a long few weeks since I updated. Laziness and a very intelligent cold held me back. Im over the laziness but the cold still lingers and poor me is fighting through the pain barrier to give me that feel good feeling of actually doing something. In my ill days i hooked up an old hard drive and did some trawling through some old long forgotten images ... memories of the nineties. The TGV to Marseille in France for the Football World Cup finals, me sipping coffee in Platanius, Crete and watching an old man shuffle by slower than a snail on prozac and lastly and image of the soon to be Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Tony Blair at the Brighton Center
This shot reminds me of my greatest photographic miss of my photo career. The previous year I was shooting at an anti apartheid meeting in London in 1994. Backstage i was having a coffee and Mr Blair exits the back stage with an apple the size of a pig in his mouth. Please understand that he was hold some papers in both his hands and only his mouth was stopping the apple from dropping. I raised my camera to get the shot as Tony raised his hand a little faster. He won the race and i miss the shot. The following year we meet again and this time no apples. He just gives me the grin!
On the TGV from Paris down to Marseille
So next year South Africa will host the 2010 football world cup. I've covered France 1998, Holland/Belgium 2000 and Japan 2002. Maybe time to get back into the English fans abroad story line. They are a great bunch of fans but sometimes very miss understood. Not so sure what will be made of them next year but it will be fun.
Images from the Euro finals in Holland/Belgium 2000 for Esquire
Good news at last as my Brighton Beach Lovers series has been chosen for a feature in Leica's LFI magazine to be published next month. This was a long term story i shot between the Brighton Pier and West Pier from 2001 to 2008. Sent a lot of emails out to boutique book publishers hoping that someone somewhere will see the potential of the project as a book. Lets wait and see...
Beach Lovers kiss during a rain storm on Brighton Beach in August 2004
Watching old men shuffle along sloooowly is a little disturbing. I often wonder how long it will be until I'm the shuffler and someone else is thinking "get on with it.. faster faster". What seems like an eternity ago I took this photo whilst sipping on the strongest expresso in the universe in the little Crete seaside resort of Platanius. The point of this image now is that its
the same as watching the image making business. Its slowly but surly coming to the end of its life as we know it. Magazines have less money to commission photography than they ever have and newspapers are closing down weekly. Everyone is a photographer now because they have a camera in their mobile and thats great. No sour grapes from me but it really pisses me off when another image library opens and offers money to unsuspecting amateurs for their images. The devil is always in the small print Ts&Cs and anyone who thinks they will earn lots of $s from image sales lives in La La Land!
If you have nothing else to do have a look here just to see the tip of the ice berg of how the image making industry is being strip mined.
