The Bartender Never Gets Killed

Patrick Shanahan is someone I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. An English photographer-turned-academic whose work strikes a chord with its unique Englishness. We are swamped with various US-centric aesthetics, the German School etc etc so it is nice to see something so essential English.

His last published project, Esperantis also contains images shot in Spanish locations, some, like his Sitges pics, I’ve shot the same location, so you also get the same sense of ‘Brit in Spain’ I feel with some of my images. He seems to have a close link to Spain and has produced a number of bodies of work here.

My deliberate nod to this pic was this one, taken of the same location but from a different viewpoint

But enough of my pics and back to Patricks…

Terra Vision was a foreruner to the Esperantis project

However, my personal favourite was cornwall: a post-landscape project that looked at how the lack of local industry and the turn to tourism has changed the Cornwall landscape…

I love the kind of irony dealing with nationalist symbols that is almost completely lacking when dealing with American flags etc

Looking back from current work to the early work it is interesting to see how Patrick moved from producing icons to showing more context within his images

Although I’d love to have this hanging on the wall

The rollei has survived initial open-heart exploratory surgery, but now needs a new heart, I mean shutter. A donor has been found and the transplant is scheduled for early next week. In the meantime, some square pics…

A bit late I know, but when I was in Logroño (capital of La Rioja, where the wines come from) at Christmas

I used the family digi ps for something other than family snapshots. I’d forgotten totally about these and only came across them when I was doing some digi-spring-cleaning.

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All a bit too digi-holga for me but hey… (this camera is also in for repair/replacement - what is it with me and equipment!?)

Out of the blue I had an email from Keith at the weekend, and I’ve been spending some time since then going through his new work, and re-looking at his older stuff.

Keith is an intereresting guy. He’s done/doing the pj and documentary photographer stuff, he’s now also producing documentary video work. He works 35mm, digi, LF, BW, colour you name it! His subject matter is also extensive - landscape, urban, people etc etc

I first really started taking notice of Keith when I saw this image of his:

It is an image of excquisite beauty; the red motif, repeated squares, the light, the viewpoint is perfect.

I think viewpoint is something Keith is very good at - he finds images that can only be described from this one POV - many photographers utilise ‘the moment’, but more for Keith is the ‘where’.

Keith is currently working on a project called Uniontown . Unfortunately these are on flickr and I haven’t found a way to link directly to the images. But spend some time on his flickr site. It is really refreshing to see a photographer with so many interests.

Tim Atherton beat me to talking about Mike’s work , but for a long time, I’ve been totally captivated by Mike’s photography. The reasons for this are numerous, but I’ll mention just three;

His way of working is to not edit or work with his images until significant time has passed. From personal experience I know that this gives you the opportunity to distance yourself from your images and also to allow your idea of the ‘keeper’ to develop.

His vision is something that I know is lacking in my own work. Even when I can’t compose on the gg and just point and guess, my pics have a formalism that I can’t (not sure if I want to, either) avoid. In comparison, Mike has the art of capturing the glimpsed moment down to perfection.

Mike’s aesthetic also brings with it an intriguing problem that I can’t wait to see resolved. When you look at his work and speak to him, you know that the individual image is subservient to the whole - you cannot pull images out of the set - everything needs to be looked at as a unit. So the question, how do you present this? As sequenced images printed as one and put on the wall? As a web gallery? A book? A multimedia display? I’m working my way through this problem in a couple of series I’m doing - no answer yet - but for Mike I think it is an urgent question that needs resolution.

For those looking for a place to start, I can recommend this series , or Mike’s latest collection here.

(Edit)

Forgot to add that Mike’s latest series has two more components, here  and here.

…is to be able to do this stuff so that I can resolve the fine detail detail that makes this kind of image so compelling - although the web is hardly the place to do it justice…

From Tim Atherton’s ‘Muse-ings’ blog.

Green Thing 2… I’m always seeking for ways to cover the material found in my ‘Only a Green Thing’ project in colour. Here’s a couple from two weeks ago

I’m always interested in photographers who try to construct narratives within single images. Frank Rothe is one - check out his Shanghai work…

Spent the weekend here a while back - 3 pics from the backlog whilst the rollei is being sorted

This pic of Ralphs had me going back to the archives for this…

I’ve a great fondness for a lot of the colour work coming out of Memphis - notably Chris Patterson and Huger Foote.

However, another photographer whose work I like a lot who has the same personal use of colour as the ‘Memphis School’ without actually living in Memphis, and who has an intimate style reminiscent of Todd Deutsch , is Ralph Ballerstadt.

Over the last few years, Ralph has been developing a style where the composition and use of colour are integrated in a way few photographers seem to manage.

One slightly (only slightly!), annoying aspect of Ralph’s work is he never gives us complete bodies of work, but he prefers small, self contained, ’sets’. But trawl his website, well worth it!

Don’t you worry I’ve done hundreds of these. There’s a strong probability you will be impotent and incontinent, but you’ll be alive and that is a result, isn’t it? (Doctor to Peter O’Toole in ‘Venus’)

I normally try and avoid this part of town as it really is a tourist hell-hole. If you enjoy watching tourists each drinking a 2 litre jug of sangria through a straw that locals use for a family of 6, go there. I’m really surprised Martin Parr hasn’t shot the location…

My parents tell me that as I kid I used to spend ages looking through gaps in fences and chain link lining up ‘patterns’…

Tree from the Olympic Village, scraggy and uncared for - NOT what you normally find in Barcelona green spaces, especially not semi-pijo places…

Oh happy day…

BTW, it isn’t my thing, but if anyone is looking for a project idea… internet cafes

Whilst the rollei is in for open heart surgery, I’m going over a backlog. One worrying thing, my repair guy is going out of business as he’s not getting enough analogue work, so he’s now working for canon and he has his workshop up for rent. Good thing he is still servicing old customers at least for now…