The Bartender Never Gets Killed

… will be resumed as soon as I get a new router!

It is my wife’s birthday today. Photographer’s spouses are very important as they have to put up with a lot - and she sure puts up with a lot! Here is one of her photos…

An addition to my Three Part Inventions series

See this pic bigger on my website

From a roll I’ve only recently got around to scanning the contacts…

Bee Flowers asked if the title for the blog was based upon the fact that my self-image was of being pissed on.

The problem with having a taste for pulp movies is no one ever admits to getting the references! Anyway, in Banderas’s ‘Desperado’ there is a scene in a bar with Quentin Tarrantino. When Banderas starts shooting, the bartender reaches for his gun. Banderas gets the drop on him, and the bartender says, ‘The Bartender Never Gets Killed’ just before Banderas shoots him. SO the title for the blog is a reference to the fact that the act of photographing, for me, at its best, and I admit it rarely happens, is about having your assumptions challenged. Hopefully the effect, whilst long-lasting, is not terminal…

(Edit)

Well, Bee now tells me that he DID get the reference, but I’ve forgotten the part where the Bartender gets pissed on. O.K. I need to rewatch it!

(Edit)

And Fred Fichter sent me a link to memorable quotes from the film

Doing another database search yesterday to find an image for a submission, I came across another old pic I’d half forgotten about. From my ‘green’ period…

… but I couldn’t come back empty handed.

And I did get some good light before the end of the day…

I was once fortunate to do a week-long workshop with Charlie Harbutt. I think Charlie is one of the best kept secrets in photography. He is a rare breed. He is, or has been, a photojournalist. Working in Magnum as well as co-founding his own agency.

He writes and talks extremely well about photography.

He is an exceptional teacher.

His personal work has also explored avenues that I find very interesting, especially for someone with a photojournalistic background, such as in this picture…

As a teacher I found him to be almost totally ego-less. His main concern was to find out what pictures were inside you. He wasn’t trying to churn out copies of himself. The effects of the workshop took, I guess, at least two years to work through for me. But without Charlie helping me to see that I was really interested in the photograph as a reflection of a psychological state, I’d never have attempted to do things like my Scene of the Crime series. He demonstrated how the moment of pressing the shutter, even in the fleeting moment of street-photography, could reflect the internal life of the photographer, by discussing this pic…

… and how nearly every element in the frame coincided with a preoccupation at the time.

From ‘Travelog’

Great photographs exist not so much where image and reality meet and balance, but in the electric tension between the real and unreal…

This weeks work is to go back to where I shot this…

Although, with the spate of change around the city at the moment, it may not be there.

I’m starting to really enjoy tracking my photography with Google Earth. This was taken just above the red dot in the map, looking back towards Barcelona, inland towards the mountains. You’ll need to click through the map twice to get the full size version - Wordpress seems to be a bit clunky in the version hosted by WP with what you can do with images

… well, not the world maybe but certainly important for me.

Going back through my archives to find an image, I found that a small number of pictures stood out as having marked a change of direction in what I was trying to do with my photography, and also in what I was ’seeing’. A landmark, if you like, in personal development. This pic shouted at me as I walked past, one of those rare occasions when the image composes itself and you don’t need to work a scene.

It contains a number of elements that I followed-up in later work: foliage in an urban setting; an interest in narrative - something I’ve pursued since by using diptychs - ; and an element of the anthropomorphic, a forerunner for this image, with it’s snake-like corrugated metal entering the arena……

In this post on his blog, Chris Patterson bemoans the lack of wisteria at this time of year…

La Raval, Old Quarter. Now in the process of being yuppified…

When Barcelona hosted the Olympics, whole sections of the city were pulled down and redevloped. The part of the Olympic Village that borders the beach is essentially Tourist City, but behind the frontline are different kinds of spaces.

I photographed this site about 12 months ago as part of my Oasis project - it was a vacant piece of waste ground. Now I find this…

One of my longterm on-going projects is a study of the parks and gardens in Barcelona. These two from the Ciudadela.

I’m irresistibly drawn to shop windows. I’ve tried resisting the urge and just not making the picture, but it is a bit like NOT having that second cup of coffee in the morning…

The last nine months have been a very fallow time for me. Far too much effort and far too many hours doing the boring stuff needed to pay the bills.

The good news is that I now have space to work on my photography on a regular basis.

My webpage has become unwieldy. I now need to pay someone to redesign it. I also need to buy more webspace! So, rather than wait for completed projects and a redesign, I’ve decided to share my ongoing work in the format of a blog. I’m going to be working on a number of projects simultaneously but posting the images as they happen. I’m also going to post pics I just happen to like. In other words, a totally out-of-context presentation of images.

If this happens to initially look like a guy just walking around with a camera having fun, rather than a deeper exploration of a topic, so much the better!

Enjoy!