I had someone say to me recently after viewing some new work ‘… you have forgotten your duty as an artist to make your work accessible…’

Check out this post by one of my favourite photogs .

Okay, so i can solve the I.E. problems by writing a .htaccess file with this in it..

# MS Internet Explorer – Mozilla v4
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/4(.*)MSIE
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.IE.html [L]

# Netscape v6.+ – Mozilla v5
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/5(.*)Gecko
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.NS5.html [L]

# Lynx or Mozilla v1/2
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Lynx/ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/[12]
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.20.html [L]

# All other browsers
RewriteRule ^index\\.html$ /index.32.html [L]

And THEN, I can write individual CSS scripts and pages for each type of I.E available, with all it’s foibles..

Or perhaps I should spend the time taking pics… ok….

Just had an email from Tim Atherton that the post content is being ‘eaten’ by I.E.6.

I only have Firefox, IE7, Opera 6/7/8 so I can’t see the problem so this isn’t going to be easy to fix.

But I have to ask… why is anyone using a) an old browser and b) IE??????? Only joshing.

Update.

Looks like I’ve solved that problem but if anyone has any difficulties in browsers, please let me know.

Got the blog imported and working.

What a joy WordPress is in comparison to Movable Type!!! I’m a fairly intelligent person, not a tech or web genius, but I can get my head around most things designed for normal mortals – well ok, except flash, and CSS position markers give me a headache. But MT is so badly, clunkily designed and the documentation is as dense as a doctoral thesis! I’d tried for about 4 days last week to make the migration to foundobjectsgallery.com with MT but gave up. Hence my joy with how easy the install and setup of WP went.

I’ve listed my reasons for shifting blog location in the last post on the old blog

I’m quite happy with the new look although I miss the red banner bg – I may put that back. I was also really happy to find out whilst googling around, that #808080 is 50% grey, so I’ve now got a totally neutral bg to present pics. I’ll probably be playing when, and if, I have time.

Update.

Ok I put the red banner back. Next problem is it looks ok in Firefox but in IE the header text has an underline – now where the bugger is that coming from…

Update 2.

Ok got that sorted. Never forget that a clickable title also takes the css attributes of a link – write out 100x

Bear in mind the last time a train track was constructed under Barcelona (last year) half a neighbourhood disappeared into the resulting hole

I’ve had a couple of emails asking what criteria I use to combine pics, and in particular Exotic5 – which some people seem to see as a riff on a set of colours.

There are more hairdressers in Spain, per head of the population, than any other European country. Image is very important. The role of women is also something that is fiercely contested.

For those over 40, who grew up under Franco and the Roman Catholic church, the traditional role of mother and wife first, and anything else second, can cause fierce tensions.

I saw a middle-aged woman hanging out those t-shirts. Looking at the style of the clothes I’m guessing for her son. They are immaculately done. Looking ‘at pixels’ you see nary a crease, and that straight from the washing machine. She took her time, and did everything with great care and attention.

Shortly after that I spotted the hairdresser’s window. A slightly faded poster advertising a different kind of role model. And yes, the colours matched the previous pic. So I couldn’t resist the combination

Thanks for taking the time to comment! As always it is very much appreciated.

The blog is a good place to post singles and work in progress rather than tight sequences, so I’ve been using it a fair bit. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’ve trimmed down the website a lot – only one urban landscape project there now – so the blog is stepping in to take up the slack.

The trips… yeah I have a huge guilty feeling everytime I do one of these. I love shooting for them as it really makes you concentrate on compositions – I’m intensely aware of the spaces I’m shooting, so the high is very rewarding. The guilt comes from making these wonderful compositions by a montage and not as single pics. I’m very aware that people respond to the highly graphic nature of these, so I’m very tight with myself to only combine pics from one space. After all their reason for being is to reflect on a particular space, not just to be merely arbitrary graphic arrangements – even if that is how some people respond to them. There is a part of me that is also very worried that I’m not a photographer anymore, although in truth I stopped thinking of myself as a photographer a while back.

