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 ?”
This morning Child A had another surprise for me at the breakfast table – this sketch of San Francisco, which turned out to be one of many on display at bryanetch.blogspot.com. As usual when A. shows me stuff from the internet, Etch A Sketch art is a widespread phenomenon that I had no idea even existed.
The whole family debated whether this astonishing image could possibly have been done without cheating. Surely, the artist must have used Photoshop or some kind of stylus on an adapted version of the toy? And how come there were no videos on the blog showing these works being created ?
It turns out the main difficulty in filming this kind of work lies in carrying out timelapse photography over such a long period – we’re told this San Francisco drawing took 18 months, after all. All doubt was finally dispelled by the YouTube clip below – showing an even more complicated image being achieved (by a different artist) in two days flat:
It’s amazing. But also one of those activities like Synchronised Swimming – where you marvel at the skill involved, yet wonder why anybody in their right mind would bother even trying.
Just fell in love with this fantastically atmospheric photo by Joachim3050on Panoramio. It shows the citadel ramparts at Hiers-Brouage built on the Bay of Biscay in Western France by Cardinal Richelieu around 1630.
As of 16 February 2009 police in England and Wales can arrest anybody who photographs them on the grounds that the footage is ‘likely to be useful to a person preparing an act of terrorism’ under Section 76 of the 2008 Counter Terrorism Act and section 58a of the 2000 Terrorism Act.
If similar laws were enforced in California, the world would never have witnessed this month’s infamous pepper spray incident at UC Davis on November 18th.
Grateful acknowledgement for original footage to: James Newman, NufffRespect, The Guardian, TriWooOx, Tricky20001, Ltroonster1, Hauerbach1992, LeakSourceArchive, AggieTV, JMackFaragher and others.
