Two faces of Glasgow. Yesterday, the pre-industrial, Victorian, under moody clouds thing. Today, definitely post-industrial, attempts to modernise the remnants of late 20th-century industrial landscapes (the modernistic building ahead being the Glasgow science park, opened in 2001; and the tower is the tallest building in Scotland, apparently). But still, the moody clouds thing.
So I find myself in Glasgow for a couple of days, meaning the four biggest cities in Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee) have all made it onto the blog in less than four months. I don’t know the place well but at least this afternoon proved that it does give good cemetery.
And the answer? Is no, not at the moment. It’ll pass.
We’re still not moving a great distance from home. Taken down the side of the cinema in Hebden Bridge. Why do I like it? The arrow, the lines, the capturing of Joe’s shuffling gait.
A lot of restaurant- and pub-related posts lately. Well, that’s life — this week there’s been little more than home, work and pub. Bear with it…
First day in Manchester for a while. Ominous clouds, but they passed over without molesting us. I like this shot — trips to deepest Africa notwithstanding, one of my favourite ones for a while.
We flew to Tanzania on Turkish Airlines so changed planes in Istanbul, allowing this city to get onto the blog a second time following my trip to Beirut two years ago. Who knows, one day I might even leave the airport here — it’s a city I’ve never properly visited. This was taken from the plane as we taxied to the second take-off of the day.
Downtown Bradford has been a hole for a while now, a big building site that carved out the centre of the city and then stopped evolving for years, because the money ran out. But there seems to have been some movement on it lately, which is good for Bradford’s sake and also because it generally indicates that public infrastructure projects have not yet quite died a death in this country — though perhaps this one was just too embarrassing to leave half-completed.
Estate agents would describe this as ‘in a highly desirable location with a world-class view, but in need of renovation and lacking certain amenities’. In other words it isn’t on a road and doesn’t have mains anything, which is probably why it’s been abandoned for many years. This is Clough Head Farm, off the Widdop road above Hardcastle Crags near Hebden Bridge. I’m still in training for the walk I will begin a week from today.
I have been re-reading Gerry Badger’s superb book, The Genius of Photography, a fascinating history of the medium. Last time I did this I went all social realist on this blog and decided I was taking away these commentaries and letting the images speak for themselves. This lasted about a week after I received a surprising number of complaints both directly and indirectly. So don’t worry, I’m not going to do that again.
But Badger’s book does always make me ask, just why am I doing this? What is it I’m trying to create? Is it art? Am I making a statement about the world? I think the answer has to be no, I’m not an artist. But what I am is a blogger, a diarist: I’ve kept a journal for over thirty years now (yes, every day), and this blog has become an extension of it into the visual medium, and also a public medium. I hope I create pictures that are aesthetically pleasing along the way — a body of photographic work if you like, after all, I take so many that some of them are going to be half decent. But just as important is the accumulated narrative. This blog depicts the world as I see it each day, no more, no less. No photos are posed or staged, and all light is what I have to work with on the spot. And that’s what I do.
I doubt it’ll make much impact on the history of photography or be noticed by Gerry Badger should he ever write a second edition of his book, but it gives me a sense of my own place in the world, and that’s what gives it value.