I really don’t know why the new work is easier. I’ve changed camera and format and I’m not really into my stride with the digicam yet. I’m so used to seeing a very bright high res MF gg and composing taking into account every detail, just seeing a vague outline on a lcd is taking some getting used to. Loosing the square hurts to. The square can be SO dynamic. You can use the sides, corners, top, every aspect can be made to work. The rectangle is not suitable for that. I couldn’t do those trip-type compositions with it.

It could also be that I’m much more assured so I’m not trying to prove myself with every pic. I’m quite happy to stand back and take ‘simple’ pics. Although, like you, I think the bitches brew has gone.

I’m not sure how the new stuff will work out. The aim is for a lulu-type book. I want to try and use singles, dips, montages,  all mixed together. The design of the book will be as important to the work as the pìcs I guess. Narrative is important to me, it is my main concern I think. Not so much the ‘story’ narrative of scene of the crime, but something more nebulous. You are right, I’m not really that interested in singles as stand-alones any more , but I’m am veryinterested in doing some serious montage work, not sure how but I hope to work on some ideas over the summer.

Anyway, thanks for the comments! I’ll probably come back to these after I’ve thought some more.

I posted yesterday on John Brownlow’s Streetphoto list, a small selection of single images taken as raw material for the ‘Exotic’ multipiles.

I was delighted and suprprised to find that an old shooting partner from London, Jawed Ashraf, had left a crit of the work.

When I first came across Jawed a numbers of years ago, I was slightly awed at the perceptive way he wrote about images. I also saw that visually he was way ahead of me, he was searching for something I wasn’t even ready to look for.

I’ll be writing a response to this later today (I hope if I get time!) , but his comments are things I always take very seriously as the guy is just soooo astute! Anyway, over to Jawed…

Blimey you’ve been busy on your blog recently! I’m one of those people who really can’t be arsed to create an account to comment on a blog, so this will have to do.

I commented before about how much I like your recent triptychs, their jewel-like quality and what I imagine as a guilty pleasure they elicit when you make them.

Today looking at the dips, trips and montage that you’ve posted recently, I’m thinking:

1. you’re working in a very similar way to 5/6 years ago – the shop windows, the urban plant life “intrusions”, the candy-coloured whistlestop tour.

2. I can’t work out why these work so much better than all those prior years’ work (singles or multiples). The montage you posted on 29/6 is seemingly in a whole different category for me. I think I felt there was something arbitrary about your older multiples. My “purely visual” sense never found a way in and a locus of engagement. That work was an effort, and never seemed to afford me a welcome.

I can’t help thinking your pix must be “simpler” than you were once making – it seems like the most straightforward explanation for my ready acceptance of them. Of course the alternative is merely that you’ve mastered what you’re doing, and that includes making your work approachable (to me, at least). I hope you don’t mind me saying I can’t tell which of those it is!

I’m more than a little suspicious that I’m simply falling for some kind of “easy” aesthetic – whoops, “prettiness”. I’m completely befuddled, but not in a bad way, because I genuinely find these engrossing.

3. I’m wondering if the “jazz” has gone. Again, I never felt really committed to the jazz associations that we used to discuss in regard to your work. I could see how they could be made, but they were never my route to meaning or sensibility in your pictures. But again, this could simply be a case of you having mastered the jazz thing.

I’m not sure yet I’m ready to take these pictures on for their meaning – I think I simply like looking at them too much to give much time to meaning. Lazy, I know – but I think they just need time and what I like about them is they graciously offer me that time.

—

I’m glad to see you writing at length about strategy, and particularly being dismissive of the typological impulse that photographers seem to entrap themselves with.

I’d be disappointed if you reverted to making single images because the multiples seem so fluid, so instinctive. Also, I can’t help wondering if a collection of separate single images can’t help but being read as an exploded multiple – because you have set the tone. You’ve made your bed…

Also, thinking of process, there’s a gulf (for me as an outsider, the viewer) between your act of taking each single picture and the assembly of these multiples. Maybe it’s just photographer’s instinct, “how pictures are really made”. But I don’t “believe” that the kind of narratives you want to express can be formed from a single image.

But I admit, I’m a weak “narrative reader” when it comes to your work, e.g. I was never engaged by the Scene of the Crime pix.

—

This:

http://thebartender.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/trip-7/

is truly surprising. It feels ridiculously new – I’ve never seen anything like that before. Absurdly simple to take in, but pictorially riotous.