20three » Photography

The Monarch’s Way: Sussex

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:11:17 +0000

The Monarch’s Way is a route that Charles II took when escaping from Oliver Cromwell after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Part of this route is along the South Downs. For more information visit – http://www.monarchsway.50megs.com/

A group of us decided to spend one night camping and two days walking part of the Monarch’s Way, starting from Amberley and ending in Shoreham-by-Sea. We lo-impact camped on the South Downs using Hammocks, Tarps and Bivvi Bags.

Photographs taken with a Holga, shot on out of date Velvia film, X processed.

The Monarch's Way

gh & op

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

Booth Museum of Natural History

Owen — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:41:58 +0000

The Booth museum is just down the road from were I live – it’s a Brighton institution – The collection housed in the museum is an extensive array of British birds from the 19th century, all housed in mini dioramas. Edward Booth built the museum in 1874 and bequeathed the museum and collection to the local authority in 1890. I took my Holga down there the other day and took these shots:

Booth Museum, Brighton

Eric Gill, a onetime Brighton resident, used to visit the museum when he was a child. Here is an exert from the biography ‘Eric Gill’ by Fiona MacCarthy:

There were many opportunities in Brighton for Ruskinian self-improvement. Just around the corner from the Gill’s, in Dyke road, stood the Booth Bird Museum (known in the Gill household as the birds’ museum, since the children imagined it belonging to the hundreds of stuffed birds displayed within it, Warbles and Buzzards and Bitterns).

The Booth museum was and still is an extraordinary monument to Victorian enthusiasm, the urge to collect and collate. Edward Booth, who formed the collection, was a wealthy man whose preoccupation with birds approached mania: he once kept a train under steam in Brighton station for a week waiting to rush him to the highlands as soon as his gillies had informed him that the white-tailed eagles were nesting.

(I had no idea what a ‘gillie’ was so I looked it up – here’s the definition from dictionary.com: ‘a male attendant or personal servant to a Highland chieftain.’)

I recently found out from the Brighton Prestonville blog the sad news that the opening hours were being reduced because of cuts in public spending, a situation that would be hard to revert. You can read more about the situation and find out how to help here.

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.

Holga Experiments

Owen — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:00:39 +0000

Inspired by my photographer mate Nhung Dang I recently got myself Holga medium format camera. I love lo-fi tech, analogue shit etc and the accidental light leak and dodgy lens of the Holga gives you unpredictability and creates those ‘happy accidents’ that digital cameras and hi tech equipment have done their best to erase.

Here are a few images from the first couple of rolls I shot.

My back yard

Brighton North Laines

Lightning Bolt, Brighton, 11.12.09

St Anne's Wells Gardens, Brighton

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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