America blog

I have a few days in New York and Washington DC before I begin my photo/documentary project. For the project I’m staying with various organic farms across the US, all seemingly diverse in their approach to organic and sustainable farming.

My usual encounter with organic doesn’t go far beyond bulking at the slightly higher prices for organic veg at the supermarket while plunging headfirst into tesco value. This is also my first real experience of the US. My previous visit was when I was six and I stayed in New Jersey with my family during our transitional phase from Tokyo to London. All I really remember was the taxi driver gesturing to some far away buildings and said ‘That’s what King Kong climed up’. I think he meant the Empire State Building, but as my dad points out he could have been referring to the 1976 remake starring Jeff Bridges when Kong climbs the Twin Towers. Either way it was a fleeting experience at best…

Hopefully this should all make for an interesting trip, I’ll keep updating…!

lcc in norf’ lndn

Elephant Project

I’ve realised that I’ve haven’t posted anything about Elephant, so thought I’d write a little quick overview of what I did for the project.

My film was shot mostly inside lift number 6 in elephant and castle underground station. I focussed the camera on individuals as they made their way up or down. I opted to use video this time rather than stills, mainly because it helped to increase the sense of waiting and the passage of time. Also with video, I could capture the slight gestures or movements by the passengers that really gave away their discomfort of riding that lift.

In total the film runs for about 6 minutes before it repeats. 6 minutes from about 10 hours spent in that lift…mmm good ratio. It would be quite impressive for anyone actually to sit through the whole 6 minutes without breaking out into a cold sweat. For the privilege of filming in the Underground, I had to hand over 30 quid to TFL for an official looking pass. Only got shouted at a few times. The lift only broke down twice while I was in there. Now I mostly take the stairs.

I’ll do my best to try and upload the film onto this blog…

Major Project

After thinking long and hard about the grandfather project, it’s starting to look unjustifiable to me at this stage to travel to both inner mongolia and egypt to take pictures of sand…! I’ve decided instead to focus on the parallel rural communities they both lived in before they were swept away to these arid battlefields. So it’s looking like Japan and Devon is on the agenda for the summer. Will carry on brainstorming…

Major Project

Came back from rooting around old boxes and files in my gran’s house at the weekend and turned up some interesting nuggets of information. I found a commemorative album for the 8th Army, printed in 1944 that seems to parallel the China book given to my Japanese grandad. Also found out more about my grandfather’s time in North Africa and just writing to a surviving member of his group who currently lives in Australia.

With the approach to the project, I’m thinking of keeping the scrapbook idea, using the materials I already have and place them alongside a series of parallel landscape images that begin in my grandads’ rural villages and gradually end up in their desert postings. Having a few wacky ideas, but at the moment nothing seems to suite this project better than a more formal landscape approach. Also I’m wondering if the two parallel pictures visually connect in some way, it might make it more interesting…

Major Project – new idea!

After the conflict photography presentation, I thought it would be interesting to discover more about my grandfather’s experiences in the war and create a piece of work for the main project over the summer. I’m thinking it would take the shape of a photographic journey, retracing his steps and revisiting the locations where he served and fought, which were mostly in the deserts of Inner Mongolia. I’m not sure if it will be possible, but it would combine well with a project on my English grandfather’s war experiences, a Devonshire man who also came from a simple rural farming community and ended up fighting in a distant desert in North Africa. I’m just not sure if I’ve got the funds to do both this year…

This project will be fascinating for me personally, but I’ll try to think hard about an approach to the project so it doesn’t turn out to be a very private and self-absorbed piece of work. Hopefully I can come up with something that has a bit more to say than the usual retracing of family histories that you often see.

In the meantime I’m just trying to collect as much information as possible. On the Japanese side, I’m waiting on the Japanese military archives for the battalion field reports and the reason my grandfather left the war early and I should find out more about my English granddad from my gran who I’m seeing this weekend.

Main Project

Apologies to all for my lack of tlc for this blog. Seeing the first post continually must have become quite annoying… I’ll endeavor to dedicate a lot more time to it these coming weeks!

It’s quite general, but with regards the main project I would like to focus on an aspect of life either here or in Japan. One idea I had is a project on Mount Fuji, which has always been the ultimate symbolic landmark for the Japanese. The mountain is open for climbers during the summer months, the busiest time being around mid-August. The idea amongst climbers is to climb during the night to be at the summit in time for the morning sun, another symbol for the Japanese. It’s a pretty full on symbolic experience.

What I found interesting when I reached the summit (that is both a shrine, kitsch shop and post office) was how different people reacted when the sun began to rise. Most pulled out their mobile phones and digital cameras, but a large number began to spontaneously sing the national anthem or pray. In a country that is both increasingly secular and quite reluctant to face its recent Imperialist past (where the national anthem is rather neglected from everyday life) I thought it was an interesting reaction. So I’ve started thinking this relationship between the Japanese and Mt Fuji warrants some form of photographic documentation…I’m just trying to figure out how to approach it.

The people praying also got me thinking. In Japan, there is a word ‘mokuto’ 黙祷 which means ’silent prayer’ and originates from religious practices, but is also used much like the minute’s silence in the West. Mokuto is also performed at the beginning and the end of certain martial arts. It’s basically a form of meditation to quieten the mind. As a photographic project, I thought it might be interesting to photograph different individuals from different walks of life, each with their own form of ‘Mokuto’ in modern Tokyo, where time for meditation and contemplation seem to be at a premium..

I think I’ll keep doing a bit of mokuto myself and come up with better ideas…

some photos

London Calling

Hey all,

Finally got round to writing and making this thing go live!

It’s quite hard to start these things…what do you write? I was thinking of writing an overview of my life from the inception of project Tom in 1981 up until I started this blog a few minutes ago, but it’s probably best to save that for a rainy day…

So I think I’ll stick to the stuff I’ve been doing these last few weeks.

………So, here goes for starters!

Thought I’d start by writing about the series of images I was taking for a couple of weeks to meet the street photography brief. In short I took candid street portraits of people talking on mobile phones in the city.

I reason is when I went out looking at what kind of relationships people are having on the street, to me it was really interesting to see how often we all communicate and relate to others through mobiles. They’ve become such a integral part of our lives that they’re almost invisible and life without mobile phones would be unimaginable…unless you run out of credit.

The reason I find the city an interesting setting for the portraits is because to me it has a certain feeling to the place. The old financial institutions, the seemingly high pace of life and high pressure jobs these people are involved in create an interesting mix of elements. I know these are preconceptions about the nature of the people I shot, for all I know they could be very smartly dressed tourists. But for me half the fun is imagining the sorts of conversations these people are having and what kind of lives they lead, which I guess is more accessible if you know a bit about the setting. Okay, I’m waffling a bit now…

Actually, after I showed these to Jocelyn, he told me about a book on people on mobile phones that Martin Parr published a few years back. Dagnammit. But I’m going to still carry on shooting the series of images because after I checked out parts of Martin Parr’s book on the net, to me, although the subject matter is the same, I think his photos deal with different themes to what I’m trying to focus on. It seems to me that Martin Parr’s book concentrates more on the relationship between the person and the phone itself, whereas I guess I want to capture the relationship being conducted by the person through the phone.

Btw, city-boys don’t seem to appreciate candid portrait photography! I was surprised how colourful they could be with their language…I don’t think I’ve been verbally abused like that since I kicked the playground football on the gym roof in second year…