we wish you a merry...

As a student I had always wanted to get up on top of the 13 story building the photography section was housed in- just never got the chance.

Now that I'm an assistant these things get a whole lot easier ;-)


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Hope you are enjoying your holidays, Best wishes for 2010!

self-portrait and eleven photos of the château de la roque baignard de nuit

the way things were then

family snapshot

fruit and the music room

Cinema! (or how I came to meet Mickey blue-eyes)

This man is Stéphane Orlando, pianiste extraordinaire specialised in music for silent films. He can be seen around Brussels, in the wonderful cinema museum or in other cinemas and concert halls around town, swooning on the piano or conducting ensembles of varying sizes and compositions in intricate improvisations and constructions.



I met Stéphane at the same time as I met violinist Marc Tillema - Guillaumes father (see my earlier post here)

Norway, again

Ok, I'm feeling a bit silly - like I've just had some proof that this going backwards idea is a bit of a trap. As I said last week I wanted to prepare a selection of photos from a trip to Norway I took some time ago, as I was making the selection I got an acute sense of déjà vu, as the number of photos on the screen dwindled I realised that I had indeed been there before - in fact, I recognised the same decision making processes arriving at what seemed to me to be pretty damned close to the same choices...





But what gets me is that seeing the selection I find myself thinking that I had already made this selection, I had already posted it on my very first website and shared it with Fred and Jeff, the friends with whom I had travelled, and that was the end of that, the series was forgotten and I moved on the better for it.

The question is am I now wasting my time repeating processes that I have been through sufficiently long ago to have forgotten? Should I be burying my negatives and concentrating on moving forwards instead of scanning them and going backwards?

(re)moving

Parallels II - portraits croisés

Me by Chantal Vey

Chantal Vey by me

Parallels

When I first came to Brussels to study photography I brought with me a shiny new 503cw from Victor Hasselblad. The camera was so new that I had hardly dared use it, perhaps I was scared that it would vaporise from my hands if I held it too much, maybe I was afraid that I wouldn't take any photos that justified my having such a wonderful machine.

Therefore I started the year timidly with my trusty Nikon camera, it was a slow start until I took that shiny mechanical marvel with me on an afternoons visit to my host-families parents place where I spent a wonderful afternoon with them and felt free enough to take the following series:




I caught myself thinking of this series this morning and wondering what it would look like if I put these other more recent photos alongside it.

Fancy a trip to Norway?

Winters-a-coming, expecting the first freeze in the coming weeks. Came across the photos from a trip to Norway awhile back when I went to visit my friend Fred Birkelund, the Norwegian who went to Australia (Albury/Wodonga no less!) to study photography when I was about to leave for Belgium for the very same reason. These days he is the photographer in the Museum of Oslo.

Just a teaser - with a bit of luck I just might pull a few together to put up here.

You can see some of Freds photos on his site - just follow the link here on the right hand side of the page.

nostalgia II

I go backwards to go forwards

So I'm still going backwards in scanning all my negatives, this evening I'm just on the point of going back to my last trip home to Australia, which dates back to a little more than three years ago. It's a funny feeling going backwards at the same time as I am moving along in other works. It is funny to see, as I am tagging my images with words such as portrait, Interior, blad, and contax, that I have (so far), this many photos of one thing and that many of another.

I always have had the impression that my work is not the series that I have made for this or the other presentation, but the whole lot of photos in their most basic form. Is this a trap? Is this just the danger of always looking back instead of continuing the experimentation?

Sometimes I work

Yes, it does happen - like the other day where Carine, the pr rep (amongst other things) for Versant Sud, a Brussels based publishing house that I'm working with asks me oh-so-nicely if I could take some photos of a book launch she was organising.

Then it's the knee-jerk cringe reaction just as every time I'm asked to do this kind of reportage (je suis un artiste vous savez!)Or is it that I'm just scared of actually working?!!

It was an interesting experience. Some people asked me if I could send them copies of their photo- I took these photos so that I wouldn't forget who they were.

choices

These kinds of choices are still very difficult for me (along with the photo from my last post). Who finds this stuff easy?

every photo has its stories

Danielle and her husband Charles, complete with a photo of Charles in his younger days.

I get along well with Charles, something that apparently doesn't seem to happen very often. I couldn't not take some photos- the light, the scene, the fact that I felt that they wouldn't mind and that we were sharing what seemed to me to be a complex and important moment.

I drove home happy to have seen them as a couple, to have heard them call each other by their pet names, to have heard them teasing each other lovingly.

nostalgia

It's just another darkroom, a disappearing breed, a place of contemplation, working with a different rhythm accompanied by different sounds and light.

