Reclaim The Night march in Portsmouth

This was a really good event last night, largely a feminist thing, protesting about safe streets at night, anti rape, anit domestic violence towards women..
It would have been better for my project if the fucking Auto Focus on my camera hadn't decided to DIE :'( and shooting manually with a flash gun in a moving march, without a tripod is quite taxing. Not overly happy with the images I took but I managed to salvage a couple (thanks, free photoshop) but yeah. here they are..Today is wank.. Hopefully tonight will be sweet.. and if all else fails I'm seeing Adam Hills on sunday so that'll make things good! ^_^

Guildhall Square Wave for Climate Change!

Anti Apathy ftw!

I'm doing a Uni project on Anti Apathy :)
Basically, getting people to verbalise what they believe is wrong, or feel strongly about, or would change if they could.. It's fairly interesting.. I've set up a facebook group asking people about issues [which you can join and post on here: http://www.facebook.com/#/group.php?gid=209588134501&ref=ts ] and then i'm documenting them in whatever ays i see fit.. going to protests, social meetings, creating set up "what if" shots, and fairly general images to collate with peoples statements -these are anonymous!- that will fit together in a book [hopefully] by January.

Here's a few images to start with:

To Write Love On Her Arm Day

"To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery."

please write love on your arms today to show support for all the sad, lonely, depressed, afraid and emotionally troubled people in the world. for anyone you know who has felt this way, or for yourself. let them know you care. today, from 00:00 till 23:59

- http://www.twloha.com/vision/

Julie

A girl I knew considerably well once upon a time, and loved dearly, commited suicide last thursday.
I don't really have much to say expect it was inevitable, I met her many years ago in a sort of Rehabilitation centre. She was the most pensive girl I knew. Although incredibly beautiful of face, she was anorexic and depressive and deeply psychotically damaged. As much as I'd love to say she changed my life for the better, I believe we were bad for each other back then. I constantly wished her well although we never met up outside.
I don't have any photographs of her sadly, but her image remains with me and I have drawn her thusly. (taken from a doodle I did during an art therapy course during that period)


I wish she could have found the peace she craved. The world was too much for her. RIP <3

My Dear Old London Town

A recent trip to london with an architect friend..

The Tourist Gaze

These are the final images for my most recent Uni project. I wanted to look at Globalization and the Tourist industry. I decided to focus on the Tourist Industry within London, and more specifically, the Tourist Gaze.

In Martin Parr's book Small World, Geoff Dyer states that:

"Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing the increasingly homogenous ‘global culture’ where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed."

I was interested in the idea that people have the opportunity to travel freely, to whichever destination they choose, and yet a large majority go to the same tourist "attractions" and come back with photographs of themselves in front of these landmarks, without actually exploring the cultures of the country itself. These tourists could have taken a postcard from the internet, and used computer software to place themselves in the image, and saved themselves the money! This relates to the idea of Photography being used to prove we exist, to show our friends and families that we have done something interesting, to show that we are alive (and up-to-date with digital technology!)

THIS IS GLOBALISATION.

I wanted to mock this kind of travel, but in a more gentle way.

I originally wanted the landscape around the tourist to be instantly recognisable, to shoot around famous landmarks; trafalgar square, picaddilly circus, big ben..
But I actually prefer the images where the landscape is a bit more generic.

The architecture is images 1 and 6 are very European in their feel, and I think this works well as it says more about the Tourist perspective globally, not just locally.

Black and white photography enables me to take a step back from the usual, vivid colours of tourist photography.

I'm quite happy with these set of images, I think there are a nice range of compostitions, which stops this kind of series getting too monotonous!

Image number 6 is the Print I am submitting to our forthcoming exhibition in January, although I am continuing with this project until then.