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Photos of Saltdean coast

Owen — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:58:09 +0000

I finally got myself out of Brighton for a while at the Easter weekend. Being a confirmed pedestrian I don’t often get the chance to visit the Sussex countryside, and Brighton can seem a very small place sometimes – gives me cabin fever.

So, the wife and I took the number 12a bus to Rottingdean, just out of (but officially part of) Brighton. After a disappointing pub lunch at the Badgers Watch we walked along the cliff tops to Saltdean, were we did a U turn and walked back along the seafront back to Rottingdean and the bus stop.

I took my Holga and a couple of rolls of film, here are the best shots:

Saltdean cliff tops

Saltdean sea walk

Rottingdean bus stop

Saltdean cliffs (film slipped with this one)

Saltdean cliffs

Photographer’s stamp

Owen — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:08:17 +0000

Just before Christmas I designed a graphic for photographer Nhung Dang. She had a clear idea what she wanted, a homage to the Carte De Visit, popular in the 1800’s. In particular Nhung wanted me to produce a graphic that mimicked the photographers stamp usually placed on the back of the Carte De Visit. These stamps are a wonderful example of typographic execution in the decades before Modernism finally took hold of popular culture and revolutionized typographic design.

Here is the graphic I produced:

Here are some of the original designs I ripped off used as reference.

Photographer: Nhung Dang

Owen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:00:00 +0000

I have always been an acolyte of handmade tools, deliberate restrictions, dogmas and other self imposed limitations that can stimulate the creative process. This might sound contradictory but a self imposed restrictive methodology can produce interesting results that could have never come about any other way. The manifesto of Dogme 95 and the cut-up technique (also called fishbowling for some weird reason) used by Bowie and William Burroughs are two examples of a self imposed set of rules or a tightly defined working process used for creative purposes.

..So all this brings me onto the photography of Nhung Dang. Nhung is a prolific photographer, but I am particularly inspired by her pinhole photography. There is something nostalgic and timeless to her photography, in both subject matter and appearance, almost like looking at an alternative past through the warm fug of memory.

Nhung makes her own cameras and her obvious skill with them has produced some amazing atmospheric imagery. There is something of the outsider (art-brut) in the idea of handmade implements, whether this is my romantic notion of the ideal of ‘craft’ or a celebration of the rejection of technology, who knows, but when I look at Nhung’s photos I want to make cameras out of biscuit tins and take photos of butchers…

I have chosen a couple of images for this post but please check out the following links to see more of Nhung’s work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhungsta/

Nhung’s ‘The Lost Promenade’ project – “Starting with the pieces around the edges…”

A short interview with Nhung Dang

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