I’m pleased to have been selected for the photography fair at the Underground Gallery, which is a quite new central London photography gallery! Looking forward to seeing the whole exhibition and all the other photographers work. Tonight is the private view at Underground Gallery which is in the actual underground under the ground at Charing Cross tube station indeed. 
Earlier this year a group of friends including me started a photography collective called, most confusingly and hard-to-rememberably, five eleven ninety nine. Apart from exhibiting at PhotoIreland Festival, and self-publishing a couple of nice little soft-back books, we’ve been playing a game we call Broken Train. Every day one of us posts an image in response to the previous image. The image can be of anything from anywhere, the only limit is our imaginations! (and it’s availability online). We’ve lately been inviting the great and good of the photography world to play with us, and they only bloody have - from Martin Parr to Alec Soth and all kinds of people in between…take a look here, it’s an adventure!
And here’s the most recent image by William Klein…
I entered the portfolio competition on Jorg Colberg’s Conscientious blog a few weeks back and humbly accepted that I was not one of the winners. This was quite easy to do as the winners were excellent – I recommend a look at them all: Mirjana Vrbaski, Nigel Bennet, and Yaakov Israel. But happily, Mr Colberg did feature my work on the blog despite this, selecting the photograph below taken in Newcastle during my lonely trip around England last year as the featured image. Cheers Jorg!
My friend Hiroshi is a brilliantly talented jewellery designer and we all try to get him to ‘loan’ us jewellery and then we try and keep it FOREVER! He spends half the year in London and half in Tokyo, and is looking to develop his web shop as well as get his jewellery stocked in boutiques here in London. We did some photos for his website and promotional things with the beautiful Isla, art-directed by graphic designer Ross Clarke, and it was lots of fun. These are from Hiroshi’s new square collection – there are millions more designs to see soon on his website, http://www.hiroshikurokawa.com/
It’s exciting to have been picked out by the BBC’s picture editor Phil Coomes (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-14026759) as one of the featured images out of the 150 which will go on show from tomorrow night at Host Gallery, London. I hope people will have a look through the entire series To happiness, endlessly on my website, which the selected image is a part of.
Here’s what Phil has to say about the exhibition in general:
Eclectic mix at the Foto8 Summershow
Once again the Foto8 Summershow is upon us and with it comes a chance to view some compelling new work.
Photographs adorn the walls at Host Gallery just off Old Street in London like some weird giant 3D jigsaw.
(…)
The show comprises 150 images that have been selected by the Foto8 editorial team from more than 2,800 entries, and as you can guess by now, there’s no set theme. Photographers were invited to submit recent pictures that engage or challenger the viewer, with the resulting mix of styles and subjects all crammed onto the walls of the gallery.
Oddly enough it works very well. Though it can be overwhelming at times, it’s a treat to pick through the shots and find those that touch a nerve, raise a smile or that are harder to digest. It’s one show you really have to see up close and not just in the brochure or on the internet.
One other advantage of attending in person is that visitors to the show are able to vote for their preferred picture in the People’s Choice award. There is also a select band of judges who are also choosing their best in show, the result of which is announced at the launch party on 8 July.
Many of the pictures on show are part of larger projects. This one byHannah Jones is part of a series titled, To Happiness, Endlessly. It was taken during a road trip without a planned route, one where the photographer recorded what she calls, “disconnected experiences”. Well worth a look.
Cheers Phil, it’s appreciated!
I’ll have one picture in Foto8′s summer show at Host Gallery, London, this year. It’s a pleasure to have been selected, and I do like the picture they’ve chosen, though which one that is will remain a mystery until the opening on July 8th – it’s important to keep people guessing! It’s from my project to happiness, endlessly.
Photographing a blind person is an experience laced with so much paradox. Geoff was a willing participant in this complex engagement. He is endlessly fascinated with sight; his own lack of it; descriptions of the sighted world, of light, of this mysterious sense which to him typifies another world.
Geoff cannot ‘picture’ anything. He can remember that an object is there, but would not be able to describe it. He does not know what a tree is, only the feel of the bark of its’ trunk. We took one walk down the street he has lived on for twenty years or more, and he asked me what I could see. He had never known there was a pharmacy, a bus stop, a zebra crossing much nearer to his house than the one he always uses.
I was interested in the different ways in which we manage our lives, his methods for doing this without sight. What does he do when an object is lost, or a number left on an answering machine, how to know when his clothes are dirty, where it is safe to cross the road? How differently the world is engaged with when sight is not possible.
But my other interest lies in the inherently visual nature of this project. I am trying to make images, using a scheme of tonalities between light and dark, concepts Geoff has no understanding of. I am by necessity in a one-way relationship with my subject, a voyeur. He can never look back. But Geoff understands this complexity, is himself fascinated, wants to explore what it means to be photographed when he cannot conceive an image, a picture, light and dark.
I know that I cannot pretend to be making photographs which somehow reflect Geoff’s view of life, when even those terms – reflect; view – have literally no meaning for him. Do I try to make images which show how I see his existence? Should I try to be simplistic and take all of these photographs in the dark? I talk with Geoff about all of the questions which persist as I photograph him.
