Small world

My dad (pictured here getting attacked by a group of seagulls keen on his fish and chips) went a concert yesterday with a fellow retired colleague from work. They were discussing my Eastbourne Pier project when the colleague (whose name is Brian) mentioned that they both know one of the members of the Eastbourne Pier Society. It appears they all used to work together in the 1970s. Brian telephoned his number through last night and also mentioned he (Brian) had an old (I’m not sure how old) Eastbourne Pier ticket from the days when it used to cost to go on it. Brian is a public transport obsessive who also collects tickets. Maybe a portrait of him.

Untitled

4,500

Uploaded my 4,500th photograph to Flickr today. My first 10,000 are the worst. I'm on my way :)

Dear Paul

Almost definitive Eastbourne Pier postcard title/subject list

In no particular order...

• A pier is born
• The pier today
• Eugenius Birch
• Architecture, structure etc
• WWII
• Culture
• Camera obscura
• Visitors and interviews
• Fish and fishing
• Boats etc
• The future
• Miscellaneous eccentricities

Editing begins

A trip to Eastbourne Reference Library yesterday failed to reveal anything of significance or major interest beyond a short piece on the reopening of the camera obscura on May 30, 2003 in the riveting Piers (The Journal of the National Pier Society). The camera obscura had been closed since a fire started deliberately by an employee of the night club underneath way back in 1970 made the entire structure unsafe. I’ve been trawling newspaper archives to find out more about the arson attack, with a view to finding the culprit and doing a portrait of him (I think it was a him) standing on the pier. Newspaper archives so far have drawn little beyond a few amusing stories about drunks, nudes and others getting rescued from the water around the pier after jumping off for a wide range of reasons including suicide, mental illness and (in the case of the kid who tried tombstoning off the pier a couple of months ago), idiocy. It’s interesting how the stories feed the photographs and the photographs feed the stories. My working method’s always been to give space within a project to allow happy accidents to penetrate the concrete visions I have. I’m at last putting together the first proper list of pictures and subjects for the backs of the postcards and starting the process of editing everything together. I’ve by no means finished taking photographs and will visit the pier at least two more times, plus one extended trip to take photographs until the battery runs out on the Nokia. At least one card will feature four photographs together on the front.

The other project

From left to right, Uncle Brian, grandma, dad, Auntie Wendy, granddad and Auntie Jean, taken in the house they all lived in in Purley just before the outbreak of WWII. Grandma and granddad are long gone bless their souls, but their children are all still alive (my dad the youngest at 76 and Auntie Jean now 82). This is the granddad who was a pilot (see About Me) and who wrote two books. With the exception of Auntie Wendy, all of the people seen here have written the stories of their lives in one form or another. Auntie Wendy has recently become the custodian of the Schofield family photo archive. I’m going to see her next week to borrow the archive and scan it. I’m also going to work some more on her and get her started on her memoirs. I recently discovered that grandma’s sister, my great aunt Alice (who I loved dearly and who died when I was only 11) was an embarrassment to the family. A fervent communist, Auntie Alice used to go on holiday behind the Iron Curtain and was always entertaining people from what were at the time Warsaw Pact countries. Skeletons don’t interest me. Colour does. Auntie Alice was especially colourful. My granddad was a home-movie fanatic and shot hours of 16mm black and white material of his young family in the 1930s. All of it was lost. Incidentally, this photograph was taken by a woman. I don’t know why I’m adding this.

Eastbourne triptych

Eastbourne photographs

The pier project is producing a few other photographs. Simply by keeping my eyes open as I walk to the pier and back I find a short and quirky series of Eastbourne pictures emerging.

