It’s easy to have so much fun in late middle age – snapping little pix with your phone and adding them to the billions already online – that you forget what truly great photography is. Idly wilfing on Google this morning I was suddenly suddenly confronted with the real thing. This photo of Oxford Circus in the snow comes from quiz.cc – the BMX photoblog of Chris Hill-Scott. Click the picture to see it full-size there.
A further search on his site for the tag ‘London’ brought up a wealth of wonderful images and stories – all shared with the world for free. You’ve got to love that side of the internet – though it’s crushing the old newspaper, publishing, music and broadcast industries as we’ve known them. When a photojournalist cheerfully publishes work of this quality unpaid, how will he (or any other future Arbus or Cartier-Bresson) earn a living in decades to come?
Incidentally HCB was notoriously camera-shy himself. My favourite story about him was confirmed in an obituary letter to The Guardian 8 years ago:
In the late 1970s, Henri Cartier-Bresson took to the streets of New York, wearing his usual inconspicuous trilby and obscuring his Leica with a big pocket handkerchief, pretending to be blowing his nose while taking photographs of passers-by on the sidewalk. A New Yorker festooned with his own Japanese zoom-lens cameras interrupted him, saying: “Who do ya think y’are … the poor man’s Cartier-Bresson ?”
From the forums of THCFarmer.com, with thanks to the user known as Stoopid Monkey, here’s the first episode of Fat Freddy’s Cat – a spinoff series from Gilbert Shelton‘s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Much like Charles M Schultz‘s character Snoopy, Fat Freddy’s Cat has endured rather better than the original series he came from.
Looking back at it now for the first time in forty years, Sixties Stoner Humour hasn’t really aged that well – though we all thought it was bloody hilarious at the time. And at least it was “ours” – belonging to the youth counter-culture of the day rather than the safe, staid world of Giles and Ronald Searle we’d grown up with. And certainly Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell still owes an obvious debt to Mr Shelton…
Fat Freddy’s Cat #1 Copyright ©1988 by Gilbert Shelton.
From The Fat Freddy’s Cat Omnibus – as favourably reviewed by Nicolas Lezard – and available in the UK from Amazon.
For more Fat Freddy’s Cat click here
By Stephen Isaac-Wilson – reblogged from The Guardian
Until last week, Dean Atta was relatively unknown; unless you were deeply immersed in the world of spoken word you probably wouldn’t have heard of him. Then, in the wake of the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, he wrote his poem I Am Nobody’s Nigger, and took the internet by storm. In five days, his poem had received in excess of 15,000 hits and gained him an extra 1,000 followers on Twitter. The poem was, he says, a reaction to “the injustice of the death of Stephen Lawrence”, and to the loose usage of the N-word. “Watching Panorama, where they reconstructed his murder, and hearing that the N-word was the last thing they said when they stabbed him really struck a chord with me”…/
Read rest of article on Guardian website
From The Guardian 6th June 2011:
“If the internet gave free back rubs, people would complain when it stopped because its thumbs were sore…” Spotify’s problem is that no one wants to pay for anything they access via a computer… [read more]
‘I thought I’d have more time between frogs and same-sex intercourse than just an hour or two. I was out of my depth.’ Photograph: Corbis
Funny, funny Guardian article by Julia Sweeney on being quizzed about the facts of life by her nine year old daughter… read at guardian.co.uk
Click for slideshow on Flickr
On my way into town yesterday found myself walking smack through the middle of someone else’s street party. Nice chilled vibe in a road bordering on an open green space in the late afternoon.
The euphoria up the line in Westminster had long subsided, leaving central London strangely deserted by the time I headed home that evening. No trace of the million revellers who’d descended on the city that day apart from a few lingering traffic diversions. And morose men in orange jackets at Hyde Park Corner dealing with the 140 tonnes of refuse they’d left behind.
In today’s Guardian Ian Jack compares the wedding with that of Charles & Diana in 1981, pointing our that in the middle of all the royalist ballyhoo imprisoned IRA men were dying on hunger strike, urban rioting had erupted in several English cities, and 2.5 million people were on the dole.
Checking the headlines this weekend, Gaddafi’s Libya is being bombarded with air strikes and riven by civil war, the governments of Syria and Uganda are killing increasing numbers of protesters, there are more riots in Bristol – and the US has just suffered its second deadliest outbreak of tornados in history, with at least 340 people dead.
Japan meanwhile has 18,000 recent deaths and widespread devastation to cope with – along with a nuclear crisis at Fukushima that remains – even according to official sources – “very serious”.
No wonder my brother’s buying himself a geiger counter.
