Madness

Travelling

Dancing in Warsaw

The world isn’t a stage, it’s a dancehall. Cities are huge dance floors full of people of every imaginable size, shape, colour, all dancing to the sound of a silent tune, whether they’re at work, shopping, picnicking in a park or simply getting from a to b. Just like its cousin the point and shoot camera, a camera phone takes forever to focus and set the exposure, sympathising with the dancers it films in its own whimsical manner, making a mockery of the photographer and producing accidental images that are more often than not badly composed disasters but that are occasionally astonishing. Walking through streets, markets, parks and shopping centres, standing on a tram, I’ve been predicting moments before they happen and shooting them as best I can, always without looking at the screen and shooting everything blind. This is merely an experiment, but I like it. I’ve thought long and hard about the idea of the street being a stage that one waits to be populated, and I still don’t like this way of working. True it almost always guarantees better photographs than taking them by running around pointing a mobile phone at things, but I feel there’s something (excuse the pun) staged about it, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. These seven photographs are the result of a reasonably quick experiment I tried out in Warsaw last week. A logical progression from what I was doing with my Eastbourne Pier postcards, expect more in the future. Larger versions of these photographs, with brief explanations, can currently be seen on DRR.

All over the place

Work, life, head, philosophy, all over the place. Time to start putting things together.

Mobile Nation and other thoughts

I can’t remember exactly what he said, but Banksy remarked once something along the lines that he doesn’t go to a restaurant because he wants to have a shit. I’m neither a fan of Banksy nor do I believe what he says is true about himself, but it’s a quote I really like all the same. I’ve just got out the bath, where I was both trying to warm up a bit (no heating in Vilnius for another couple of weeks and already freezing cold) as well as absorb the first group tutorial of the new term. Of the many good things to come out of it (the tutorial, not the bath) I was struck by the momentary touching on the subject of amateur versus professional, vis Flickr, which in turn reminded me of Banksy’s quote. Forgive me for the stream of consciousness that’s about to follow. As far as I understand it, this course is primarily about the understanding and acquisition of the two things that go together to make a professional photojournalist and/or documentary photographer. Firstly, it (the course) provides a path that leads to a personal understanding of the language of the medium. Second, it provides an insight into the world of the professional, ie. how one can best prepare oneself to make money from photography. If you think about it, like I am now, it makes one wonder what a professional actually is. The definition is of course somebody who makes money (or a living) from what they do, as opposed to an amateur (from the Latin amātor, lover). In reality it’s much more complicated that that, and I wonder if one can be a professional by using only one of the two above-mentioned criteria. The answer is if course Yes. I can think of plenty of people earning good money in publishing who are pretty useless at their jobs and who certainly don’t understand the business. Likewise, I know plenty of people who create things professionally without earning a penny. My oldest and best friend Al for example built this lovely house. Basically, Al didn’t like what the architect was doing, sacked him, picked up his tools and did the job himself. If anybody’s still reading this, I think it’s only fair to jump in quick and say that this interesting area is a border, one that from time to time, certainly when I’m doing things with my mobile phone, informs my photography in one way or another. Whether I’m conscious of it or not, when I’m producing what I believe to be serious work using my Nokia I’m exploring the interesting, grey and often controversial area between what’s accepted as amateur and what’s accepted as professional. I find this interesting. Really interesting. One of the things I think about is that if it can be shown that toys such as mobile phones can be used to create serious work then this, theoretically at least, opens the door to a massive section of society who remain silent and at the mercy of so-called professionals. At times I find this almost obscene. The BBC and others have done great work with this idea, notably with such groundbreaking work as the Video Nation series (a piece of sheer genius bought about by the advent of the camcorder, check out the BBC website for more). Maybe it’s time for a Mobile Nation. Maybe not. It seems to me at times that how the message is delivered is far more important than the message itself. There was an argument when I worked in television that ‘broadcast standard’ (ie. high quality (expensive to produce) video was a union invention, used to secure people’s jobs. If it was this (it was certainly partly this), then the unions failed. I wonder how much this argument can be used in photojournalism and documentary photography? My mind’s racing now. I need to think about this some more. I had an idea right at the start of this course for producing some work that would be photographed not by myself. If photojournalism is so keen to reinvent itself with the use of moving images then surely there’s no reason why documentary photographers can’t become directors, especially if the director remains responsible for the project planning and the editing. That the very medium that we’re currently studying is teetering on the edge of two borders at the moment is truly interesting stuff.

Druskininkai

Last year I bought a collection of early Krzysztof Kieślowski documentaries on DVD, films that in my opinion far outshine any of his later works of fiction. If you ever get the chance to see them, do. This has got nothing to do with this post. I’m currently in Krakow, where I travelled to via Druskininkai and Warsaw. Druskininkai, which if anybody ever reads this blog will know, is the second Lithuanian town that I’m thinking about producing a series of postcards for using Borders as the theme. I arrived there lunchtime last Tuesday, visited a few cemeteries but failed to find any Tatar graves (at least any with Arabic writing on them). My suspicion is that the Tatars assimilated so much into local life that their gravestones were marked in either Russian, Belarusian, Polish or Lithuanian. The town’s old cemetery, conveniently located next to the bus station, was as I suspected a truly multicultural affair, although as usual the Jewish cemetery was located apart from the main one. As well as skulking about looking for suspicious writing, I got some nice pictures of old ladies in traditional coloured headscarves as you can see before spending the rest of the day and the following morning wandering around, visiting places I’d planned to see as well as allowing myself the space to have plenty of happy accidents (see recent posts for more). I also visited the local museum, little more than a collection of small rooms that with the help of old photographs, furniture, maps, letters, bottles, pianos etc charts the rise of Druskininkai, showing without a shadow of a doubt that the town was predominantly Polish despite it being yet another place that the Lithuanians like to consider their own. One thing I didn’t realise is that Druskininkai was between the wars well and truly a border town. Nowadays it’s a couple of kilometres from Belarus, but between 1920 and 1939 it was in Poland, separated from Lithuania by the Nemunas river which runs through the town. There’s a tiny island on the river, called Love Island (Meilės Sala), which according to maps of the time was half in Poland and half in Lithuania. This is quite common throughout the world, but what was extraordinary in this case was that the island was in use as part of the holiday resort. There were even photographs in the museum of Poles lying on the island’s miniscule beach some time during the 1920s. The mind boggles. There’s an entire story just in this, but I’ll save it for another time. For more information about some of the interesting characters who lived in Druskininkai, see earlier posts. The Jewish Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz (born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, Lithuanian Žakas Lipšicas, 1891-1973), was born here. His childhood home, opposite the hotel his father owned that’s now the town’s Best Western, is a museum, but has been closed for ages, and nobody knows when it’s going to open again. I’m still trying to make some logical conclusions from what’s clearly a national obsession with obliterating anything from the past that wasn’t Lithuanian. Anyway, more about Druskininkai later. I just want to mention before finishing that the ancient bus that took me from Druskininkai to Marijampolė (known as Kapsukas during the Soviet occupation, after the founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas (1880-1935), and, incidentally, the only town in Lithuania to be renamed under the Communists), where I picked up the Warsaw train, was full of country folk. These people are like they’re straight out of the Middle Ages. Lithuania is Africa. I’m beginning to understand and even occasionally sympathise with the Lithuanian obsession with clinging onto the past, although I’ll never truly admire it. Writing about photography is like dancing about architecture. Onwards and upwards.

Thinking

The quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing

Simon Jeffes (1949-1997)

Dancing in Warsaw