UNDERCONSTRUCTION 4 November 2008
Season 4 of our favourite night of alt.performance works-in-progress kicked off on Tuesday at Bistrotheque, with work from Spanky, Akimbo, Dame Jayne and Le Gateau Chocolat. Pix here.
UNDERCONSTRUCTION Season 4
Lisa Lee and the crew return to the stage at Bistrotheque on Thursday November 4th, for a new season of performance works-in-progress. Click on the image above for a personal selection of my favourite photos from the last couple of seasons. Some nice images here, but they don’t do justice to the sheer diversity of acts, and the energy, enthusiasm and sheer brilliance of much of the work. For more on UNDERCONSTRUCTION, check their MySpace. You can find the rest of my pix from UNDERCONSTRUCTION over on Flickr. But most importantly, come along.
Kit List for Nightlife/Club Photography
I’ve received a few emails recently asking what kit I’m using. Virtually all the photos here and on Flickr were shot with a Nikon D200 or D300, although a few are from my Leica D-LUX 3 compact. I use the D300 almost exclusively now — the dynamic range and colour are vastly superior to those of the D200, and the metering is way more flexible. It’s a big heavy body, but I love it. Many of my favourite shots were taken with the D200, but I don’t miss it. Most of the club shots are with on-camera (or hand-held) SB-800 …
Polaroid Retrospective
Excellent show of polaroid works at the AOP Gallery in Leonard Street.
Jonny Woo’s Birthday Party
Tucked away in a bar at a Casino on the ‘wrong side of Leicester Square’, with a light up dancefloor and some fabulous outfits and performance turns… pix here.
This is War!
Spent the weekend rather immersed in the world of war photography. I’ve been involved in James Nachtwey’s XDR-TB campaign over the past couple of weeks, and seized the opportunity to watch the documentary about him, War Photographer, at a rare screening at the Barbican. The film is a must-see. If I were screening it, I’d programme it on a double bill with Chris Marker’s Sunless. To me, both Marker and Nachtwey focus unblinkingly into the abyss which — for much of the world — was the twentieth century, yet frame their record of these terrors in a radiant humanism. In …
Before The First Thought
I’m bored by posed nightlife photos. Club kids are ready to freeze for the camera at a split-second’s notice, and photographers seem generally happy with that. The result? A tradition of static, posed ‘street fashion’ shots. All well and good, but I’m much more interested in the unposed shot, taken before the reflex to ‘do the look’ kicks in. I want to catch the moment when our gaze first crosses, to snare that fleeting instant-between-people, before our relationship has been resolved as being between ‘photographer’ and ‘subject’, with the consequent spiral down into stereotypical role-play and performance that dynamic entails. …
Film Noir at Bar Music Hall, 17 October 2008
Helen Noir and Ingenue St. John at the decks, Dickie Beau and Amanda Pet on stage and stopping traffic on Curtain Road. Pix on Flickr.
Photojournalism: No More Heroes?
[The TED/Demos team working to raise awareness of XDR-TB with photojournalist James Nachtwey invited me to write a short piece on the future of photojournalism for their site. The following is a slightly edited version of that piece] We inherit the archetypes of the Photo-Journalist and their Work from the profession’s Golden Age: that of Time and Life magazines, and of early Magnum; the searing inscription of truth burnt into 36 frames of Ilford FP4. Photo-journalists as Heroes of the Modern Age. Times change. When we now read about the Magnum photographers who, upon hearing the breaking news while at …
A Magazine
Two of my photos were selected by Givenchy’s creative director Riccardo Tisci to accompany a profile of our friend Helen Noir in the current issue of A Magazine. In London, you can find A Magazine at Art Words.