Has anybody seen Tito's leg?

No time to do much of this for a few days. Work’s gone into overdrive. Funny that just as I embark on a group effort with the Kosovo photographs, of which Antrim, Martin and Rhian have all now got involved in, bless them, we start getting into both the nuts and bolts of editing (this week’s group tutorial was extremely good I might add) and talking about group projects. Looking forward to meeting everyone online on Monday evening, assuming I’ve got a decent internet connection in my hotel in Ljubljana, and bashing this all out a little further. In the hot seat with Homer tomorrow. Looking forward to more eyes and experience helping me move my work forward. On an entirely different subject, I’m in Ljubljana all next week to write a guidebook to the city. If anybody knows the city and has any information about anything to do with Ljubljana I’d be very happy and grateful to hear from them. I'm particularly interested to find out what happened to Tito’s leg after it was removed. Strange that the Croatian-born hero of Yugoslavia was half Slovenian and left a bit of him behind in that country just before he died.

The bridge

Carrying on with my stark silhouette theme and my continuing amazement at the quality of the light here I found a great footbridge this morning. Just north of the train station and crossing a series of both used and derelict tracks, the shadow the bridge casts is something else, especially when combined with the diagonal lines below, and of course when people are walking across it. When I get a bit of spare time I’ll pop down with a flask and a bag of sandwiches and see what I can get. As you can see from this test shot, the shadows of the people walking over the bridge only really work when they’re crossing on the northern half of the pathway (like me, right). Maybe I could place a load of bollards down one side to keep people where I want them. Is this cheating? I'd forgotten how just how wonderful high contrast black and white images can be. I'm reminded of the films Rain and The Bridge by the late Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898-1989).

Aren't people amazing, the way they move?

Yet another spectacularly bright and sunny day here again in Greece and I remember again one of the reasons why I chose to come to this part of the world. The light really is extraordinary, even in the winter. Today was almost an entire day off. Late this morning I went for a walk and visited a few small parks in and around the centre of Volos to watch people sat on park benches. It was educational to watch them purely on the grounds of how they fit in the world compositionally. If I had the time and was driven enough I’d get a stopwatch and time the periods when people from individuals up to groups of seven or eight can be photographed well compositionally and when they can’t. It was a revelation to watch people with in such a way instead of just watching them as I usually do. I’ve only got two Street assignments to do due to my cock-up with the third Relationships one. I wanted to do two that said something about Greece and about Volos. I also wanted them to be very different. Yesterday I walked the length of a market, picking out interesting slices as I went, watching closely and taking photographs of the scene as it changed in front of my eyes. This first shoot was most certainly colour. Today, thinking about the sea, about the light, about the culture, and especially about Sundays when almost everything is closed and friends and families get together and head for the waterfront here, I decided to approach the working practice as I did yesterday and work my way down a street from one end to the other, picking up interesting scenes along the way. I knew I’d be more or less shooting into the sun all the way along, and so decided to exploit this and let my Nokia expose itself accordingly, ie. with the people in shadow. An example of each of the three places can be found above. The pictures were screaming out to be in black and white. Aren't people amazing, the way they move?

Concentrate. Look. Think. Relax

Because I cocked up my final Relationships assignment (I was drunk) I had to shoot another one. This I did last night, on my mobile phone. The location was a fabulous bar for retired working class Greeks here on the waterfront in Volos. I got a series of photographs of two exceedingly photogenic geriatrics playing speed-backgammon at a table, surrounded by a small and rather wrinkly audience. As well as watching the eyes and the hands as I was asked, I also concentrated until it almost hurt on the composition of every picture. It worked. Having a fully automatic camera certainly helped I won’t deny it, but I’m learning something. Concentrate. Look. Think. Relax.

Oh, and I just remembered! When I was taking these photographs an old man from another table called over (in Greek of course) to ask what I was doing. Somebody at the table I was photographing shouted back, ‘he’s photographing memories of us to look at when he’s far away.’ I thought that was an awfully nice thing to say!

At least I’m not in China

I was offered €10,000 cash for my passport by somebody I know and trust in Kosovo last weekend. Why did I say no?

Oh well, at least I’m not in China. Towards the end of Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag writes a few illuminating lines on the country, or rather the difficulties of taking photographs of people there. This is a land whose culture dictates that photographs of people should be set-piece affairs. This wasn’t exactly news to me, as I can still remember clearly failing to film ordinary street scenes in Beijing in 1997. Every time I set the camera up and started recording, the people would stop what they were doing and form a line and grin at the camera. As annoying as it is, I must say I admire the Chinese for failing to cooperate.

