Drawings

Here's a couple of old drawings of mine from early mid-nineties.

Film or digital?

Really, for me, if we are speaking of photography in terms of love, it has to be film. I like to get involved with the little machine, the camera itself, focusing, setting the aperture and shutter speed, estimating the best effect. I like the relative permanence of the negative, stored away. We have, in some ways, had digital thrust upon us and for me modern cameras with automatic everything and immediate results on the screen, can both enchant and disenchant. Sometimes delayed gratification is the only way! But having bought myself a Lumix G1, I have also bought some adapters so I can use old lenses on the digital camera. So far my adapters are Leica screw, Olympus OM and Nikon. The Leica seems maybe a bit more specialised because the main reason for buying it was to use my one Leica screw-mount lens, a scratched old Summar. However, I also have a Jupiter lens from a Zorki and that should be interesting.

Both the Nikon and Olympus adapters work very well with the lenses, completely manual focusing of course, and I will post stuff up as soon as I take something worth seeing. I want to get at least one more though, so I can use my Voigtlander Bessamatic lenses, especially the Septon. Here is an interesting and comprehensive review of that lens on a digital camera:
http://forum.mflenses.com/voigtlaender-septon-2-50-for-bessamatic-review-t33501.html

But I don't think I will ever give up film. I am dying to get out there with my Rolleiflex or Mamiya 645. Film just has something, and what can seem like inherent limitations of the medium are, like some of those old lenses, more a matter of character than a limit and a spur to creativity.

Thinking on photography

Apologies first for the 'dead' links here, cut and paste them and they take you to the Flickr page. In future most of the images will either be cut and pasted into the entry or there will be a live link. And starting with the question: what sort of photographer am I? Because although in some ways I have defined this for myself a long time ago, through my participation and my passionate engagement with the work of Emila Medkova, this can not remain a static thing. It is to some extent redefined by every new photograph and by the examination of every old photo that I rediscover. So, if I look at an oldish image like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartinman/2804816221/in/photostream/lightbox/
it seems not so different to one such as this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartinman/7537967230/in/photostream/lightbox/
in that it is the result of wandering and looking and finding that extraordinary double-image, the extrusion of the imagination into the real world. So what about this?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartinman/6258929944/in/photostream/lightbox/
Admittedly the last shot was done as part of a project for a friend organising a Burlesque show, but I think that in the end I put as much of myself into it. Then again, going back to the 'paranoiac-critical' image, is this in some way different?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartinman/7585439288/in/photostream/lightbox/
It seems in some way more obviously convulsive and chaotic, but maybe that is just me. Maybe it is just the demands of each image as I find them.

What all this does though is show moments that perhaps defined me at that moment, but neither define me in any permanent way nor in this present moment. Isn't that actually the way it should be?

Back to the blog

   I thought it was time I started writing things on this blog again. Of course, the internet is littered with dead blogs, and in many cases their death is unmourned, so I can only hope that if this one returns from the dead (or was it only sleeping?) it will not be met with utter indifference in every quarter.
   I have had plenty of time to reassess what it should be about. I am as prone as many to give vent to a little rant on the state of things, the world, the dreadful ConDem government, young people - young people??? - no, I am not quite that old yet. But I'm thinking there's areas I have not explored in writing and maybe I will be less boring than some and that in an age when the blog has become a universal Diary of a Nobody I won't become too Pooterish.
   So, poetry, photography, drawing and painting, art criticism, thoughts on surrealism, mythology, politics , architecture and wanderings, what else? Well, it will surely come to me as I proceed is it premature to say watch this space? We'll see...

Distorted images in a hall of mirrors

http://londonsurrealistgroup.wordpress.com/

Svankmajer on cancelling his attendance at the West Dean conference

The Leeds Surrealist Group have published texts by Jan Svankmajer and the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group concerning his decision to cancell his attendance at the conference on surrealism at West Dean:

http://leedssurrealistgroup.wordpress.com/

A statement in support of him will soon be available on the London Surrealist Group blog.

Magon and Zapata Spoke Through Them

I have just received the following tract by the Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement. I thought it worth further distribution.


MAGON AND ZAPATA SPOKE THROUGH THEM
On the murder of Betty and Yiry
In a declaration made shortly before her death, Betty Cariño said: “Our feet firmly on
the ground, our heads held high; with dignity, a focused spirit and burning heart.” Her
heart, like that of the young Finn, Yiry Jaakkola, has stopped beating, victims of the
PRI paramilitary hired killers responsible for the abuses against the autonomous
commune of San Juan Copala, the village of the rebellious Triqui natives whom they
would like to cut off from the rest of the world; the assassins responsible for the
armed attack upon the solidarity caravan, taken in ambush. Through our voice, Betty
said, speak the voices of the Oaxaca women in struggle, the voices of Magon and
Zapata, the voices of all our ancestors who have fought for freedom. This heart,
which she recently compared to that of a flower opening towards the sun’s rays of
the days to come, continues to beat in Mexico, in France, wherever human beings
stand up against the intolerable submission to all the tyrannies on our planet. No
machine-gun can silence this voice, which will continue to resonate in the mountains
and valleys of Oaxaca and the whole of Mexico, to murmur in the rivers, to thunder in
the tropical storms, to blow with the wind, to sing in the waterfalls. It will manage,
inevitably, to break the jaws of the killing-machine used by the oligarchy and by
Capital.
Paris, 11th May, 2010
The Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement
Anny Bonnin, Michèle Bachelet, Hervé Delabarre, Alfredo Fernandes, Michaël Löwy,
Marie-Dominique Massoni, Dominique Paul, Bertrand Schmitt, Michel Zimbacca,
and their friends: Guy Girard, Jean-Jacques Méric