Visaginas idea

A small yet significant reflection

This morning whilst waiting for the kettle to boil I held a bowl up by the window, used a scrap piece of white paper as a little reflector and was amazed.

Which one of these two and why?

Semi-Greeks

Try to work on something you feel a real personal response to.

Hmmmmm. Ok, weighing up the time limitations and the fact that just about everything here is still literally Greek to me, how about something like this for my first multi-picture assignments?

Almost without exception, all the people I know here in and around Volos are in some way connected with another, second country. Some came here as young women 50 years ago, married locals and got thoroughly wrapped up in Greek life and culture. Others have brought their entire families over to start new lives. A section of both of these types of people have had children in Greece. The identities of these different-yet-connected people are extremely interesting, especially for somebody like me, who, as an Englishman who gave up living in England years ago, has a particularly strong empathy for exiles and their nearest and dearest.

Not unlike Hercule Poirot, I’ve discovered the most interesting things about some of these people just by having normal conversations with them. Dorothy, a lady from Manchester who married a Greek and had kids here and who I bumped into on a flight back to Greece a few weeks ago, gave a most interesting reply to my question about whether it felt good to be home again as we rode on the bus from Thessaloniki to Volos. Her reply was that she wasn’t home yet. For Dorothy, who’s been living in Greece for some 25 years, home to her it turned out was Volos, but not Greece. Startled at the revelation herself, she told me she’d never really thought about it before. Who is Dorothy?

And who for that matter is Anita (pictured)? Anita appeared before on this blog. She’s the retired American lady whose Jewish grandfather fought Hitler in a German court in the 1930s and won and who came to Greece as a young girl 50 years ago. Immensely proud of her Jewishness, one can only imagine her feelings when she made the immense sacrifice of converting to the Greek Orthodox Church in order to marry the man she fell in love with as was (and still is I believe) required under Greek law. Now living alone, Anita recently started getting involved with the Jewish community here in Volos and is a truly interesting soul.

And just look at 19-year-old Alex. His father is Welsh and his mother is English, and, many years before they divorced they came to Greece to start a new life when Alex was still a toddler. I asked Alex when I first met him whether he felt Greek or English. Alex, born in England, is, he tells me, categorically, completely Greek.

Now Douglas on the other hand, who made a early staring role in one of my Relationships assignments, is a retired Englishman living up on Mount Pilion above Volos with his wife Allanah, herself born in India and having spent most of her life in England, Latvia and Greece. A former financial bigwig at Del Monte, workaholic Douglas suffered a massive stroke four years ago and now has limited use of his left leg, almost no use whatsoever of his left arm, and has also been left with fairly serious brain damage. Who is Douglas now?

Lastly there’s Dimitra, the young woman of mixed English-Greek parentage who’s paralysed from the waist down and who I mentioned briefly in an earlier blog. A girl turning into a woman has got enough on her plate without having to deal with her racial and cultural identity, let alone having to deal with all this as a disabled person. Am I projecting all of this on Dimitra? We’re having a big party tomorrow night and hopefully she’s going to make it along, so I can start finding out then. If not, I’ll call her next week.

Then, after I’ve spoken to everybody and got their permission to photograph them, I’ll start with a short picture story for all of them, something along the lines of what Lizzie mentioned about simple portraits (thanks Lizzie). Working with one of these people will, at least I hope, lead to the opportunity of extending the work into the longer piece as required for the assignment. I like the idea of a thread running through the work. It also fits nicely with my Macedonian butchers project idea, not to mention the identity issues surrounding the people of newly independent Kosovo. Looks like I’m finding my feet. Now all I’ve got to do is find my eye.

Whittling pics

I’ve got my Kosovo pictures down to just 38 and onto Flickr. Some of them are there for the hell of it, some of them for the sheer lo-resness of it, and some because I truly believe they’re good photographs. Time to step back again for a few days before I go on to select the final 12 or so. Just to clarify for those who thought I’d knocked this one squarely on the head, I have indeed given up any attempts to pull together a series of images that create a fluid image of the day, but I’d still like to have a set of strong images. I think I deserve that if nothing else.

Tight

I’ve received several comments from several different sources over the last couple of months about some of my photographs being shot too tight. Sometimes I fully agree. At other times I’m not so sure. Take this one for example. Personally I really like the fact that the two main characters don’t quite fit into the frame (and I especially like the policeman’s foot not being there). It lends a certain character to the shot that I feel would be lost if they we both completely in shot. The things I don’t particularly like about this picture are the space over their heads and the fact that the background is in focus. The latter fault is one of the pitfalls of a point-and-shoot camera, and there’s not a lot that can be done about it, but if I really had to change something about it’d be the loss of some of the empty space above their heads. Funny also that the classic faux pas that nobody picked up on this one is the lamppost growing out of the cowboy’s head. Oh well. I’m always interested to hear criticism, but sometimes it seems to me that there’s no reason for the criticism other than that’s sort of what’s supposed to be said. I realise that as a still relatively inexperienced photographer I have little defence for my work, and that one of my main objectives over the next few months of the course is to produce a body of work that pushes all the right buttons. The late saxophonist John Coltrane continues to be criticised in many circles for his later work because to them it sounds like he’s simply making a racket. Firstly, sometimes there’s nothing wrong with a racket, but for me the thing that makes John Coltrane ultimately listenable is that he spent years playing his soprano and tenor saxophones in a more traditional way and was by all accounts one of the finest saxophonists around. It’s back to the old cliché again of not being able to break the rules if you don’t know what the rules are, and I suppose one of the main reasons for doing this course is to learn what the rules are. I’m very serious about this, even to the point that I really want to learn how to shoot classic, almost boring photography, which will provide me with both a base and a reason to branch out. I’m waffling again, but I do just want to get this down and on the record. If the tightness of my photography is my trademark mistake then so be it. There are other mistakes in my work, and sometimes I see them as the humanising factor of my photography. I need to work harder on my mistakes until I’ve got them all absolutely perfect.

Pondering poodles

Reading Anna's blog recently I was reminded of seeing a poodle wearing earrings in Stanmer Park near Brighton many years ago. Then, on turning a corner on the way to buy some blank DVDs today I was confronted with the little fella above. He moved fast and the shutter delay on my Nokia didn’t help, but I think I captured the essence of the beast as he passed. Sniggering aside, there’s something much stranger going on with these dressed-up doggies than first meets the eye. Surely.