This all brings me albeit rather clumsily to what I’ve been up to today, namely out and about in Volos getting the first street assignment under my belt and in the can. Greece in the winter is a wonderful place for street photography. The sun shines almost every day, and because it’s fairly low in the sky from the time it rises until it goes back under the horizon again, it throws some spectacular shadows, even in the middle of the day. Time being of the essence I chose for my first assignment to photograph one of the city’s main food markets, which takes place every day in a different location. On Saturdays it spreads out along a road running from north to south, which means the shadows the sun cast run lengthways along the street, adding a wonderful visual spectacle to the scenes. The fabulous choice of backgrounds, the bizarre mix of shoppers, the colours of the things for sale and the aforementioned light all add up to make a perfect piece of theatre.

Looking at the pictures I took I’m pretty happy. Choosing to use my mophone, I suffered some headaches such as having to anticipate not only for the shots themselves but also for the inherent (and random) delay between pressing the shutter to the camera actually recording the image. Benefits included the usual sense of blending in, plus the advantage of having a nice big screen to look at. This latter point can be awkward when the sun is shining on it at certain angles, but also allows me to keep an eye on what and who is coming up and down the street and into the picture.

Failure to do a proper third Relationships assignment means I still need to do one. I’m off now to see a friend who’s repairing a yacht to work out how to shoot him and his assistant next week.

Colour versus black and white... the verdict

The votes are in and counted, and it’s a resounding win for colour. Thanks to all who left comments on these. In a pantominesque sort of way you were all shouting, behind you! I was looking to shift the look of the photographs my mobile phone was giving somewhere, and was looking the wrong way. I’m no digital darkroom guru but I can see that by twiddling around with the levels I’m starting to get a look and feel that I’m really happy with. Onwards and upwards!

Independence Day (cont’d)

More hastily scribbled notes on my recent trip to Kosovo plus further thoughts on mobile phones in one vast paragraph

