Let us begin with the picture below, which I like the most.

A silhouette defines a subject by its edges and there is just a second when the man and the boy separate from being one black blob. I see an adventurous boy holding the hand of a loving grandfather, on the edge of the sea and the mist. But that is my assumption and they could be anybody. Then they fold back onto one meaningless black shape, and they are gone. The mist persists all afternoon. Perhaps it is a metaphor.

Six hours earlier and 15 miles to the east the water is 5-6 degrees Celsius (41-42.8 Fahrenheit) just after dawn and people are swimming. This time there are six silhouettes of people and two more of dogs. Sea swimming is a tonic for the mind and soul, I am told. Some swimmers wear wetsuits, and others do not. Everyone wears rubber shoes to protect their feet from the beach pebbles, and goggles to shield their eyes. Some trail a sea thermometer on a nylon cord, like colourful plastic fish.

There were no silhouettes before 1759, when the French finance minister, M. Étienne de Silhouette, slashed the economy with his fiscal blade, and his name stuck to anything cheap, like the portraits of the day, cut from paper to show a subject’s outline, and called silhouettes. There are many forms of the silhouette today; in film, art and anonymous interviews. And photography of course.

I am now thirteen miles to the east, on the same south coast of England, and I discuss our lifespan with a man underneath the Worthing Pier. He says we should live for 300 years, as it takes the first 30 years to have any understanding of the the purpose of life. I point out he can’t find a job, and it could be a long haul.

Beneath the pier, and the clinging shards of indestructible plastic waste, my new philosopher friend finds a five pence coin embedded in a shell, which in turn is clamped onto a rock. It is a small treasure in his hunt for meaning.

And so, from the sea to deep space.

Last October, on a cold night, I saw the comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS swing by Earth for the first time since the Neanderthals paused their clubbing to look up and watch it blaze across the sky. I wrote about it here.

I said it would be back in 80,000 years. This was the view of scientists at the time, but it seems A3’s elliptical path was “squished” by our sun as it hurtled past, and it may now take hundreds of thousands of years to return, if at all. I thought some people might like to know that.

And finally, to a pool where the only swimmers are famous ghosts.

No silhouette here, except for a tree. This is Ernest Hemingway’s swimming pool at his home, Finca Vigia, outside Havana, Cuba. This is the pool where film star Ava Gardner swam and Hemingway ordered the staff not to change the water. He reportedly said to his friends: "Gentlemen, please remove your shoes and dip your feet reverently in the water of this pool, where Ava Gardner swam naked this morning,"

All this came back to me when I saw a fine story by about his acquired photograph of Hemingway with another Hollywood star, Lauren Bacall. The image was taken in 1959, which was just two years before Hemingway took his own life. I thought he looked more interested in his drink than his glamorous companions. Photographs lie of course, but sadly this extraordinary man was battered by alcohol.

I remain fascinated by the pool. It is an ordinary photograph, but what counts is what you imagine, rather than the actual image. To me, it looks like the Hemingways expect to be back, one day, to occupy those three chairs. To drink daquiris in the shade. Perhaps one chair is for Ava. This freezing of time is what happened in Cuba in general, when Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries kicked out the dictator Fulgencio Batista and the US mafia on New Year’s Day, 1959. Cars and buildings remain the same today, as they did in 1959, and so does Hemingway’s house. It is just there. You are not allowed inside, so visitors peer through the open windows. There is an old toilet with his stack of books to browse, and his weight recorded on the bathroom walls. His life has been raked over so much he may as well be sitting on that porcelain relic.

Finca Vigia is the house where Alfred Eisenstaedt came to photograph Hemingway in 1952 when the Old Man and The Sea was published in LIFE. But his decline was underway and the writer who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature behaved like “a gin sodden lunatic”. Eisenstaedt spent three days trying to get his shot. He did, and it was on the cover of Life.

That’s the thing. Get the shot.

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I never liked geology. On school trips to the rock museum, I learned how to sleep while standing. Felspar, granite, or shonkinite are rock names with the power of a powerful sedative. So I know it’s risky to publish photographs of just one type of stone, and then expect you to stay with me.

But this stone is natural art. It has colours that defy an artists’s palette and it holds a story for the ages. It is called yellow gold for a reason. This is Sydney sandstone and the city is built on an enormous slab of it.

I was back in Sydney for two months, and years away always create a sharper focus on things I took for granted. Like the extraordinary beauty of the sandstone which shows up along the harbour foreshore and the beaches and cliffs along the eastern suburbs.

The natural overhangs of stone gave shelter to the aboriginal Gadigal people who lived here for many thousands of years before the arrival of the British in 1788. The stone was a canvas for aboriginal carvings which survive today, because of the stone’s strength.

Stone was quarried from under the colonists’ feet, to build the original city, but this was eventually replaced with modern building materials. Today, the many road tunnels are drilled straight through the sandstone under the city.

That’s enough geology for now. Thank you for visiting. Please feel free to leave a comment - about sandstone, or Sydney, or analogue photography. All these images were shot on 35mm Portra 400 film and I think it works well for this little series. Until next time. Simon

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I know there are many issues more important than house paint. However, my home town of Sydney has gone grey. Once, many houses were painted in the Federation style: rich browns, reds, greens and yellow. These colours flowed into the tiled floors and walls of the old pubs. They blended with the sandstone the city is built upon. They are reflected in the uniforms of the national sports teams. The harbour ferries are still yellow and green and there’s enough colour in the native plants to carry the colour chart to infinity. I’m not here to lament the past. Grey has been popular for years, and it refuses to be elbowed out. Instead, it has been very slightly infiltrated by blue. The result is colour charts with Explorer Blue and Dark Newport Blue. They look grey to me. There is Metal Glow, Grey Wolf and Silver Charm. The last two feel related.

Grey makes a perfect canvas for anything with colour. A frangipani flower drops onto a dark grey gate. Backed by a light grey wall. It looks good to me.

If you want to run about and photograph grey, it’s in your face. All these pictures were taken in a few square miles. However, the next suburb may not have much grey at all. It’s all relative. I took these photographs after driving in a grey car with a friend in a grey T-shirt to a grey pub (inside and out). And I crossed the harbour on a ferry, in a rain squall, and I saw how Sydney and grey are made for each other (last image).

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There are some clues further on. But full disclosure; it is not the moon. If nothing else, there is no water on the moon.