Pier update

A grand total of five trips to the pier now made. On the fourth trip (I’m not going to the Moon by the way, Eastbourne’s only about eight miles (13km) east of where I’m staying) I finally made some progress with the research. You can Google and email until you’re blue in the face, but technology will never replace the simple act of walking through a door. The Eastbourne Heritage Centre, a wonderful building itself, built in the 1880s as the home of the man who looked after the (recently demolished) Devonshire Baths, is run by a bunch of lively and mostly retired volunteers. Barbara Hooke (nee Hook… I found that rather amusing) was on duty when I visited on Monday afternoon, and she very happily showed me around the building, eventually leading me to the tiny archives in the basement. Happily I found a small folder containing bits and pieces of writing about the pier, which Barbara was kind enough to photocopy for me. I also got a handful of Eastbourne Pier-related contacts including an architect who recently did a complete structural survey of the pier and a couple of leading lights in the Eastbourne Pier Society (which, because Google doesn’t throw it up, I still don’t believe exists). My job now is to assemble the text, which will then be edited to fit the final postcards. The fourth pier trip itself produced little in the way of photography, although I did finally get to look inside the camera obscura, and was amazed. More of that later on the back of one of the postcards! Yesterday I took my dad along. We bought fish and chips and ate them on the pier in a half-hearted attempt by myself to do a little Method Photography. Putting myself into the role of the ordinary punter who visits the pier as you can imagine was a waste of time, but an interesting exercise all the same. The only other thing of note was the local schoolchildren (see above) I photographed. After taking four pictures and asking the kids where they were from, their teacher warned me that I couldn’t take photographs of some of the children because their parents didn’t allow it. The country’s gone mad. Just west of the pier is a huge Union Jack on the seafront. I want to get a long shot of the pier with the flag in the foreground. The only way to do this is to get inside a room at the Devonshire Hotel. I’m taking my student card and press accreditation there now. Watch this space.

Colour or black and white?

I'm sold on colour, but there is something about black and white. Do these four identical pictures say something different in colour than then do in black and white?

The pier process

Does anybody have any opinion on just how faithful a match should be made between image and text? My original thoughts were along the lines of making at least some attempt to make a visual connection with the text. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps a looser confederation of the two mediums would suit my purpose better.

Pier pressure

Today was my third trip to Eastbourne Pier. The original weather forecast for today was for rain, which made me happy as I wanted to film people on the pier in the rain. Unfortunately the rain never showed up, and instead we had (still have) lots of wind. During the trip to the pier from my dad’s place in Seaford I wasn’t feeling very optimistic. Despite the fact the double-decker bus felt like it was going to get blown over thus providing plenty of visual possibilities of people struggling along the pier into a feisty breeze, the sky was overcast and the light was crap. Although great for faces, overcast skies do nothing to bring out the best of the colours, shapes and shadows the pier likes to throw out in abundance. Acceptable I hoped when it was coming down in buckets, not so when the air was dry. Anyway, as so often happens, the sun came out as I was getting off the bus, which goes all the way to the seafront, but for reasons I can’t explain, I got off one stop before and stumbled straight into a man in a monkey suit playing a drum kit. I felt lost and confused on the pier, took a lot of rubbish with the occasional decentish photograph. I was in a hurry and realised you can’t hurry these things. The rest of the trips I take to photograph the pier must last a few hours each. I’m also aware that the research I’m doing is not coming in as quickly as I’d like it. Eastbourne’s museum about itself has been closed since 2005 and is scheduled to reopen this summer. The local Heritage Centre is filling in for them, but when I went there on Friday it was closed despite the fact it was supposed to be open. I found a local historian on the internet and sent him a detailed email. He replied telling me to look at Google. The history department of Eastbourne Council is yet to reply to my email. Perhaps time to call them. I’ve unearthed some nice facts and figures concerning the history of the town, but little on the pier. The pier website doesn’t work and the camera obscura is always closed. Research uncovers picture ideas, so I really do need more as soon as possible. Then I need to work on a shotlist as well as some ideas for simple interviews. It’s a fun project. Ideas in my notebook include notes on the pier’s wooden and concrete decking, WWII, Dickens and reading on the pier in general, the camera obscura, fishing (and fish stocks), a series of ideas for an establishing shot, reflections galore in surfaces including the two old red telephone boxes by the entrance to the pier and hotel/restaurant windows across the street, lots of information on the underneath of the pier including the tangle of fishing nets clinging to the cast-iron legs, the so-called Glass House, ice cream, the pier’s owners, interviews and lots more. I need to talk to somebody.