While surfing the BBC News website last Friday it became increasingly clear to me that Kosovo was almost certainly going to declare independence from Serbia within the next 48 hours. It’s not every day a country declares independence, especially in such a controversial manner, and the idea of dropping everything and travelling there to take photographs was a gamble more than worth taking. With my mobile phone fully charged and my dSLR in my bag as backup, I boarded a bus the following morning at the start of a two-day journey that would take me through northern Greece (Macedonia) and FYROM (also known by the local population as well as most of the rest of the world as Macedonia, a particularly Balkan-style problem), where I’d have to spend the night in Skopje, and finally over the UNMIK-controlled border and into the centre of the action in Kosovo’s tiny capital city, Pristina. The ultimate aim of the trip was to start putting into practice a combination of my own theories and ideas about using a mobile phone as a serious tool for photojournalism and documentary photography alongside the things I’ve learnt so far on the course. Most importantly I wanted to put myself inside a significantly important news story the whole world was talking about, to benefit from working on the factory floor as it were, in an authentic news environment. As I remain neither trained as a photographer nor have any desire (to date) to concentrate on specialising in any one type of photographic style or technique, I thought it’d be both fun and instructive to mix the discipline I’ve so far learnt on the course with an open mind about the events unfolding around me and how to react to them photographically. I had the advantage of knowing Pristina fairly well, and knew more than the average person in the street about the issues that had sparked the revolution. Thus comfortably armed with the appropriate tools and knowledge, the following morning I bought a ticket in the bus station in Skopje after a pleasant evening with friends who live in the city the night before and started the two-hour journey to where the action was taking place. During the course of the day I took what I believe to be a personal record of 692 photographs on my phone, from the moment I boarded the bus in Skopje until myself and my Kosovar-Albanian friend Vullnet had downed our final beers in one of Pristina’s heaving bars at the end of an extremely long, enjoyable, moving, extraordinarily unforgettable and unique day. The contentious recipient of the positive rewards of doing something a little out of the ordinary, I believe I was compensated for my efforts with some fairly interesting work, some of which I can say I’m extremely proud of (although everything now needs some serious post-production work, something I know even less about than taking the photographs themselves). Despite the fact that the day was clearly one of the most photogenic Pristina had ever known, I was still grateful for the things I’ve so far learnt during our online course sessions and the limited number of accompanying assignments. Of the multitude of unforgettable photographic moments during the day, particularly poignant highlights included arriving at the bus station in Pristina at the same time the bus station staff were having their independence party, being surrounded by hordes of brightly decorated, horn-beeping vehicles covered in jumping, dancing Kosovar-Albanians, trying to frame shots taken into the blazing sun of screaming-shouting-flag-waving revellers as I walked backwards trying not to fall over things, finding by complete accident the special cake made for 35,000 people as it was being cut and eaten by hundreds of hungry partygoers, taking the time to snatch candid pictures of the press, ruling elite and gatecrashers inside the Grand Hotel, likewise stumbling on what appeared to be a UCK bigwig giving it large through the open roof of a car complete with a huge poster of Ibrahim Rugova on the wall in the background, catching the Prime Minister getting out of his car as he arrived at the Grand Hotel to start his public affairs for the evening, and, finally, taking a handful of pictures in an almost pitch black bar as the night wore on and the party broke up into smaller, more personal, local events. Almost every photograph I took involved me being more aware of what was going on in within the frame, not just compositionally but also in what the things in the picture meant and/or conveyed. As mentioned before, a large part of what I wanted to do was to simply get out into the crowd as it were and play with my camera, but at the same time equipped with the additional knowledge I’ve been learning feeding into the pictures I was taking. It was frightening, interesting and fun to be confronted with a new kind of discipline, but looking through the pictures (through the ones that worked anyway), I can see that the course is already having a positive effect on my work. Why exactly I chose to use a mobile phone and will continue to use it more and more in my work still remains a partial mystery to me. One thing I do know for certain is that what I’m attempting to find with the mophone is far from just a gimmick. The reasons for using a mobile phone instead of a more professional camera are many. The freedom it allows both in terms of how it can be used in a large crowd without having your dSLR lens thrust up your nose every few seconds as well as how it can at times make you feel invisible, especially during times when a certain sensitivity towards the subject is required, is truly amazing. As a discreet tool in the service of the experimental gathering of visual information at a large international news event I really don’t think a mophone can be beaten. My interest lies in using images intelligently and to interact with the people in my pictures with as much dignity as can be expected during what can always be seen as an invasion of the press. I’m tempted to declare that the often cheap, blurred, wobbly, burnt and generally bruised pictures my mobile phone produces say something about the nature of the world I’m capturing, but that would be rubbish to say the least. Neither am I particularly interested in the growing popularity of the so-called citizen journalists on hand to capture everything from the July 7 bombings in London to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. If anything I’m more a convert to people such as Bert Hardy, the self-taught Leica user who once wrote an article for amateur photographers showing them how to take professional pictures using a Box Brownie. It’s all about finding my own voice with the help of the course and everyone on it. Sometimes I get tired and frustrated at my lack of academic ability as well as the pressure of doing this course whilst trying to run a business. But I’m not complaining. Really. Just as I was finishing scribbling this blog entry I got a nice comment on a previous blog from Antrim, offering to help edit some of the pictures I took in Kosovo. This is the best news I’ve had all day. Now I just need some help with the post-production, although I doubt anyone reading this has managed to make it down this far. It really would be nice to do something with these photographs, and to work with other people to produce something would make it even better. Back to the future, and I’m planning to do my street assignments with my mobile, whilst sticking with the dSLR as much as I can for most of the other work. I love and enjoy my dSLR, and would hate to see it not getting used. It too needs its roles in my photographic life. Watch this space!

Doing a Bevis Fusha

Interesting to see the work of the Albanian photographer Bevis Fusha featured in yesterday's group tutorial. I was particularly taken by Paul's analysis of Fusha's photographic vision of the world, that it's not quite perfect and consequently the composition in his work reflects this. I must remember this fine excuse the next time I'm getting slapped about in my one-to-one tutorial. But Paul, I was just doing a Bevis Fusha.

Independence Day

WANTED: One picture editor and/or digital darkroom genius!

My first real test with my mobile phone. Hastily slammed together images from Pristina. More to follow once time allows.

Street moment test 1

As I needed to get out and do a few things late this afternoon I thought I'd look for a few backdrops for the next assignment and have a play with the people and the light whilst I was at it. As well as getting me out the house and providing a bit of creative fun, it also showed me one or two things that are both interesting and will help me choose my subjects carefully. The shadow in the middle picture for instance. It's going to be fun chasing that as it moves. The other thing I also realised is that with shooting digital you have a record of the time the shot was taken. Useful if you forget to take a pen!