I bought the eggcups (2) at the gift shop of the excellent René Magritte exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney, Australia. I believe every art exhibition is only complete with a browse through the gift shop. It is here, in this final room, through which you must exit, that the genius of the artist is metamorphosed into hundreds of trinkets and ephemera so we common folk can carry home a tiny impression of the genius we have just witnessed. In other words, a fridge magnet, a postcard, a tote bag. In other galleries I have seen a Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People coffee mug (for our times), Joan Miró Wiggle Black Circle drop earrings, a Piet Mondrian water bottle, and then a Roy Lichtenstein men's cycling jersey with a big Whaam! print - a risky provocation. And many wrist watches including one inspired by the pinks of JMW Turner’s Scarlet Sunset.

It would be one thing for Van Gogh to know his paintings, ignored in his lifetime, now sell for a fortune. But a much bigger thing for the great painter would be to see his self portrait hanging on a tea towel in my kitchen - made even more real by the immoveable cooking stains.

So back to these egg cups. Magritte painted a chicken eyeing an egg in a golden egg cup, with another freshly laid egg on the ledge behind her. The skies behind are tinged pink and the mountains are a melancholic blue. What does Variation on Sadness mean? Who cares. The marketing people produced a pair of golden egg cups for the gift shop and I have them.

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Most of these pictures were taken beside a rock pool in eastern Australia. Film is Kodak Portra 400. If you would like to see my previous rock pool story, please click below. All likes and comments are welcome to feed the algorithm and my self-confidence. Thank you.

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There are 34 saltwater rock pools along the beach suburbs of Sydney, facing the immense Pacific Ocean, and often cut into the beautiful, timeless sandstone the city is built on.

People come down to the ocean pools (and beaches) to swim at dawn, to meditate, to heal their wounds, to recover from hangovers, to save and be saved. To escape the summer heat, and to shiver when the weather turns cold.

I am here for two months and I want to keep taking pictures, and to push on with an ambition to learn more about film. In this case, by shooting enough rolls of 35mm Portra 400 to keep Kodak ticking over. I now think this film was invented for rock pools. I went to the beach to look for good sandstone, weathered by the sea and wind and streaked with yellows, ochres and greys. I settled on the pools instead, and often at sunrise with the regular swimmers. There are backpackers, martial artists, retirees, tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, parolees, merrymakers and influencers. The water in the ocean pools is usually still and safe, even when the surf is rough, so perfect for children. And the water swirling around the pools is home to all kinds of sea life. Crabs scuttle past the toes of the swimmers. There are more species of fish in the nearby harbour than the entire Mediterranean. There is no other city like the beautiful, sub-tropical and crazy Sydney.

Most Australians live on the edge of this island continent, but not everybody has easy access to the ocean pools. The city of Sydney sprawls 80 kilometres inland from the sea. There are nearly 5.5 million people living here, but only a small percentage can afford to live in the eastern suburbs, where many of these images were shot. But I met people who travel from inland suburbs to experience the early morning rock pool magic.

The name Emerald City comes from the title of the play by David Williamson, written 38 years ago, with its themes of greed and obsession with success. There is a line in the play: “The Emerald City of Oz. Everyone comes here along their yellow brick roads looking for the answers to their problems and all they find are the demons within themselves.”

The name Emerald City stuck. Read into it what you like because the waters do sparkle emerald green.

Thank you for reading. If you liked it, please click the “like” button and feed the algorithm, and make me feel fulfilled. Even better, leave a comment.

When I was writing this, I was listening to the surf down below the balcony of a house on the south coast, surrounded by eucalypts. More about those on another day. And sandstone.

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The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World is the latest doorstopper by William Dalrymple. You may have heard his history podcast Empire, which has made him a global celebrity, in the new world of podcasts. He writes about the extraordinary Khmer kingdom of Angkor and its famous Hindu temple, Angkor Wat. This reminded me, that carved into the temple walls of Angkor are fighting men, which represent the origins of the modern Cambodian martial art called Pradal Serey, or Khun Khmer.

The capital of the Khmer Empire (9th to 15th centuries) was Angkor, which gives its name to the beer company which sponsored these matches. Beer and fighting have gone together through all time. There is a thread.

Angkor may have been the world’s largest pre-industrial city. It had a massive system of dams and canals and an irrigation system to support up to a million people. Compare that to London at the time with 30,000 people. The temple of Angkor Wat alone is four times the size of the Vatican City.

Many Cambodian fighters come from the countryside to earn a small living in the towns and cities. These fighters were in the capital, Phnom Penh. The matches begin with ancient prayer rituals and music from a traditional wind instrument called a sralai, and the beat of a drum. The drum beat intensifies in time with the battle in the ring. If a fighter falls, the drum stops.

Strangler figs, kapok, and banyan trees choke the ancient ruins. it is an image that evokes the movies Tomb Raider and Alien. Sinews, constriction, strangeness and slow defeat. The drum beat stops.

Also:

1. Golden silk is another tradition that goes back 1,000 years to the Khmer dynasty. It has been revived near Angkor by Madame OUM Sophea Pheach using golden silk spun from golden silkworms. The golden silkworms are delicate and yield 15 times less silk than the common white variety. Natural dyes come from the Angkor area. An almost black dye from the chambak fruit and natural yellow from the bark of the prohut trees. The process is all by hand.

2. UNESCO is worried the four million tourists a year to Angkor Wat are causing water shortages and a dangerous lowering of the water table. The population of Siem Reap is now over one million people, with an international airport and tourists hotels. “This illicit use of water, for which no statistics are available, threatens the stability of the temples and towers of Angkor. The archaeological treasures have been designed to sit on a base of sand, kept in place by a constant supply of groundwater”.

3. Pradel (boxing) Serey (free) , or Khun Khmer, is a national obsession in Cambodia with live TV broadcasts and enthusiastic gambling on the results.

4. All images ©simonbohrsmann. Shot just over a decade ago, which is a mere life of a silkworm in the timeline of history.

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There’s nothing like meeting people with fresh ideas, ambition, youth - all those things that drift easily down river.

So, off I go to an Intuitive Portrait Workshop for a few hours last Saturday. This is held in the basement of the Photobook Cafe in London. The cafe has many photobooks to browse with a flat white, and it is a focus for new photography.

Whether any of the day will sink in, I don’t know. I think so. I certainly like the idea of not overthinking. Just responding. Natural light. Found objects. Embrace imperfections.

Our tutor is photographer Viviana Almas. She is very talented and has just graduated from Falmouth University in Cornwall. She’s earning a reputation for a strong body of original work. Her images makes me think about what photographs by JG Ballard might look like, if he ever took photographs.

Viviana is also a sculptor and works with experimental and performance-based art, and moving film, which makes the way she sees photography… different.

