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.