wanted to make a decent living.
Everyday I ask myself the same question? Am I doing the right thing? Should I be pursuing my ambitions and passion? Is my love for photography enough to keep me going? Should I buy film or go to Tesco? My answer is always the same, No. But hey, I am not one of the sensible ones..

Sometimes I put my life in danger when I am looking for a good shot..

A wise man once said, I think it was Atilla the Hun, "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail." superman 3

World Press Photo 09 by Paul Lowe

08 May 2009

The World Press Photo Awards days held in Amsterdam recently had something of an 'after the party has ended' feel to them, when you look around at all the wreckage and wonder how you are going to clean up all the mess, but know with some effort and imagination you can maybe get it all back into shape before your parents return... This wasn’t just because it took place this year just after Queen’s Day, the mad party that transforms the normally clean and tidy Dutch streets into quagmires of crushed beer cans, squashed orange cowboys hats and garlands of orange balloons floating away forlornly in the morning breeze. This year too it had an extra, disturbing quality when the usually joyful celebrations turned to horror when a car careered through the crowd, killing and maiming on its way, transforming a party into a wake in seconds, bringing the world of World Press to the streets of Holland. There was a lot of talk of how to survive the recession, of how to find new ‘business models’, and of how to explore new ways of connecting with the audience, but still a sense that there is still to much mess to be cleared up before we can really set the room straight again and get on with planning the next party. The awards have now really established them as a vital date in the photojournalistic calendar, with the unique opportunity to see 30 or so photographers present their work to an audience in the packed Felix Meritis; some excellent, some good, some not so good, but as always plenty of gems in there. For me one of the highlights was to realise the depth and breadth of the 8-year odyssey Antony Suau has engaged on after returning to the USA after his mammoth project on the transformations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This new work provides a fitting counterpart to his documentation of the decline of one of the cold war superpowers, as he has engaged with the issues that threaten to trigger the decline of the other; the divisions over the Iraq war, the far right, and of course now, his prize winning series on the economic crisis. For once, it was satisfying to see an overall prize winning picture emerging as just the tip of the iceberg of a far larger project, and giving that project a new prominence that it richly derived. Emotional, ironic, witty and challenging, Suau’s work from America had the feel of a sustained critique of a fallen empire, the devastation the Bush legacy has left at home as much as aboard. Stephen Mayes gave a valedictory speech as his retirement gift to WPP, beautifully presented and illustrated with over 200 of his own intimate behind the scenes images of the judging process over the last few years. With a wry smile, he offered 3 golden rules on how to win an award at WPP: Rule 1 Is to enter! Don’t try to anticipate the jury and how they will think, just put in your best pictures. Rule 2 Bad pictures don’t win. The discussions about winning pictures are always between good pictures Rule 3 Get published the jury will pull out unrecognised unknown pictures but being a little familiar does sensitise the jury But of course, he did note that statistically your best chance of winning is if you are American, male and shoot in black and white.