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These are a few of my humble images from the day.

In the end, most of photography’s mysteries tie together, whether it’s intuitive, or the decisive moment, or gesture, or the instinct of a news photographer. It’s all about the journey.

Thank you for visiting The Back Story. Small stories of the everyday with a photography theme, mostly. Subscription is free, so please sign up to get future posts. And comments are welcome.

On the turntable: A new repress of UB40 - Signing Off. With the bonus 12” disc.

©simonbohrsmann

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This one is for all the writers who toil to get their books published. Or have been published, printed and bound. And it’s for all the photographers who want, or already have, their own photobooks. Some books will become “bestsellers” and a few of these will still be sought after when they are out of print. And some will become immortal, if that’s possible for a book. Books grow old, but they will always be inhabited by their creators. I once held a first edition of In Cold Blood, and it was signed by Truman Capote. His signature was small and on the bottom right of the page, It looked to me like he was being deliberately restrained, with no flourish of the pen. Perhaps Truman was having a bad day and goodness knows what that may have involved, or he was balancing a glass of champagne.

Anyway, Capote was a pen name, as he was born Truman Streckfus Persons. In Cold Blood made Capote a celebrity with his “non-fiction novel”, as he called it, attracting love and hate like the opposing tattoos on a pair of knuckles. And it made him rich. Many called the book a work of art. But others claimed he made some of it up, although young journalists at the time saw Capote as a visionary. It all went wrong after that, when Capote got fact and fiction entangled and he turned his bitchy pen on his New York society friends, in his too thinly disguised novel Answered Prayers. The book never got finished but it finished him. Alas, no signed copies.

So, let me try to persuade you that a book fair can be interesting. To the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association rare book fair, at the Chelsea Old Town Hall, in London. I will get to the photobooks, but first:

1. Biker gangs and Hunter S. Thompson. A first edition of his Hells Angels is on sale for £7,000. The book made Thompson a star and his gonzo journalism was the drumbeat for many a young man living vicariously through Hunter S’s crazy drink and drugs lifestyle. He spent a year embedded with the Hells Angels - until he was beaten for commenting on a gang member who beat his wife. I had never heard of Thompson, until someone gave me, in a very remote location, in a far away time, a worn paperback of Hells Angels. Since then, I kept an eye on his erratic life choices and oddball sidekicks.

Another beating in Chicago, this time by the police, propelled Thompson to write Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72. “Over 50 years later, it’s still one of the most prophetic warnings ever written about American politics”, wrote Jeff Weiss in Tablet, just before the November 5 US election.

Packaged with Hells Angels, at Sotheran’s books, is a photobook: Portraits of American Bikers: Life in the 1960’s, the Flash Collection with photographs by Jim “Flash” Miteff, who was also a biker. He shot 4 x 5 black and white negatives using an old Speed Graphic press camera. (See Weegee below). Note: Sotheran’s is far older than many of the books they sell (since 1761) and they acquired Charles Dickens’s library in 1870.

2. Only a few hundred copies were printed of Ballet by Alexy Brodovitch, who was the art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Between 1935 and 1937 he photographed visiting ballet companies in New York. He shot performances with a 35 mm Contax camera using available light, and often at very slow speeds. The blurry, grainy images broke all the rules and the resulting photobook became a legend, with current prices to match. The copy held by Giles Lyon (above) of Worlds End Bookshop sold for £3,500.

3. Lee Miller found a new audience with the recent movie release, Lee. (Kate Winslett). The film focuses on her WW2 experiences as a photojournalist for Vogue. The rest of her life is rich with stories of her work as a model, her work and love affair with the surrealist photographer Man Ray, her portrait studio in New York, her marriage to an Egyptian businessman and her life with the British surrealist Roland Penrose. Less is heard about the book above, Wrens in Camera, which Lee Miller shot for the British Admiralty. It records the wartime lives and work of women in the Royal Navy. A bargain at £300.

4. William Klein and Cleopatra. Wedged between two William Klein photobooks is A Night of Cleopatra by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872). He was a flamboyant Parisian, poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and critic. He also imagined a night of passion between Cleopatra and an admirer who drinks poison the next morning, as Mark Antony is at the door. Worlds End Bookshop sold a copy of William Klein’s photobook Life is Good & Good for You in New York for £3,000.

5. Arthur Fellig aka Weegee. The New York photographer worked the streets at night in the 1930’s with his Speed Graphic press camera set to f/16 and 1/200th of a second and focus fixed at 10 feet, with a flash bulb. Newspapers paid him because he got the dark and dirty pictures that made the front page. Some say his name came from the Ouija board, because of his ghostly ability to turn up at the right place, at the right time. But he also had a police radio. Today his pictures have a cult following, but they are much more than visual history. We are all Weegees with an iPhone. This copy of Naked City is £900 from Worlds End Bookshop.

6. Love and Marriage. A quiet corner and on sale is a Eucologe or prayer book, to be used in the diocese of Paris, in Latin and French, in 1777. It was gifted by a husband to his wife. Bookseller Cooper Hay from Glasgow - fine books and bindings - sold this one for £450.

7. And finally, Madonna’s book SEX. With photography by Steven Meisel, art direction by Fabien Baron and its whirl of punk, fashion, erotica and celebrity. It had everybody tittering on its release in 1992, but it sold 1.5 million copies and is still the most in-demand but out-of-print book. And it’s on sale at an antiquarian book fair. The world is definitely turning. If you have the right coffee table and a CD player for the included single Erotic, and the cash, there are plenty of copies on the market.

Note: At the same fair last year I saw some of the books from the collection of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died two years before. The best of his collection was auctioned by Christies in September, 2023. The highest bid was for his presentation copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, inscribed by the author “to the real Gatsby” and sold for £226,800 ($US287,000).

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Cornwall is one of those coastlines with stories of pirates and smugglers. It is also home to extraordinary wildflowers, including the spikey pink and purple (and white) fingers of the Foxglove. (Its formal name digitalis is from the Latin for finger - digitus). It grows everywhere along twisty lanes which once clattered with horses and carts and contraband, and are now hosting my walk. It grows in fissures under stone walls, and on waste ground. Any part of it is poisonous, even deadly, but digitalis also gives it name to life saving heart drugs, extracted from its toxins. The flowers here grow above the famous Frenchman's Creek, where Daphne du Maurier set her novel about Dona, Lady St. Columb. Dona falls in love with a French pirate, Jean-Benoit Aubéry, and joins him when he plunders her neighbour’s merchant ship. Please stroll on for more hidden stories.