Food for thought

It’s been a bit like learning to drive a car by taking a F1 for a spin around Monte Carlo this week, and once again the Wednesday session featured a non-stop cavalcade of male superstars (although to be fair at least not all of them were citizens of the United States of America this time). Other thoughts and feelings generated from Wednesday’s journey through the masterpieces of the great and the good included the suspicion that the course is secretly sponsored by Magnum and that we’re not studying photojournalism and documentary photography at all, but rather art photography. This was (thankfully) mentioned towards the end of the session by Paul. Ultimately I guess that the medium at its purest (ie. without the use of words) must be visually powerful otherwise it simply doesn’t work. So much of this course makes me uncomfortable, which is a good thing, as it’s making me think all the time and stretching me beyond what I’ve been almost exclusively up until this time… a predominantly instinctive photographer. Not that I’m gagging to radically change my photography. I can’t start breaking the rules if I don’t know what the rules are in the first place etc. Going back to Wednesday, of the three photographers we looked at this week, Harvey was the only one who really did it for me in terms of commenting on the world. Not only did his work contain the most humour of the three (I believe wholeheartedly that art without humour isn’t art at all), but I felt he was the only one of the three who was truly engaging with his subjects. Webb’s work was way to complicated for me, and Parke’s work, albeit breathtakingly beautiful, told me nothing about the world. Having said that, it was the latter’s work that’s influenced me the most this week. I’m currently rediscovering my mobile phone work in high contrast black and white, and will almost certainly present my next assignment in this format.

What I do feel becoming clear already from being involved in this course is that I want to take my work to two different places. Firstly, I want to take my wilder, more instinctive street-based work to a place that’s recognisable professionally without compromising what I’m doing (if that makes any sense). And secondly, working with Douglas and Allanah this week (see below) took me back a decade to my documentary film-making days, and the pleasure and satisfaction I got from working in a more serious, story-based medium. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Watch this space.

I didn’t quite have a new arsehole torn for me by Paul during my one-to-one tutorial this week, but it came close. His criticism of the many faults evident in all the work I produced for the Relationships assignment was, after I’d picked myself up and dusted myself down, greatly appreciated. I genuinely feel stronger and better equipped to take photographs each time I come out of these sessions. My only criticism was a practical one. Having been asked to prepare background reading for the assignments on this blog I was slightly put out to discover Paul hadn’t read them before we began, and I confess to having been put on the spot a bit by having to quickly explain each shoot as we went along. More than happy to start the session 25 minutes late, I’d have been just as happy to have started 28 minutes late and safe in the knowledge that Paul had been better briefed on what he was looking at.

Onwards and upwards. In general I’m totally enjoying the ups and downs of the course, and despite the fact that my day job is becoming ridiculously busy (this is the busiest time of the year, when everybody wants new titles on the shelves in time for the summer), I’ve promised myself to spend more time and put even more thought into the next assignment.

Colour versus black and white?

Relationships assignment

So many possible subjects and so many interesting things to think about for this one. In the end I took the more conventional route, eschewing for several reasons such subjects including the one inspired by the Greeks’ relationship with God, visible at all times courtesy of their constant fiddling with little strings of worry beads in the hands of so many of the population. They even cross themselves when they go past a church on a bus here. More time and experience and I’d have thought this one through some more. After family, the relationship an individual has with God here is the second most important thing in life. I also thought about and discarded the idea of shooting my friend Andrew’s relationship with his ‘mistress’. Whilst his wife stews in their flat in London. Andrew spends his time restoring an old wooden yacht here in Volos. We even call ships ‘she’, and I was interested to see how I could approach the visual aspects of Andrew wooing his second love. Currently in dry dock, the yacht this week sees Andrew rubbing down the keel. The idea of photographing him caressing those luscious curves would be, after another six months on this course anyway, irresistible. Finally I glimpsed and immediately discarded an idea to shoot one person, using my relationship with them as the subject. Again, maybe some other time.

In the end I went for the following, all shot on a fairly wide lens because that’s how I like to see the world.

