learning to love all over again

remember… if you see somebody riding around with L plates, give them plenty of room….. it could mean they’re learning to love all over again. 

political without trying

as i continue to dip my woefully amateur toe into photography, a thing i’m noticing is oftentimes when i feel i’ve snapped dull pictures, i flick through them on the train ride home, and discover how the camera lens was more peeled than my eye ever was … i love these young women doing what was traditionally men’s work… one black one white. both on equal footing.. hair tied back out of the way, in full control of a situation… pure london.

dark and tender

here’s a dark and tender photograph i took last autumn.. her name is mandana. she fled the 1976 revolution in iran and descended on soho at the age of sixteen where she now runs her own private members club… it was quite late at night when i bumped into her and we talked only for a few minutes, yet clicked instantly right there by saint annes court alley where david bowie recorded hunky dory / ziggy stardust, and where marianne faithful kept her head down during her homeless days..  when mandana spoke she reminded me of marianne’s natural sophistication and street smarts which is a combination of things i find enormously attractive in people…

she also made me think of a fashion photographer called steven meisel who in the 1990’s became interested in doing portraits of older ladies. there’s something mystical about a face that’s flown down through the corridors of culture and experience. curiously the world of fashion photography hardly ever taps into it. i saw steven meisel in midtown manhattan once at a p.j harvey concert. she was very young then, but already had an older face. patti smith always had it too. these kind of ladies exude a knowledge of art and literature that radiates from their eyes, bones and jawlines. i love them for it

the orangemen and woman of london

i was born in Northern Ireland, where the orangemen and woman who take to the streets with accordions and drums are very different from the ones around here in soho …….. harry krishna for the weekend everybody 

oldsters in the city

i used to believe london was a young person’s sport, but i was wrong. fearless oldsters ride in on a crystal clear agenda, knowing what they want and where to get it with a minimal amount of fuss. they know their restaurants, theatres and drinking dens. age means they pace their day … young folk could learn a lot from them, instead of skidding about or falling flat on their backsides, guessing all over the surface of fun city.

london savoy

last summer while sat at a bar in the savoy drinking bellini made from pear rather than apricot, i casually mentioned to the cocktail waiter how beautiful a commonplace thing like ice is. he then replied by telling me how his ice was no ordinary ice. there are in fact a bundle of variants, but the one that i was referring to looked so good because unlike regular cubes, his block is constantly stirred all the way down to freezing…this removes all air bubbles and makes the ice far more dense, which means it doesn’t dissolve when being rattled around in a cocktail shaker… also, because of the glassy clearness and slower melt, it is this variant that is sourced for ice sculpture.

have you never been to the savoy doris?.. well you should go.. treat yerself for god’s sake. 

unwanted attention

in times like these, where it feels like the whole world is taking a selfie of itself, i find the bemused glare of citizens rejecting attention make for a far more compelling photograph. their reluctance renders them credible, unlike whores like me, who forever ache to give a camera lens a generous blowjob.

the honeymoon period

there’s a honeymoon period in men’s lives where they’re just about old enough to know their way around town, yet young enough with stamina to ride the thing. life’s dead simple as they mooch around, hermetically sealed off inside their spendy wendy headphones. it’s all about the clothes records hair drink drugs and girls.. nothing else.

emotional spectrum

one of the many fun things about going out fishing with a camera is no matter how fixed your agenda, you always end up with lucky shots born out of pure chance.

i love the polarity here between the kid and young adult. he’s happy as larry, while already the weight of the world colours her pretty face. alas, life becomes all too serious a business

car crash in summer

one ultra sunny day last summer, as we cruised along the english motorway system with our roof down, my camera caught this freshly toppled car… a policewoman comforted a very very young girl pacing around in a summer frock…by the look of her, she could have been headed to the seaside for a jolly time…but then suddenly this…

it’s the oddest thing… all could be going great, and then boom… reality changes in a flash… a dumb part of me wants to believe bad news is for bad weather.. not for summer days on the way to the coast.

francis bacon the brave mind that he was, once said there is great beauty in a car crash. shards of splintered glass strewn across a rainy road.. abstract splashes of fresh red blood. it takes a consummate artist to make those raw admissions, though no doubt if you’re there in the thick of it, it’d be a lot harder to see the terrible beauty of things.