Seeing double. Hemlock grows along Cornwall’s lanes and thrives in damp ditches. A handful of leaves is enough to cause paralysis and death. In 399 BC, hemlock was used to execute the Greek philosopher Socrates. He was accused of worshipping false gods and corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens. Some things never change. The two plants above are Common Hogweed, Heracleum sphondylium and part of the Apiaceae (carrot) family, along with Hemlock, and to the inexperienced eye they look very similar. By the way, I got help with the plant names from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. And all this is swaying in the breeze of an afternoon stroll.

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Daphne du Maurier loved the outdoors and walking in Cornwall.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again …” Her novel Rebecca was her most popular, and is still in print. Alfred Hitchcock saw its thriller potential with his 1940 film version. It was re-made into a Netflix movie in 2020, but many critics gave it poisonous reviews. This year, the Guardian newspaper included Rebecca in a list of the best five psychological thrillers written by women.

Note: I didn’t set out to write about Killer Plants of Cornwall. I photographed these flowers and read about them later. I had no idea I was taking a picture of the same plant used to kill Socrates. I didn’t know that types of Foxglove provide heart drugs, although I do know they never survive in my garden. Which is why I was interested in how so many grow in this part of Cornwall. There are many other wildflowers in Cornwall that will not harm you, and live in harmony with humans. The yellow flowers of Lady’s Bedstraw have a scent like honey. But when it is dried it smells like new mown hay. In the old days, it was used to stuff the straw mattresses of women giving birth. Wild Thyme is used to make tea and scent clothes.

Footnote: Daphne du Maurier’s father, Sir Gerald du Maurier, was an actor and stage producer who lent his name to a new cigarette brand in 1930. The royalties would pay off his tax bill. My school master smoked du Maurier cigarettes. He was a bit of a tyrant and used the cigarette pack to write down our numbers (yes, we had numbers) to deal out punishments later. They are still a popular brand in Canada and other countries, but not sold in the UK. It is a strange world.

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Simon

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And what does Gladiator contribute to life on earth? To my life? This is worth considering as the sequel, Gladiator II, opens soon in theatres around the world.

1. The Hand Through The Wheat Shot. The hallucinatory scene where Maximus is on the verge of death and we see his hand brush over the wheat field is iconicus maximus, to give it my Latin. But did you know it was a last minute idea on the final day of principal photography in Italy? Director Ridley Scott saw Russell Crowe’s body double walking in a wheat field, and sent in the Steadicam. (The story goes that Russell Crowe, who plays Maximus, was not even there). The shot is a metaphor for Maximus’s journey to the afterlife, known in Roman and Greek mythology as Elysium. Homer described it as a beautiful field at the western extremity of the earth. As a Roman general, Maximus rallies his cavalry before battle: “If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you are already dead!” The shot has been copied to within a sandal strap of its life. Below is my version, with no apologies. It is not even a wheat field.

2. Philosophy. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, spends the early part of the film in war weary disappointment at the bad behaviour of his son Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix. “Have I missed the battle?” asks Commodus, like a child with terrible excuses for not doing his homework. “You have missed the war” replies his father. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as crazy Commodus is another gem in this film.

   The real Marcus Aurelius was an original Stoic philosopher and his Meditations is still a best seller. For many people today, Stoicism is the way to happiness.

   “What we do in this life echoes in eternity” was written by Marcus Aurelius but borrowed in the film by Maximus, as he winds up his soldiers before the opening battle. I quoted that one for the forward of a book I wrote about my family history - a bit of a blame memoir perhaps, as I had someone in mind. But it’s fair to say the movie introduced me to the Stoics.

3. Screen Writing. The film started shooting with an unfinished script and lines and ideas were often scribbled down the night before the next day’s filming. One of the best known is by Maximus as he inspects his officers before battle: “Strength and Honour”. It came from Russell Crowe’s school motto, Veritate et Virtute - Truth and Honour. He ran it past Ridley Scott who said yes. One of the most famous lines is delivered by Maximus in scorn at the baying crowd in a provincial arena, where he has just killed a pile of other gladiators. “Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?" before he hurls his bloodied sword into the expensive seats. Well, some people were not entertained. There were skirmishes about academic input which didn’t make the final cut. I briefly fancied myself as a screenwriter, and I bought a book on how it’s done by William Goldman, and did nothing much else, but I did read somewhere about the script problems with Gladiator. That stayed with me, as a great story about the chaos of creativity, in this case with a script written on the fly, and yet it all works, and a film of genius is added to the pantheon. I can see how people and ideas and facts would have been discarded or overlooked along the way. But it takes great skill and talent for a director to pull all the chaos together into something that really works.

4. The Sopranos. Someone on the writing team of one of the world’s greatest TV series was into Gladiator quotes, and they fed most of the best ones into the character of the psychopathic gangster Ralph Cifaretto. Ralph dropped lines from the film like grains of sand in the Colosseum. “I have come to reclaim Rome for my people” he tells the barman at the Bada Bing strip club. The barman says he hasn’t seen the movie and Ralph tells him: “You’re an asshole then.” In the Colosseum, as his little band of fighters wait for the onslaught to come, Maximus says: "Whatever comes out of these gates, we've got a better chance of survival if we work together." I used an edited version of that in a business strategy meeting. They were assholes.

5. History. The film started life more than fifty years ago when its creator, David Franzoni, rode east on a motorbike through Europe, Turkey and Iraq. Everywhere he saw ancient arenas, and then he read a novel about gladiators. Many years later, he pitched the idea to Steven Spielberg, and the rest is history, although not always historically accurate. The British historian and writer Tom Holland is quoted as rating the opening battle scene as the second greatest cinematic experience of his life. (After Jurassic Park). A few years after Gladiator’s release, Holland released his own non-fiction blockbuster Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. I read it back then, and I’m sure that was the influence of the movie. But the book was much harder work than the film, with many words and pages. Rubicon was also the name of a new bar near me, when there were no cocktail bars at all. Rubicon the bar was owned by two ladies who left their jobs as school teachers and named their leap into the unknown after the river crossed by Julius Caesar, as he marched to Rome to make himself dictator. There is no going back for a Roman general who crosses the Rubicon with armed troops, just as there is no going back for two teachers who open a bar. I took all this in at the time. I felt my affinity with the movie, added to my growing knowledge of Ancient Rome, was coming together over a martini. Rubicon by Tom Holland is even more compelling today as a reference to current politics, particularly in the USA. Gladiator is fiction and Ancient Rome can only live in our imaginations; and there is no point obsessing about whether the swords, sandals or togas are historically correct.