First up (Sco RELATIONSHIPS1), done I might add before I’d read the brief, are Joe and Susan. Susan and Joe’s mum are old family friends, and despite the fact that Susan lives in London and Joe and his mum are here in Greece, the relationship between all of them is very strong indeed. Susan is a retired music teacher, Joe a keen amateur musician. Each time Susan visits Greece she brings Joe a new book of music and they spend hours together going through it as well as working on Joe’s own compositions. I deliberately avoided the touchy-feely moments, opting to press the shutter during less immediately obvious intimate moments.

Second (Sco RELATIONSHIPS2) are Douglas and Allanah. As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, Douglas and Allanah are a retired English couple living high up on the mountain overlooking Volos and the sea. Until four years ago, Douglas wore the trousers in the relationship, then he had a massive stroke. Their relationship has completely reversed and it’s now Allanah who’s the carer. Douglas is fairly seriously although not entirely paralysed down the left-hand side of his body. His mind has also been quite badly damaged and is slow to both think and speak. It was difficult calling them to ask their permission to invade their life together, but that’s partly what I’m here on the course for. The shoot took a couple of hours, was shot at 1600ASA as the house is so dark inside and I wanted to avoid mistakes made during the first assignment, and covers a few moments of their life together shot as normally as I could make it. For reasons that I’m still trying to work out, the shots taken outdoors are a failure. Note I also make one of my regular appearances in a mirror. I’m always doing this!

Finally (Sco RELATIONSHIPS3), I was in the UK at the weekend where I was visiting my uncle who was 80 on Sunday. I had grand ideas to shoot one of the social events planned for the weekend, but for personal reasons it just didn’t work out the way I’d seen it in my mind. So, what you get here breaks all the assignment rules, being shot with a not fully manual camera (for this I blame the several large glasses of red wine I drank earlier in the day), at a ridiculous 3200ASA, and with lots of shots missing. I felt too involved to really get under the skin of this one, and perhaps it was empathy that led me to consciously take several pictures of one of my cousin’s sons, who, by far the youngest person attending the two events shown here and having had a particularly difficult childhood, like myself and my camera, clearly felt like an outsider. Most of these pictures were snapped, so the composition of the majority of them are nothing to write home about, but I do believe I’ve captured a sense of isolation with these last pictures.

All in all a most thought-provoking brief.

Interlude

Douglas day today

Cameras have the propensity to be weird and powerful things. Sometimes it’s like they’re conspiring with unknown forces. They take possession of you. Mess you about. Bugger around with you and generally force you to think and act in strange ways. From left to right this is Allanah, Zackery and Douglas. Douglas is the bastard child of Johns Major and Lydon and is a loveable old rogue. Retired and living on a mountain in Greece with a view of the sea to die for, the once unstoppable, frenetic, loud and opinionated Douglas had a massive stroke four years ago. My camera became weird and powerful and the next thing I knew I was calling Douglas’ wife Allanah to ask if I could come and take some photographs of them for my homework. I spent a wonderful afternoon with them poking my nose into scenes unthinkable in 2004, such as Allanah cleaning Douglas’ spectacles and bursting into hysterical laughter at her own stories of how Douglas, who’s left half barely works anymore, now goes to the toilet. This over lunch with one of King Crimson's former drummers.

What a planet!

Work’s gone mental and I’m just back from a weekend in England to help celebrate my uncle’s Brian’s 80th birthday. Things are piling up. I need to dig out the names of those Soviet-era Lithuanian photographers, write a business plan, negotiate and schedule trips to Montenegro, Kosovo, Slovenia, Bosnia and Albania among what feels like eleventy million other things that are all twice as important as each other. Last night, after getting up at 5am and travelling by car, plane, bus and taxi back to my temporary residence in Greece, I attended our first online get-together. Beautiful chaos. Power to our elbows! What a great feeling.

Colour versus black and white?

