Making an exhibition of myself

Not in the mood for sneaking around taking photographs of unsuspecting characters today I thought I’d go an have a look at the prospective gallery spaces in the two shopping centres that appeal to me the most. First was Europa (www.europa.lt), which having looked at it in a new light (no pun intended) is by far the best shopping centre in Vilnius. Banana-shaped and on three floors, it’s mostly fashion outlets plus a few restaurants and cafés and it’s in the new swanky business district. Best of all it’s got a glass roof, and the light during the day is perfect. I’d been told yesterday that there was a space inside for exhibitions, but this wasn’t exactly true. There were six appalling photographs hanging on bits of string and in crappy frames, but they were just against a wall on the top floor. What was interesting was that a lot of people were looking at them. If I decide to pursue exhibiting here I’ll need to design the whole thing (or rather I’ll need to get somebody to design it for me). The two spaces I like are the bridge on the top floor that joins the two rows of shops on either side and one of the two hanging pods that belong to a café. Next up was Akropolis (www.akropolis.lt), the most popular of all the shopping centres in the city and always packed. The exhibition space here I already knew about, and it runs down a corridor where the toilets are. It’s dark and depressing and nobody was looking at the (dreadful) photography on display. So, Europa it almost certainly is… unless things happen at the Prospekto Gallery or I decide to exhibit in the café-bar I mentioned before (or at least I think I mentioned before). In Akropolis I also couldn’t resist buying a camcorder, the cheapest one they had, which is an old MiniDV camera that I bought because of another project I’m working on here (www.freevilnius.com) and also because the 20 hours or so of footage I shot in Cuba a decade ago is all on MiniDV and I want to digitise it all before the tapes degrade too much. As for the actual content of the photographic exhibition, I’m almost certain now that it’s going to be a black and white Nokia retrospective with ongoing work as well, all shot blind and all printed on an inkjet printer. I need to put some of the pictures I’ve been working on for this online soon. Work is mental at the moment and once again I find myself with no time to get completely stuck into this.

Lithuania

And because it's Lithuania, three of the six email addresses don't work.

Exhibition

I've just sent an email to six major shopping malls in Vilnius enquiring about exhibition space. Should be interesting to see what kind of replies I get. Some of them I know for sure have exhibition space.

I'm invisible

This is interesting. An experiment with software for stitching pictures together I was messing around with last year, and that I just came across. This is three pictures together, taken in broad daylight inside a supermarket in the UK. I'm 6'3" and I don't blend in easily. Look how there's no recognition of the fact that I'm photographing. Would this picture be possible if taken using anything than a mobile phone? Just a thought to add to the rest.

Daily Lives Revisited

Wiki

After finally getting access again to the MAPJ wiki I managed to get my citizen journalism stuff up. However, not unlike the back end of Wikipedia, this particular wiki was (and I suppose thinking about it all wikis are the same) the most unfriendly, unintuitive piece of programing I've come across in a long time. Does anybody reading this understand it? This is an important point I believe, that technology on many occasions holds back creativity. I'd like to read everybody's citizen journalism pieces but I'm buggered if I can find them. What a piece of crap.

More of the same

I honestly don’t think you can beat printing on an inkjet printer, at least not if you’re doing what I’m trying to do at the moment. Not only did the chirpy anorak at the Kodak Pro shop not get the idea that I wanted to print pictures complete with their original aberrations and colour indiscretions, the finished prints (which cost an arm and a leg and a bit more) were lifeless and, in a word, crappy. Having also had my Nokia work published in a full colour separation magazine before and seen equally dull results, I’m more and more excited by an inkjet printer’s extraordinary ability to squirt vast amounts of delicious ink onto shiny paper and produce the most stunning photographs. Since starting printing a few weeks back (why did it take me so long to do this?) I’ve tried just about every kind of paper available and, interestingly, I’ve found I get by far the best results from the cheap generic stuff (acme®) from the local supermarket. The black and white prints I’m working on now, which may or may not end up as the Daily Lives Revisited project, end up with a slight brownish tint, which really make the images absolutely perfect. What’s also extremely interesting is that having printed out a range of prints over the last day on A4 paper with the images considerably smaller in the middle I’ve noticed that they’re all photographs I shot blind. Zen archery again? Anyhow, ordinary people in ordinary situations captured sneakily and presented using the most basic and amateur of equipment seems to be where I’m heading for the final term. This is a glorious path of discovery, and I really feel like I’m producing work in a style that’s really me. It’s a crazy project, especially with such a crap camera (I could of course go out and buy an 8Mp cameraphone and take the same pictures only in ‘much better quality’… but I won’t), but it’s unique, and of course the pictures are good. Now on with the project and work out where to exhibit the final stuff at the end of the year. I think a quick trip to the UK is in order too, to show some of these pictures I keep going on about.