6. Special Effects. “Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.” Actor Oliver Reed won the crowd with his performance as the gladiator owner Proximo, and made different headlines when he died of a heart attack near the end of filming, after a drinking contest with sailors in a pub in Malta. Director Ridley Scott wanted to honour Reed’s performance and avoid re-shooting, and the actor’s final scenes were created with a body double and special effects by The Mill, the graphics company who also created the virtual Colosseum. This was a quarter of a century ago and early days for this technology. I worked in television so I feel I have benefited from the developments set off by Oliver Reed’s fatal night out. "We mortals are but shadows and dust."

7. Results. Gladiator grossed nearly $500 million worldwide. It won five Oscars, including Best Picture, and Best Actor for Russell Crowe. His performance as the growling Maximus is brilliant. It is a mystery to me why Ridley Scott did not win Best Director.

8. Music. The soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard. The track Now We Are Free has nearly 270 million plays on Spotify. I saw the soundtrack performed live, with my son, at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2014. I hope I have educated him in the ways of Gladiator. Lisa Gerrard sang that night. Her voice is extraordinary. You can read about it here. She fronted the Melbourne, Australia post-punk band Microfilm, before co-founding Dead Can Dance in 1981 with Brendan Perry. She won a Golden Globe for her work on Gladiator.

9. More History. The photograph above is shot in bracken, a type of fern that grows in Bushy Park, near Hampton Court in London. There are around 320 red and fallow deer living in the park in herds that were hunted by King Henry VIII. The deer hide their young in the bracken.

10. Gladiator II. The original story moves forward two decades with new actors and the same director, Ridley Scott. It opens in the UK on November 15 and the United States on November 22.

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I would have missed it completely if my friend Tim had not dragged me to the cold and dark countryside outside London. I couldn’t help thinking of scenes from Lars Von Trier’s apocalyptic Melancholia, a science fiction movie about a rogue planet which crashes into earth. Don’t miss it, because it won’t miss you…

And I definitely will not be here when the real Comet A3 comes back in 80,000 years.

So out on a hill above a polite English rural town, I learned a little about the art of astro-photography. First, try shooting something you cannot see. Despite the “comet of the century” label, this comet was impossible to see without binoculars, or through the camera. This was proper hunting, for a quarry which was 88 million miles away from our scrubby hillside. And powering away from us at 50 kilometres per second. Up and up, in a steep elliptical climb away from the orbital plane of the solar system. I know, I can’t take it all in either. But I know it’s a lot more complicated than taking a photograph of someone sitting on a park bench. Also, it was cloudy and if you get a shot at all, it has to be through a gap in the weather. Success only comes from quick thinking and technical skill.

Its full name is Comet A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, or Comet A3 for short, and it was only discovered by astronomers last year. It comes from the exotically named Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system and may contains trillions of icy objects, according to NASA. Some are as big as mountains. Most of the “long period” comets are thought to come from Oort. To qualify as “long” a comet has to take at least 200 years to orbit the sun.

Here is something else to chew on: The Voyager 1 space probe was launched by NASA in 1977 and will take another 300 years to reach the Oort Cloud, and then a further 30,000 years to get out the other side. That is some commute. I can see why all this is so interesting to astro-photographers.

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Question: How do you prevent blurring caused by the rotation of planet earth, when you need a long exposure of an object which is so faint, and so far away? Tim uses a small motorised box called a Vixen Polarie star tracker which runs on low tech AA batteries. You lock it onto the North Star and it moves the camera in the opposite direction of the earth’s spin - to follow the comet or any other heavenly body in the viewfinder when the shutter is open. You may need to read that twice, perhaps three times.

Back on earth, I took these shots with an iPhone 12 on a three second exposure (but no movement tracker). So here are two wildly different forms of the same thing. The kit and knowledge of the astro-photographer alongside the digital science of the iPhone with its generous serendipity. The iPhone chose the exposure by the way, I just pressed the button. It’s the way the iPhone rebuilds the image, from the scraps of light, that is a kind of magic. What would a Neanderthal make of all this?

And below, at last, is Tim’s capture of Comet A3. Shot on a Canon R6 with a Samyang f1.8 135mm prime lens.

It looks easy, but it is not. It is its own art form, I think. Like all fine photography, it is about our understanding of what we see, and the questions it asks.

Meanwhile, the moon was rising behind us.

Here is an interesting article by Mason Leaver on the existential philosophy of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

An asteroid about a metre across burned up above the Philippines in September. You can see the spectacular video here..

Asteroids often burn up in the earth’s atmosphere. The chance of a more serious impact are very, very small.

And here are a few asteroid disaster movies for the weekend.

Armageddon

Melancholia

La Fin du monde

Don't Look Up

I wrote this between scuttling to the turntable to play Dreamstate, the new album by Kelly Lee Owens. The first track is Dark Angel, and just right for comet studies. The second track, Dreamstate, is better for imagining dead birds falling from the sky in Meloncholia.

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If existentialism is to create your own meaning, then dogs do that without a second thought. If the existentialist notion of the absurd is about our struggle to understand why we exist, then dogs have sorted that out as well. Part of my own search for the meaning of life is to occasionally photograph Men and their Dogs. There is something about the combination of man and canine that works for me. Men I bump into - once they get over the initial existentialist absurdity, like the idea. I do not own a dog, instead I have a cat who is afraid of dogs. If my cat had the power of reason and could read, or go online, he would probably be surprised, even shocked, about my time spent taking pictures of dogs.

Bob and Tyson are good mates. They have both “lived” this life and Tyson was beaten by his previous humans. They have a bond, which includes Tyson keeping guard. Beware of close-ups - that is not a dog smile.

Missy lived with a family who became victims of the economic storms of our time, and they lost their home and could not keep her when they were re-housed. She is an old dog, nearly 13, so she was unlikely to survive, until Robert and his wife adopted her. Lucky girl.

Andy Spencer operates the Thames river ferry in Twickenham, in West London. Two years ago, he swam a mile in the river every day, for 365 days, in memory of his father Francis who ran the ferry before him. Francis died of cancer and Andy’s swim marathon raised £62,000 for Macmillan Cancer Relief. Many of his swims were at sunrise which Andy describes as ‘paradise’. But the river can also be cold, swift and dangerous. Boats and logs are hazards. His dog, Siren does not swim, so my synchronised diving shot remains a fantasy.

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Dixie had a rough start but now lives in comfort with Grant and his partner on a houseboat on the river. She lies down for long periods, but sat up for a few seconds for this shot.