Paths of glory

On July 6, 2003 a granite statue of Lithuania’s one and only crowned king, Mindaugas (1203-1263) was unveiled in front of the country’s National Museum in Vilnius. Reading these blogs last night, in particular Lizzie and Rhian’s enthused ravings about Victorian wall signs, I was reminded of my own interests in urban landscapes, with particular reference to a curious mass social incident that occurred as a direct result of the siting of the Mindaugas statue. Having lived high up in several vast concrete buildings in the past I’d become aware of the way urban planners provide paths and pavements for pedestrians that often fail to meet the pedestrians’ actual needs. As a result, almost the entire urban landscape of the world (or rather the bits of it that I’ve seen) is scarred willy nilly with muddy paths made by pedestrians who walk over grass to get to wherever it is they’re going just that little bit quicker. It therefore came as no great surprise to see that the planners who designed the new square around the Mindaugas statue in Vilnius had laid out a serious of new paths that looked nice but that were absurdly impractical. On a busy pedestrian route from the city centre to a bus stop, two of the fancy new paths radiating out from the statue went in the general direction of the aforementioned bus stop, albeit missing it by several metres on either side. Needless to say the locals were soon cutting a path of their own, which led straight to the bus stop, and which I duly took a picture of and immediately forgot all about it. Sometimes when I was thinking about these paths I wondered whether city councils ever took notice of this bizarre and rather charming form of anarchy by building solid pavements over the improvised tracks. What had until this point been little more than an amusing personal observation suddenly turned into a huge event (for me), when, a few weeks later, I discovered that the people at Vilnius municipality had done just that. I took another photograph. Mindaugas, who is generally believed to be the father of the founding of the Lithuanian state, led a fairly eventful life before being murdered by one of his friends, but for me the intriguing history of the tacit doings of a handful of 21st-century Lithuanians and their unconscious contributions to the urban landscape of their city is a far more interesting story indeed.

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Ah yes, here I am.

This time last week I was close to abandoning the Mobile Phone As Serious Documentary Photography Tool philosophy, having experienced the immense technical difficulties of shooting reportage-type material with my Nokia at the Jewish memorial service. Today I'm once again wildly excited about the philosophy. The type of pictures that I can rely on my Nokia to deliver are precisely the kind of pictures I enjoy taking. I’m still a long way from knowing what I’m talking about, but this course is really helping me develop as a serious photographer.

It’s been a fun-packed, interesting and altogether positive nine days since I last reported from here. Here are some of the highlights.

A small crowd of 200 or so locals including representatives of the police force and Greek Orthodox church, who were both important players in the saving of many of the Jewish population of Volos during WWII, were already assembled at the Jewish memorial when I arrived last Sunday morning with Anita to continue with the pictures I’d taken earlier in the week. Essentially improvising, I’d deliberately taken only my mobile phone and wanted to see what there was to shoot when I arrived. The limitations of the phone (most notably the lack of a zoom lens) made getting any shots that really said something about the event impossible, and as the army band played and a succession of people including the town’s three remaining Auschwitz survivors laid wreaths, I mingled in with the crowd and failed to take anything even vaguely interesting. The most memorable moment came when I was plucked from the masses by a large Greek man in mirror shades, who turned out to be a policeman and who wanted to know who I was and what I was doing. It was interesting to see that the other people there with cameras, members of the press and television stations, all looking professional with their tripods and big lenses, were left alone. I was reminded of the Luis Malle film My Dinner With Andre, when the protagonist spoke about his trust in people in white coats inside a hospital, regardless of who they might actually be. I was taking pictures with a mobile phone, so I couldn’t possibly be serious. Afterwards everyone shuffled inside a large hall to deliver speeches, including the mayor, whose absurd grinning for the cameras made the entire day seem rather cheap. After that we all piled out for a finger buffet inside the exhibition I’d shot being set up earlier and got the only decent pictures of the day, of the older members of the assemblage who stuffed their faces with food and promptly left. Later in the day we drove up a mountain to visit a retired English couple for lunch in their old stone house with a glorious view of the sea. Douglas and Elena have had their roles reversed since Douglas had a massive stroke a few years ago. Now it’s Elena who does everything. Eight days later (today) I realised they’d make a wonderful subject for one of the relationships assignments and called to get their permission. I’ll go and spend some time with them early next week when I get back from my next short trip to the UK.

On Monday we drove north to Thessaloniki. An almost exclusively non-photographic day, I did at least get one quirky and altogether furtive picture (with my Nokia of course) of a Greek Orthodox priest shopping in IKEA.


Tuesday I was back in Kato Gaztea where I’d shot my first People At Work assignment, this time to get some pictures of a local restaurant manager, who in true Greek style treats work like a philosophical adventure. I liked the idea of looking at work in a slightly different way and was rewarded with a few interesting pictures of the man in question drinking with his clients and generally fooling about. It was from him that I learnt about the fate of the local fisherman. Five years ago there were several traditional boats fishing out of the village. The one I filmed on was the last, and its days are numbered. Large boats from along the coast have recently been given licenses to empty the bay of life, and the locals have got nothing left to catch. Savas, the fisherman I filmed, is lucky if he catches enough fish to pay for his time at sea. I realised that the village would be an interesting place to spend time in, getting to know the locals and their stories. Ever since my days of making documentary films I’ve always felt uncomfortable about parachuting in somewhere and grabbing material without really knowing the subject. If I was going to live forever, and if I had the resources, I’d spend a year in Kato Gatzea doing my own photographic version of Smith’s Spanish village.