Guillaume before he had ever seen a Hasselblad

I hardly knew him back then, he had just joined the second violins after I met his father playing as a figurant in a french téléseries set in a cabaret in the 1930's.

He has grown a lot since that photo which was taken more than a year ago.


This was at one of our last concerts (phone photo):




And here is the photo he had taken of me that same morning in Berismenil (way back in the days):

Chef d'orchestre Marc Collet and son

A dear friend and mentor.

Why this photo was the last one on the film, why it had to get cut so poorly, and on top of that fall down whilst drying, remains a mystery to me.

Portrait of a friend

Wonderful French photographer and good friend Chantal Vey asked me to take her to a special place for me and to tell her a story. I spent the whole day taking her around the village where I had been an exchange student.

Theres no stopping now!

Ok - just a couple images of a work in the pipeline, a collaboration with my good friend Pascalia Papadimitriou.

I'm starting to teach- perhaps a good moment to pick up this project we started last year and see where we are going with it.

Going backwards

Ça y est, I've cleaned the inside of my scanner, lined up a handful of external hard-drives and I'm going full numérique. It feels as if I've been floating between the darkroom and digital for at least the last 5 years and in my confusion there has been an accumulation of stuff just waiting to be looked at.

thetrip

Good lord!!! Two posts in one month, I don't know what is happening to me :)


So - a few images, a few thousand kilometres and all of a sudden I'm more serious about keeping this blog.

Back in the saddle

Or rather out of the saddle ;-)

I will soon be posting a selection from the photos of the trip.




Just before leaving I went to a friends wedding and had the pleasure of taking some inhabitual photography.

Ok ok ok

I'm about as good at posting as I am at keeping my place clean,

which brings me to some new images I am working on.

Planning a bike trip from Berlin to Istanbul for next month.

Semana Santa - Christoph Konopatzki

Another wonderful series from Christoph Konopatzki:

It's a summer holiday - Christoph Konopatzki

This is wonderful to discover now that we're hitting spring!





See more, including some fantastic new work here

Antwerpen - Noorderdokken :: Arnold Lebovics

find more of Arnolds work here and here.

Anybody heard of Simon Hoegsberg?

Just discovered this guys work over this last week - Fantastic stuff! I have been dosing my discovery to looking at one work per day just to keep the pleasure levels up.

Sorry not to have a slideshow for you, but you can take a look here.

Diana Color - Peter Schafer

Ok - I just couldn't resist...



wow

More here

ttv - Peter Schafer

I've discovered some beautiful photos on Peter Schafer's page. Don't miss the two "Diana" series, I had a hard time choosing which one to put here!





"The pics were taken with an Argoflex TLR and an Anscoflex TLR, using a Pentax ME-F w/ a 100mm lens and a couple close-up adapters to take the pics of the viewfinder imag. I use Velvia 100 film."

Estate Sales: Everything must go - Danielle Aseff

Some wonderful visions of suburbia from up and coming photographer Danielle Aseff.

Dad's Slides - N T Klein

50's-80's Australia & Papua New Guinea




I found these in the garage when I was helping my Mum move a couple of years ago... I had known that they were there but hadn't realised that we had so much in common.

Still a lot of work to go but I'm putting some kind of book/exhibition of his work together.

Facing things - Jonathan Levy

The surprising north, I mean really north! Seen by photographer Jonathan Levy

The Old Couple - Dan Hayon

Another one that really must be seen full screen or in its original context.




This is the second part in a three book series.

"I imagined this book as a dialogue between their little black and white family photos,
- on the left pages -, two young people with plenty of projects and dreams for a better life and, on the right, photos from their last “station” in life, the little flat in a huge, grey, ugly popular building."


For a breath of fresh air and a good dose of vitality spend some time on Dan Hayons own blog here.

Polaroids - Ania Bystrowska

Mmmmmmm... Polaroids, thankyou Ania!!


" I think it's about my life. Something like autobiography, you know.
About friends, family, love, hate, places where I belong, work, travel, things I've done.
It's not a complicated project.
I would say : It is, because it is :)"


VISIT ANIA'S SITE HERE

Nausea - Bruno Charoy

This and more of Bruno's work (particularly some phenomenal and touching portraits) can be found on his viewbook page http://brunocharoy.viewbook.com/

This work has to be seen fullscreen...

I am working on getting the fullscreen button here but until then I recommend you see the series in it's original context: Nausea

femme

This is one of my first "coups de coeur", the story behind how I acquired these images is almost as wonderful as the images themselves.