Jigsaws as the medium (1)

Click on the image and see how fast you can put the picture together
My personal best is four minutes and three seconds

A sumptuous meal on a broken plate

Thought for the day

One step closer

Still a way to go yet, but the format is now more or less worked out. The idea is to create a series of postcards, all using photographs taken on my mobile phone, that very loosely chart the history of the pier and celebrate some of the main reasons why people visit it. Picture on one side, and text on the other. The postcard ‘back’ still needs some work doing, but is taking shape along with everything else. Perhaps most importantly, as I’m doing all of this because I want to earn a living from it, is that the projects I work on all have a way of being realised. I want to be able to work on projects that I can take to people to develop, commission, whatever.

Arthur

Ian Mitchell's dad was of course called Arthur.

Greetings from Eastbourne (continued)

Sometimes there’s no such thing as the right decision. Sometimes making a decision, any decision, is all you need. Today I went to Eastbourne to start working on my main photographic project for this term. Better late than never. Circumstances and the nature of my day job meant that Eastbourne was going to be the subject. A bit of thinking (see the earlier Eastbourne post) and I decided that the seafront at Eastbourne was an even better subject. Today, after looking at the seafront and thinking even further, it was obvious that Eastbourne Pier, the extraordinary, 1,000ft (305m) structure built to a radical design on little cups on the seabed in 1866 to a design by the English naval architect Eugenius Birch (1818-1884), who, coincidentally, also built Brighton’s West Pier, the subject of my first serious documentary film in the late 1980s, was absolutely perfect. Today, armed only with my Nokia E61i on a pleasantly bright a breezy afternoon, I took a stroll around the pier to take a few visual notes to help me plan the project in more detail. Eastbourne Pier is a microcosm of shapes, colours, shadows, people, ideas, eccentricity, culture, recreation, sport, food, drink, seagulls, vapour trails and a lot of fabulous-looking people. The English seaside may well have been done to death by photographers in the past, but that’s no reason why it can’t be done again. It certainly hasn’t been done on a mobile phone. Using a combination of techniques from blind, furtive photography through to conversations with people on the pier, I’m now set to visit the pier, rain or shine, to photograph it, and to simultaneously learn more about the pier’s history and combine the two into a photographic essay. All of it presented using my earlier postcard idea, ie. with accompanying text on the back of each photograph. Click on the picture here for a look at the first edited 16 photographs. All comments and suggestions welcome. One of the main reasons I wanted to do Eastbourne Pier, the 1901 camera obscura, was closed today. Watch this space!

Sign of the times

The telephone box at the bottom of the road from my sister's house, taken somewhat ironically with my mobile phone. If I'm anything to go by they're not kidding about how little it gets used. The last time I made a call here, long before my sister moved around the corner, was in 1980. I'd been to a party at the Sheffield Arms at the junction of Gibbon Road and Fort Road in Newhaven and my friend Ian Mitchell’s dad, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, fed me endless pints of foul-tasting bitter and got me horribly drunk. I don’t remember much about the evening, but I do remember I had a packet of 10 Benson & Hedges and that I walked a girl from Seaford home along the beach. I made it as far as this telephone box on the way back home after seeing the girl (whose name I also have no recollection of) to her door and ended up making a reverse-charge call to my sleeping dad in the middle of the night to come and collect me. I guess it must’ve been a different telephone box. They were all still red then. A different universe.

