Ey! There is no rifle in Ching Chong Cha...

Not my picture

Honey, please come down from the attic-it's been 20 yrs

A petroleum company have commissioned me to make some photographs of the interests they have in heavy industry and urban infrastructure.

They asked me to photograph various landscapes using the 'tilt/shift' effect. What this easy-to-do effect does is throw various parts of the scene into blur. It's been done millions of times before and will be done again, but it never ceases to look uncanny.

Scenes look like miniature models.

It's a gimmick in a sense, but I was thinking that this may be what most architects when they are faced with the world. It's easy to gloss over complex problems when the inhabitants of the scene are objectified and become gnomes with no feelings, or workers.

Venice Biennale of Architecture

http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html

I have been asked by Noero Wolff, a firm of architects, to produce a film about 3 schools which they built, or added to, recently. The schools are in Cape Town.

The only other moving picture which I have ever made(and can mention in the public realm) was called Jokes from Old Folks and appeared in Video Room of the National gallery in Cape Town.

This second stab at film/video is a touch more serious than the first.

Here are some stills from the project.

Cobus Best.

An extract from a letter to a friend:

I interviewed a car guard at Milnerton(MKT) today called Cobus. He had had his nose bitten by a boerbull and his surname is Best. He is George Best's cousin, he says. I wasn't sure about the relationship with the British hero until be told me that the dog owners gave him some box wine as a compensation for the nip. He said he poured some Martell(are you counting the nips?) into the box wine and slotted it before he had crossed the street...

What a good guy.

the etched hound

I resurrected my Olympus Mju, climbed Cape Town's Mount Olympus, snapped her(Cressida) with Ilford film, came home, processed it in my bathroom and posted it on Facebook...wow

Canny inverse

The canny part of the way in which this uncanny agglomeration(see post below) of objects presents itself is in the red of the pool table's felt: it's the precise inverse of perfect pool table green in the additive colour model.

When I saw this scene I thought of my delirious, drunken days at the University Club pool table I felt blue.

Cairo

I was invited to speak at a conference, on African Urbanism, in Cairo.

Amongst the heavies were Abdoumaliq Simone(urban theorist) and Filip de Boeck(anthropologist).

I presented my thoughts on some ethical problems associated with photographing strangers in a city, and a method of photographing cities which gives a sense of the way in which people move through urban space.

After the conference finished I walked Cairo...

The woman with her kid lives in an area called the 'City of the Dead'

I know her name, but I don't know how to spell it. Once I have a good translation I will post it.

Enjin Magazine.

Thank you Enjin Magazine.

http://www.reportageatrifestival.it/it/

Federica Angelucci of the Michael Stevenson Gallery has invited me to be a part of the show mentioned at the URL above.

It opens in mid-June, runs for 2 months and is held in Abruzzo, Italy.

The 'Handbags' have been included. Seven works, each at 70 cm in diameter, printed on uncoated paper and mounted on circular aluminum discs.

It's an interesting inclusion under the problematic banner of 'documentary', but I guess it will stand out amongst straighter forms of documentary photography.

The titles specify the name of the bag owner, the colour(from a pack of paint swatches) which the owner chose as the background and the date on which the photograph was made.

eg. Simone, Lush Bog, 5.12.2009

The Big Banana Bet

I was recently privy to a wager($25 000). The question on which the bet was founded was... it possible to reconstitute a peeled banana in less than 10 seconds?

In order to prove that this is possible I devised a mechanism to capture very fast motion.

Here are the results.

I am not the first person to use fancy photography to get rich. The first photographer to do it was Eadweard Muybridge.

His work was about small parts of hard-to-see actions. The narrative structure of his work was dissimilar(and strangely post-modern) to the banana series. The relationship between scenes in Muybridge's work is dissolved and each frame has its own distinct dramaturgy. In the BBB there is a distinct succession of productive actions leading to a happy finale which is justified by my friend Kilian's expressive succession.

ICON MAGAZINE spreads

Wicked. Here are the spreads.

Ponte, and Cape Town.

ICON MAGAZINE

The famous design rag from London asked me to photograph the city and include the controversial stadium. There they are, arranged neatly for das Camera.

I needed some sense of scale in the middle ground, so when an unsuspecting dog walker cruised past I gave her the large-format crash course.

'When I whistle depress this stalk, ok?'
'Ok'

Don't believe the hype. Large format is a piece of piss.

My dog is there as well. Looking back at the camera, returning the 'mechanised gaze' of the big boner camera which is shafting the entire city bowl.

Cressida is a woman dog so everything will be fine.