Wednesday saw me grabbing some pictures of a Roma gentleman complete with pork pie hat, playing what must be one of Europe’s last barrel organs for loose change in the centre of Volos, followed by another two-hour session with you lot. It was interesting to go over the careers of the two photographers in question but I felt that there was something missing. It was almost as if Cartier-Bresson had invented the subject, whereas there were of course people way back before him doing similar work. I must remember to find out if there’s a good book on the complete history of the subject.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking through Volos at night. Passing a bakery I was mesmerised by two men pulling trays of cakes out of a large oven in the wall. As I often do, I snatched a quick photograph of them with my Nokia, and looking at it later thought the place would make a nice subject for one of the People At Work assignments. A deal was struck, and at 7am, with a few hours to spare before my one-to-one tutorial I arrived to shoot some pictures. Each assignment is different in both how to approach the photography as well as the particular relationship(s) with the subject(s). Still struggling with operating a hefty camera with everything switched to manual I decided to sort out the latter beforehand as much as I could by taking along an interpreter to ask a few questions on my behalf as well as to explain to the baker and his two assistants what I was expecting from the pictures, for them not to grin at the camera, etc. It paid off handsomely, making the shoot a lot easier than it could’ve been. Anyway, I think I did a fairly decent job for an amateur in showing the entire process from making to baking in a traditional wood-fired bakery-shop. Having been bored stiff by school and not receiving any formal education since being kicked out of school way back in 1981, it’s an amazing, exhilarating and entirely novel experience to be doing homework and understanding why I’m doing it etc. After converting the images and putting them online it was time for my session with Paul, which again felt positive, worthwhile, etc.

Needless to say all of this has been punctuated with large bursts of employment, and not long after logging off I was on a bus for a 12-hour, overnight bus journey to the Albanian capital, Tirana. Exasperated by a constant struggle with serious management issues for an Albanian publisher client myself and my business partner have been working for in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro for the past couple of years, I was in Tirana to make an offer to run the business ourselves. Gazi, our client, is a jovial millionaire who was one of the first post-communist Albanians to have studied at Harvard. Being his guest is always fun, as we get driven around by a chauffeur, taken out for expensive meals and generally treated like royalty. It’s interesting to see both sides of what remains Europe’s poorest country, and I was more than delighted to hear Gazi accept our offer of a business partnership with him. This gives me some financial security for the duration of the course, a constant worry for freelancers. Anyway, whilst I was walking around Tirana (arguably one of the most photogenic cities in Europe) I spotted that the World Press Photo 07 exhibition was in town, so I slipped in. I happened to arrive an hour or so before the official opening, and, because I was using my mobile phone, was left alone to wander around the exhibition taking pictures of the waiters who were going to provide food and drinks for the guests, looking at the pictures. Paul told me about the Albanian documentary photographer Bevis Fusha, and after looking at his interesting work on the internet decided to use my Gazi connection to see if I can get in touch with him.

Watch this space.

It’s now Monday evening and today among other things I’ve shot the first of the Relationships assignments, a simple set of pictures of a teenage boy and retired lady sat at an electric piano. Joe is keen to improve his musical skills, and Susan, an old friend of Joe’s mum and a former music teacher, look great together when they’re both sat at the keyboard. I’m sure I’ve missed lots of things out here, like what I’ve been reading and my adventures with another one of my cameras and the fabulous second-hand camera shop I just discovered in Volos and my attempts to start a Flickr game called Shoot My Elephant and how we’re all starting to work together and get to know each other and how good it all feels and why I’m still not living in Montenegro and the extraordinary man I took photographs of the other day and how I was amused to discover Paul mentioned in one of Susan Sontag’s books and loads of other things, but right now I need a Metaxa and feel better that I’ve at least managed to put some of what I’ve been up to down on the blog.


I just counted one thousand seven hundred words or so. Not bad for a hastily assembled diary entry. No time to edit. Onwards and upwards!