Mini has an excellent hard stare, straight into the lens. The Schnauzer breed originated in Germany in the 14th-16th century, and the name means moustache or whiskered snout. Mark says the dogs often stare in hope of spotting wildlife to chase. They were bred as rat catchers, but I am not taking it personally.

Sadly, Pedro died recently. “He was an exceptionally sensitive, good-natured and optimistic animal,” said Barney.

Mabel is a young British bulldog, and you can’t get a more British symbol, in dog terms. People associate the bulldog with courage and strength and determination. The name comes from history and the terrible sport of bull-baiting, which was banned in England in 1835. But today’s bulldog is bred to be friendly and not bite. They make popular mascots.

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Simon

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I think all of us who enjoy taking pictures, and gazing at them with a mix of pleasure and self doubt, also spend a lot of time studying the work of famous photographers. There are many of these. I never stop finding new ones. I wonder why there are so many, yet I am not about to become one of them, any time soon. But I am leaving the door open.

Sometimes, not often, I am compelled to move close to a famous/talented photographer to see if some of their magic might rub off. When I say “close”, I mean within a metre. I have a friend who is a fine artist with a camera, and he inspired me to take up this complex and noble craft. One day, I showed him a portrait I took on an old manual film camera, with flash. I was giddy to see my subject had actually appeared on the negative. My friend looked at it, and said: “I can show you some tricks with exposure.” I took this to mean my skills needed polish. And I never got those tips.

I eventually worked out that great artists are just different, and they probably don’t have a clue themselves about where the magic comes from. Would there be any point asking the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, back in the day, how he created The Night Watch, from little dabs and dashes of paint.

Let me explain how and why I met the famous photographer Alec Soth. (Pronounced ‘both’)

Alec Soth is at the top of his game, and very successful and respected. Unlike many photographers, (not all) he shares a lot of himself and his process. Just Google him, and up come many interviews in which he talks about everything from self doubt and ideas, to failed and successful projects - just ask him a question. Watching all this, of course, will not necessarily make any of us a better photographer. But it might help us take a step forward. Or just enjoy getting inside his mind. He is not talking about f-stops or the reciprocity of the film stock, but he is verbalising the stream of consciousness that ends up as images on the pages of his books.

I was only a bit over a metre away when he said that all photography is self portraiture. I am still thinking about that. He said many things that night and most of them made a lot of sense. He is very open and down to earth. He is happy to share his cerebral wanderings, and all the thinking and image making in between.

He was talking about the journey that became his new book Advice For Young Artists and how it started when he was looking for “loners” to photograph (He is drawn to loners: “Loners, preachers, sex workers and sinners: how Alec Soth captured the real America” is the headline on Sean O’Hagan’s interview in the Guardian about another work, Sleeping by the Mississippi).

Before Alec Soth’s success as a photographer came “failure after failure” to live up to his own expectations. I can identify with that. The people who succeed, he says, are those who close the gap between their work and their taste. To achieve this, I am prepared to lower my taste ceiling.

Getting back to his more recent search for loners, and his personal journey toward a project that would work, he revealed he was visiting colleges (with his daughter) and then he went to the Middle Tennessee State University where he met photography students with energy and enthusiasm and a new idea took hold, which became the book he is talking about this night, in London.

We are in the famous Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road. This is dangerous because there are so many good and tempting books over four floors. When I say “we” I don’t mean just Alec Soth and I, as there is a crowd of other people who have also come to hear what he has to say about his latest book.

He told how he meets people and he thinks “what do they think about me”. And they are thinking the same about him. In his early days he was nervous but forced himself to approach people he judged safe to photograph, and in return they were reading him, and perhaps forming a view of him influenced by and his large format camera and tripod; props he could work behind. He was nervous and he could hide under the dark cloth of his camera.

He sees his work on a spectrum between documentary on one end, and narcissistic, inward looking expressionism on the other. His words. So it’s only reasonable I would have philosophy on my mind, and a book by the existentialist hero Albert Camus in my bag, purchased in the book shop earlier, as I queued to have my Alex Soth photo book signed. Not the new one, but the 20-year-old Sleeping By The Mississippi.

They hand out Post-It notes for us to write our name on, if we want the book signed with our name included. There is a profound connection here, in my mind, with the Post-Its which are included as photographs in the new book. Tonight, the Post-its are a simple device to avoid spelling mistakes. For example, is that Jayne with a “Y” or Jane, without? Who wants their name mispelled at the front of an expensive book?

Alec Soth is sitting behind a desk and signing book after book with good humour, and to his right is a growing pile of discarded Post-Its. Alberto, Billy (not Billie) Amy (not Aimee), Caitlin, Alan with one “l”, Hallie, Juliette with two “t’s” and so on.

Is that pile of sticky edged notes a brilliant idea for a photograph, that links to his book, and captures my own nascent inward looking narcissism, or just a stupid idea so far behind the curve it is infinitely flatlining? The latter, I think. I’m not sure. At least we share self doubt.

I could ask, how did he get to photograph those naked people on honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Or how does he take double exposures, which is a question I saw on Google. His answer to the double exposures question is: it was a mistake, but a magical one.

“Hello, what is your interest in all this - what brings you here tonight?” Alec Soth is talking to me. He must be sizing me up, and thinking: what does he think about me? And I am thinking, he seems approachable, and what does he think about me? We are reading each other at hyper speed. I am intellectually speed dating one of the world’s great photographers. And I am talking nonsense as he writes my name in the book, correctly - as it’s on the Post-It. At first, I suggested I stick my name on my forehead, which he seemed to like. You need an icebreaker.

He is drawing a river in my book and I try to say something about the photography I aspire to and somehow that is linked to the Albert Camus book in my bag and then I said something really absurd: “It is existentialism with a camera”.

With a flourish, Alec Soth finished his elaborate part signature, part art work now taking up a full page of my book, and looked me in the eye, from his seated position, and said: “Isn’t that a contradiction?”

Let me come back to that.

The only other time I shuffled up to a great living photographer with a book to sign was when Sir Don McCullin was at The Photographers Gallery in London. He is a hero of mine for his work, his life, his images of war and humanity, good and evil.

The book was Shaped by War. On the back cover is an image of Sir Don’s battered Nikon F and just below the rewind knob is the damage from a sniper’s bullet in Cambodia. “He was trying to kill me, and he hit my camera which was by my face”.

You can see the Nikon and some of his greatest images here.