Greetings from Eastbourne

With a permanent population of just under 100,000, the English seaside holiday resort of Eastbourne attracts over four million visitors a year. Officially the sunniest place in Great Britain, Eastbourne’s tourist industry generates an annual £365 million (€463 million), supporting somewhere in the region of 7,000 related jobs. Evidence suggests that people inhabited the area during the Stone Age, although the town is relatively speaking quite a modern one, having been little more than a collection of sheep farms until the opening of the railway linking Eastbourne with the capital on May 14, 1849 turned the town into one of the most popular seaside resorts of the day. Voted Number One UK destination by Co-op Travel in 2007, Eastbourne is often forced to play second fiddle to its altogether more hip cousin Brighton, 19 miles (30km) to the west, and has a somewhat cruel reputation as being a magnet for both short- and long-term anoraks, pensioners and other unsophisticated souls. True up to a point, on the other hand it could also be argued that Eastbourne has attracted a more interesting and cultured variety of characters over the decades. The town currently features 10 blue plaques celebrating among others Charles Dickens (who stayed several times during the 1830s with his friend the artist Augustus Egg), Lewis Carroll (who spent a grand total of 19 summer holidays in the town), the portrait and fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, the socialist author George Orwell and two disparate stars of comedy, namely Charlie Chester and Tommy Cooper. For most holidaymakers, Eastbourne is the part of the town where the land meets the sea, the fabulous promenade of pebbled blue flag beaches, fish and chip shops, deck chairs, beach huts, 19th-century pier complete with Victorian camera obscura, bandstand, hotels and, every August, the world’s largest seafront air show, all of it stretching some two miles (3.2km) from Dukes Parade in the west to Royal Parade in the east.

To be continued…

Douglas clarified and enlarged

Strokes have the unwelcome distinction of being the most common cause of adult disability in Europe. Now also the world’s number two killer after the combined waterborne diseases of (primarily) the Developing World, my friend Douglas Hoarton’s massive stroke back in October 2004 somewhat ironically happened in Greece, where the first written record of a stroke was made by Hippocrates in around the 3rd century BC.

In February this year, Douglas and his wife Allanah were one of the three subjects I chose for my Relationships assignment. Later I had the idea of using the exceedingly photogenic and easy-to-work-with Douglas again for my somewhat disastrous Easter assignment. Despite Paul’s lukewarm appraisal of the original Relationships photographs and my own inability to finish the second project, I recently decided to continue following Douglas’ life with my dSLR, delving deeper and deeper into his life.

To date I’ve shot three complete series of Douglas photographs, namely the original shots of him and his wife at home from February, a second shoot mostly on the land they both bought just before Douglas fell ill and from where he was driving when he had the stroke and a third sequence of pictures shot mostly on Douglas’ sunny terrace overlooking the Bay of Volos. This latter shoot involved a long sequence with Douglas attempting to fill seven plastic pill boxes for his following week’s medical supplies. It was during this seemingly simple exercise that I realised just how much damage Douglas’ brain has suffered.

Douglas arrives in England, where I’m also staying for a few weeks, next weekend to visit his son and grandchildren. This will be my forth shoot. Once we’re all back in Greece again I’ll start tackling more issues and themes, including Douglas’ weekly physiotherapy sessions, his occasional art therapy sessions (see the pictures I recently uploaded to DRR for a couple of Douglas’ paintings) and his attempts to start sailing again with the help of a wheelchair-bound Greek sailor. At the same time I’ll start interviewing Douglas, who has some incredible stories to tell and who, thanks to his stroke, now tells them in the most peculiar, disjointed and charming ways.

If things go well, I’ll include a short Douglas edit as part of my practical assignments for the end of the term. All comments and suggestions more than welcome.

A selection of Douglas can be found here.

London

Straight from the phone. No edit. 25%.

How it looks from the other side

Greetings from Kosovo

Wish you were here

Thinking aloud (Berat)

Berat person at work

Berat relationship

Berat street/moment

Berat portrait

Thinking aloud (Tirana)

Tirana person at work

Tirana relationship

Tirana street/moment

Tirana portrait

Not such a large post after all

I lied. It’s not going to be a large post.

All I need to add at this point is that it’s become clear over the last few weeks that rather than use the course to move away from my current profession, I should be tailoring my current profession to meet the needs of the course. Since I had 35 of my photographs published in a book that had already commissioned its photography from somebody else last year the alarms bells started ringing, their message being that I should be working in photography. This is my reason for being on this course. My travel photography portfolio is growing nicely, much of it here. My question is, how can I develop this photography using the course to reach a level that will enable me to work professionally in the travel publishing industry?

