Yesterday I had the fortune, if you could call it that, to visit the heart of the red zone in the central city. I was there with my friend and fellow artist and analogue photographer Paul Johns to recover his work from the badly damaged building he lives in on Manchester street, unfortunately this time [...]
Kia ora tatou: This short, terse and nasty e-mail arrived in my inbox late last week. Fortunately I was on the Road, and only having a BlackBerry gave me the perfect excuse for avoiding it. So I did. Now, however, having returned home, it simply will not go away. The person who sent it to [...]
Kia ora tatou: They say there are six degrees of separation. In New Zealand that number is smaller, and in Christchurch, smaller still. We all sensed we were going to discover we knew somebody who didn’t survive February 22′s earthquake. All of us within the Christchurch photographic community will probably have met Stephen at one [...]
I love teaching. It always seems to me that I get as much from my students as I hope I am giving them. Inevitably, as I drive way home, I begin to think about the questions they have asked me and what they have to tell me about my own perceptions of a medium which [...]
The greatest journey is the journey within -Rainer Maria Rilke Photography, like life, is a journey. Like all journeys it begins one day, and we set off, confident and enthused, certain of our destination. Because we know our destination, we are sure we know all the steps necessary to reach it. We are, after all, [...]
“…within five years Flickr will emerge as one of the major sources for licensing imagery… the other point about Flickr, is I can’t tell you how bad the most of the pictures are. I mean, we see this in the site up there (at Musee de L’Elysee) the noise of this contemporary photography is relentless [...]
Kia ora tatou: Colour is something we all take for granted. But we shouldn’t. As photographers and artists we ignore it at our peril. Colour is more than illustration or decoration. And we need to develop our own dialogue with it, as photographers and it is human beings. In this essay I want to do [...]
Carving is easy. You just go down to the skin and stop. Michelangelo Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something. Frank Zappa An opinion piece. The other day a thought wandered through the vast unoccupied gulf between my ears. Actually, it was more of a [...]
TJ WASHINGTON: Don’t mock me, my friend. It’s a condition of “mental divergence”. I find myself on another planet, Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though it’s a totally convincing reality in every way…I can feel, breathe, hear…nevertheless, Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. [...]
What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I’m not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I’m not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world. -Galen Rowell What I am [...]
I spent last weekend at the PSNZ central regional convention in Levin, where I was asked to be the keynote speaker. Those of you who couldn’t make it missed a real treat. However, in response to a number of requests, I have agreed to publish it here on the blog. Feel free to download it [...]
I came across this article online and decided to share it. While it pertains to music, reading between the lines I believe it has much to tell us about the photographic journey. The Revenge of the Intuitive-turn off the options, and turn up the intimacy. By Brian Eno I recently spent three days working with [...]
Uh oh I’m in trouble Someone’s come along and burst my bubble.. -Shampoo (lyrics) No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public -H L Mencken – The problem (and the challenge) with being in photography is speaking with your own voice. There was a time when technical expertise was what separated [...]
Hutia te rito o te harakeke, Kei whea te kōmako e kō? Kī mai ki ahau; He aha te mea nui o te Ao? Māku e kī atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata If the heart of the flax bush is removed, where will the bellbird sing? If I am asked, what is the [...]
Lately I have been thinking about the importance of motif in our photographs, and this has been becoming ever clearer as I do more and more creativity and design workshops. I still remember a conversation, albeit a brief one, which I had some years ago, with Craig Potton, the photographer and publisher. I hasten to [...]