I have a Nikon manual film camera and I asked him to sign my book ‘to Simon and his Nikon’. As if there was some mystical link between my camera, dented once when I dropped it on the tiled floor of a restaurant, and his extraordinary talent. Of all the things to ask a man who risked his life many times to capture history, and asked by someone who has trouble loading a roll of film. He looked up at me with those eyes that have seen the unseeable, and checked that he heard me right, and I wished I had come up with something else to ask him, anything else. But he graciously signed as asked.

So returning to my more recent encounter with Alec Soth, and my unprompted babble about existentialism with a camera, and his question on whether that is a contradiction. Is it? Probably. I’m thinking about it.

Next time: Existentialism with a camera in Amsterdam, self doubt and Albert Camus

Alec Soth’s advice for young and old artists includes reading the 10 rules of Sister Mary Corita

I like this interview with him in The New York Times

Playing on vinyl in the background: Scientist. Direct-to-Dub. Produced by the Night Dreamer label in Haarlem, Netherlands. The music is cut direct onto acetate from single-take live performances.

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This photograph (above) from the river is a single frame of film which has not been enhanced. But that is without accounting for reflected colours, clouds, decaying leaves in the water, the haphazard exposure, the reaction to the silver halide in the film emulsion, the developing and scanning - so it is a unique construction of something that existed for a moment, and also did not, if you follow.

I went back to this exact place a few years later, as it is thousands of miles away, with the idea of seeing the same things again, the shifting cloak of green glass on the shiny rocks, which I saw in that single frame. (I did go for other reasons as well). And I found proof that nothing stays the same. The water level was lower, and there was a different chemistry of light and stone and stream.

I took more photos of the water and the rocks, this time with a digital camera. The first picture below is pretty much as it was in that moment. The second has been “enhanced”.

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They say there is gold in this river, if you look hard enough. For thousands of years, the ancients were obsessed with the fantasy of turning lead into gold. Sir Isaac Newton not only worked out gravity, and the secret of how white light is made from the colours of the rainbow, but he also had a sideline in the pseudo-science of alchemy. He believed it was possible, just as an apple falls from the tree. Moving on from the 17th century, I had some software with film emulations and a lot of sliders, and I made a little gold colour, but my main discovery was how this mountain water + rocks = digital magic. Somehow, beyond my understanding, these shots turn into all sorts of colourful and strange others. The first image below is pretty much as it was shot. Nice but drab.

Below is the same shot after an attack of the sliders. Extreme? Maybe. I can’t even find any notes of the process I followed, so it’s unique, and I can see a cow, a baboon, and some simian eyes. And a lot of gold. King Croesus on a Mac.

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The pink flowers are oleanders; prolific in the Mediterranean, and particularly in this spot. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder claimed the oleander could be boiled up with another plant called rue, to make an antidote to snake bite. Both plants are poisonous, as is the snake, so the more likely outcome is death. So, are these cars dead? I think they have been stashed in a kind of open air cryogenics, until any viable parts can be scavenged. Cars here are kept going and going, and going, until any forward movement is abandoned. Before then, they are kept on the road by mechanics revered as miracle workers, who combine cannibalised parts with an oily alchemy. People live longer on these islands, and so do their cars.

Money is tight here. If you are lucky enough to have plenty, then you drive a nice, new or newish car. Otherwise you keep your old car on the road for as long as possible, plus another 20 years. I asked someone about this, and he said an uncle has his old car gently rusting in the garden. Why? Because he likes to look at it. I think this nostalgia at least partly explains why many cars disappear under flowers and vines, off side roads and mountain passes.

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Trivia: There are 25 million oleanders planted along the roads and highways of California. Every year in the USA, 13-15 million vehicles are scrapped.

The Suzuki engine above was put back together by a mechanic they call The Magician. The car started and the owner drove away.

More trivia: Gregorios Sachinidis, a Greek taxi driver, holds the world record for the second highest miles driven in his 1976 Mercedes 240D (2,850,000 miles).

Thank you for visiting. This is the last of my road trip stories. You can see the others here:

A Ferry To The Apocalypse

Warlords and Despots

Summer Holidays

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The ferry above is reversing into the dock. Trucks roll off, followed by people, and new passengers are harried on board. There’s no check-in and security like you see at an airport. You just get on, and the hydraulics push up the huge stern doors. They slam shut and it’s full speed ahead to the Apocalypse.

There are kennels on board with just one large, sad dog, and a giant saloon full of passengers including a circle of people praying and singing from hymn books. I assume, like me, they are on a journey to their own revelations.

Patmos is the island where St John the Evangelist is claimed to have written the final chapter in the Bible: the Book of Revelation. I just want to see the cave where St John had his hallucinatory visions of the beast from the sea, with seven heads and ten horns. He also saw other creatures, including a seven-headed dragon. Scholars disagree on who the author really was, and various religious interpretations of these writings will keep you up at night for decades to come, if the world has not ended first.

Here is an artist’s interpretation of St John’s visions, in the medieval French Apocalypse tapestry, commissioned by the Duke of Anjou and woven between 1377-1382. What beasts are waiting on Patmos?

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The cave is now entombed in a small monastery. When I was there, coach loads of tourists were ferried from cruise ships in the bay below, and processed into groups, each with a guide, and marched down the steps. The inner sanctum is in a small chapel, and along the back wall is the rocky cleft where we are told St. John dictated his visions to his scribe, Prochorus. If you squint, can you reconstruct this scene in some ghostly way? No, today it is impossible to sink into a vision of any kind, even a mild reverie, as two guides, each surrounded by a sweaty group of the curious, argue loudly about one group taking too long, and slowing the queue.

The cave, and the apocalypse, is big business for Patmos, with queues of coaches and an endless flow of tourists, including me, and trinkets and souvenirs aplenty to buy. After all, this is meant to be the small patch of rock where the bad news about the end of the world was delivered two thousand years ago, and who doesn't want to stare at that. Tourism on Patmos will suffer if the Apocalypse actually takes place, although of course it will no longer matter. This cave and its visions are also the indirect source of many apocalyptic movies - Terminator, Bladerunner, Don’t Look Up and Shaun of the Dead. Or the downer that is Melancholia by LarsVon Trier, with a very unhappy ending for all. And Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which I watched inside the Georgio Chorico dreamscape of Lakki, and mentioned in my previous post.

Thank you for visiting. Simon

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(Picture credit for Apocalypse Tapestry. Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Here I watched the new movie Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It was screened in the open air on a perfect night, beside a cinema built by a fascist dictator. Looming above the audience of four was a clock tower like no other. The cinema is built like a cylinder bolted onto a brick. The clock tower has four faces, but none of the clocks work, with balconies and semi-circular discs stuck on the sides. It’s all a little weird.

“Snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers, young Furiosa falls into the hands of a great biker horde led by the warlord Dementus”.

A previous post was about taking photographs on holiday; or whether to even take a camera. I took these pictures on a subsequent trip to the Greek island of Leros, where I watched Mad Max in a town which could be a deserted film set. A tale of multiple tyrants as two worlds come together - one from the past, with a megalomaniac leader adored by young men in black shirts, and the other from a fictional future in a post-apocalyptic and radioactive wasteland.

I picked a few subjects to photograph on this trip. Some worked, some did not, but I found it was a satisfactory way to take pictures on holidays, in themes or in a short series, which left plenty of time for just being on holiday. Some people might prefer to just enjoy their time off, and I can see their point.

The history lesson:

Leros was occupied by the Italians from 1912-1943. They built a naval base on the one of the deepest harbours in the Mediterranean, at Lakki. Two Italian architects in the 1920’s, Rodolfo Petracco and Armando Bernabiti, were given an assignment; to design a modern town for 10,000 to house the military; with a hospital, a school, a hotel and a cinema and shops. They renamed it Portolago and followed the architectural rules of rationalism, which fuelled the grand delusions of Benito Mussolini, their fascist patron who dreamt of a new Roman Empire. There are Roman style squares, wide streets, and echoes of ancient temples with a blend of classical with Art Deco, Bauhaus, with a dash of Middle Eastern. The architects went further, and designed a model town for warriors that could be from the mind of a pre-surrealist painter. In a way it was, as they were inspired by the Italian artist Giorgio De Chirico.

Chorico painted empty, melancholic dreamscapes, with long shadows, few people and classical arches. Chorico said we needed to “live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.”

The Hotel Roma was built next to the cinema, with 19 rooms and a two storey tower, and finished in 1938. Did Mussolini fly over for the opening, in one of his navy’s seaplanes? There was a “wing” of them in the base at Portolago and plenty of water to land a visiting dictator and his overnight bag. The next year, the top Italian movie was L'albergo degli assenti, or The Hotel of the Absent starring Paola Barbara. It’s a thriller about a hotel where all the guests are imprisoned because their families want to get rid of them.

Thanks for visiting, and there are more holiday oddities to come, including a stroll to the Apocalypse, dumped cars and ferries across magic seas.

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Travis says he’s not the only person interested in undercover cars (a relief to me) and he mentions the many posts on #undercovercars on Instagram. I find one account called Underthecover which specialises in asking what make and model of car might, well, be under the cover. I have no idea what’s under the cover of my cars, but I like the patterns and contrasts. There, I’ve said it.

Thanks you for visiting. I’ll be posting more stories and photographs from my recent holiday/road trip to Greece, including more about cars and the Apocalypse, but not in the same post. Simon.

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Holidays are for selfies, oddities, photos of food, drinks, pebbles, water and feet. The photos created in your head before you get on the plane often never happen because, in the way of holidays, your destination is at least part fantasy, part expectation and part surprise. Before leaving, you spend more time thinking about which camera to take than deciding what underwear to pack. Then you worry about it being stolen, or dropped into the deep blue sea, left in a bar, or weighing as much as the rest of your luggage. So you leave it at home anyway. Good decision.

Maybe holidays should be more a time to write, or at least to read books by people who write very well about the place where you are staying, and in a way that creates thousands of images in the mind, without lifting more than the sun cream. Such a writer is Charmian Clift.

She and her husband George Johnston lived on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950’s. His work includes the novel My Brother Jack, set in Melbourne, Australia, after the First World War. Her writing includes the memoir Peel Me A Lotus, about their life on Hydra. They were poor, as the royalties came and went, but life rich. A friend advised me to read the book before going to Hydra and it was good advice. It has sentences that stay in my mind more vividly than any photo could even fractionally reach.

There are photographs of that time, when Hydra was the place to be for writers, painters and most famously, Leonard Cohen, who arrived in 1960. The photojournalist James Burke took more than 1500 photographs on Hydra that year for an unpublished story for Life magazine. Most of them are shots of the Bohemian colony at work, and play. Some are of Cohen and his Norwegian girlfriend Marianne Ihlen, as in So Long Marianne.

Leonard Cohen would later write about Charmian and George that they: “… drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more … they were an inspiration.” Today, the wall of their old house is cloaked with a vivid pink bougainvillea and hopefully the house now has better plumbing. But like everywhere, Hydra has moved on.

So, you lay out your beach towel, and you have an iPhone to take hundreds of photos, if necessary. It’s the camera in your pocket, as they say. I went to three Greek islands last year, with an iPhone, and it can do extraordinary things with minimal thought or effort. I recommend the Portrait setting for photographing alcoholic drinks. Go in the spring and take many photos of flowers. And cats. So here are a few shots I took on that island holiday, and I’m going back with the iPhone, of course, and perhaps just one small camera. And books.

Thank you for visiting and have a good holiday!

(All photos by the author except Charmian Clift which was taken by Frederick Stanley Grimes and is courtesy of the NSW State Library and ACP Magazines Ltd).

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Look at this image and see abstract beauty. Then the camera inside your head pulls back and these few square inches of colour are joined to other splashes of colour, and bubbles and smears of paint, and you keep zooming out fast and the inches are sucked into a much bigger picture, and pull back even faster and it’s a tiny detail in a huge mural on a wall which is one end of a row of houses, and there’s fire and smoke and fighting and gunfire on the streets of the city.

The city is Belfast in Northern Ireland and the image is from Gareth McConnell’s photo book Details of Sectarian Murals. There are 53 colour plates of these tiny, secret gems hidden inside the complicated stories of the Troubles.

Gareth shot these between 1997-1999 in the city of his birth. Some of the worst of the violence was in 1997, with street battles between nationalists and republicans. The Good Friday Agreement was reached on April 10, 1998. The next year, direct rule from Westminster came to an end.

“His micro details become of great macro proportions; a trippy, slightly stoned cosmos of beauty and enormity – of wild, formative, creation and destruction.” - Press release.

“Orange and Green, lost in a mix of white, purple, black, blue, and red – colliding brushstrokes that amass to form a larger picture lying beyond the frame. During the Troubles, and still today, the streets of Northern Ireland are a canvas onto which allegiances are projected. The Republic of Ireland’s tricolour and the Union Jack are ubiquitous.” - Extract from the essay included in the book, by Sarah Allen, Head of Programme at the South London Gallery.

Details of Sectarian Murals is available from Sorika.com

And there’s more to see in the Observer newspaper on May 25, 2024

All images ©Gareth McConnell

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