Notes before a large post 4 (Anita)

The most amusing and perhaps the most illuminating moment for me so far on this course happened during the first minute of my first individual tutorial with Homer as I sat in a hotel room in Ljubljana after an exhausting trip from Greece to Slovenia via Austria at the start of what turned out to be the most hectic period of my life, a period from which I’m slowly in the process of extricating myself from, with, as a first gesture, the posting of today’s multiple blog entries.

My rendezvous with Homer was to look at and discuss my Street/Moment assignment work (here). In his trademark chirpy, eccentric way, Homer began with a barrage of plaudits about my work. Then I told him the photographs he was enjoying so much were taken on my mobile phone. Never use a mobile phone to take photographs (or words to that effect) was Homer’s immediate, snappy response. Take what you want from that, I’ve got nothing more to add, beyond the fact that I continue to use a mobile phone to take serious photographs as and when it pleases me. If I could find the energy to trawl the Wimba archives I could even find the quote from Paul stating something along the lines of him being more than happy to see work on this course original from a mobile phone.

Anyway, until such a time comes, if it ever comes at all, that I need to justify my occasional use of a mobile phone to take photographs, I shall do so. In the mean time, I’ll just carry on taking interesting pictures with my Nokia, such as the ones I’ve been taking of my elderly Jewish friend, Anita. Yet another star of these pages, Anita’s the lady whose grandfather fought and beat Hitler in a German court in the 1930s and who was forced to change her religion to Greek Orthodox when she married a local man here in Greece. Now a widow, Anita is currently in the process of rediscovering herself and her Jewishness. With 653 photographs of her I’d taken at two Jewish events in Volos, I wanted to start putting some ideas together and doing an extended photo piece about her, starting with a simple, three-picture essay.

This didn’t happen.

Notes before a large post 3 (Douglas)

As mentioned in my previous post, Douglas has appeared on these pages before. Now a good friend as well as a fascinating subject photographically and photo journalistically, Douglas went from being an active and outspoken Englishman with a busy job and social life into a partially paralysed, partially brain-damaged invalid after suffering a massive stroke whilst driving home one evening in October 2004. Douglas describes himself as a disabled Englishman living in Greece, but on closer inspection he’s much more than that. Time meant that I simply couldn’t get the pictures I wanted of Douglas (physiotherapy, art class, sailing etc), and the pictures I have of him, including an extraordinary sequence where he tries (and fails) to organise his medicine for the next seven days cut together (in my mind and camera, but never as far as in an edited piece of work) with pieces of rusting furniture in his garden are all that I’ve got to show (currently residing as a series of contact sheets on Flickr here).

Notes before a large post 2 (Dodo & Petra)

As well as creating individual photo essay pieces for my Easter assignment that focused on one (or in this case, two) characters, I also started experimenting with overlapping characters. The work I started doing with Dodo and Petra, the German lesbian couple, incorporated, through them talking about their friends in Greece, Douglas and Allanah, who appeared in my Relationships assignment and, as Douglas, as an Easter assignment character (see the post to come after this one). As I was in the middle of layout on a publishing project at the time, the Dodo & Petra piece wound up as a magazine-looking piece (albeit a ridiculously bad an unfinished one). This piece was the closest I cam to actually finishing an assignment.

Notes before a large post 1 (Alex)

Edited and unfinished photographs from my Easter assignment with Alex (see below). I was interested in doing a series of essays on people living in Greece who were born somewhere else, and how their backgrounds affected their relationships with their adopted countries. I threw in a few wild cards too, such as a pair of German lesbians and a formerly frenetic Englishman who had a seriously debilitating stroke in Greece four years ago and who is now cared for by his wife. Work commitments among other issues (see today’s lengthy blog when I finally post it later in the day) meant that the project has been mothballed. I’m putting this information up to show that I have at least been working on the projects! Alex is 17 and was born in the UK. He moved to Greece when he was four. The day I first met him, as he sat at a kitchen table swinging his kompoloi (Greek Orthodox worry beads), I asked him if he felt British or Greek. He told me he was 100% Greek. This is interesting as his younger brother, 14-year-old Joey, left the UK when he was a tiny baby and yet feels entirely British. The pictures here were the final few that were to be edited down to four or five to go with some text that I never got from Alex. My fault entirely.