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Jan
31st
Tue
 

Birmingham - 35mm black and white

I finally got my finger out, replaced a broken thermometer and developed a few black and white films that had been sitting gathering dust for a while. (Absolutely nothing to do with putting off writing my disseration, for the record.)

Turns out that one of the films was from when I went down to Birmingham for a few days back in January last year (2011), which I had initially thought had been lost and confined to history, and then later totally forgotten about.

This is Biduu and Ian, who I Couchsurfed with for the first night, and who took us to a crazy party at the top of some fancy hotel the next day.

Personally, I thought that this was an example of marketing at its finest.

This is my good pal Toby, who I met whilst on tour with the band Hold Your Horse Is for the first time. (whenever that was…). Bizarrely, he emailed me out of the blue just as I was scanning in these pictures. Maybe it was karmic energy, or something.

Either way, he is one of the coolest dudes around, and let me sit up ridiculously late in his flat before helping me find the Megabus stop. The journey back home was horrific, but he can’t take the blame for that.

Here’s Biduu having a swatch at the old Canon 7 with the 50mm f0.95 lens that I had for a while.

It truly was a thing of beauty, I often wonder whether or not I did the right thing in flogging it, and then I remember that it paid for my trip to Colorado back in September and all doubts go out my mind. I’d give up a camera for time spent with amazing people any day. What’s the point in being able to document moments in your life if you never have any?

We had beans on toast this night, as it’s all the money we had left in the world. Toby later revealed that that’s all he’d been eating for weeks.

This is Ben. He is definitely one of a kind. His life was a myriad of insane contradictions that you couldn’t make sound believable even in a fictional novel. He is ridiculously camp, was on some obscure TV programme about knitting, couldn’t cook, and turned up to that party we went to wearing a devil mask.

You can’t help but love him.

Hannah. The reason I went to Birmingham, and one of my oldest and dearest friends. This picture doesn’t really do her justice, but since it’s the only one, it has to be included.

For those of you that are interested in that sort of thing, these were shot on (what I think was) a Leica iiia with a Jupiter-3 f1.5 lens. Oh, and some pretty badly expired Fuji Neopan 1600.

Every so often Toby gets these moments of insanity that interrupt his usual calm demeanour, and a sort of crazed look takes over. I love this shot, as it sums those times up pretty well.



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50 - Murder Mystery

Continuing on with the celebrations for my dad’s 50th (which he claims have to last the full month), a pile of us gathered at the house back in Kirkie for a gangland themed night.

With all of the cigars and cocktails kicking about, it was almost like being back in New Orleans.

Ever since I was wee and read a book on Al Capone, I’ve had a soft-spot for the whole 1920s gangster culture. You can’t help but admire the guy that flooded the streets of Chicago with booze during the height of prohibition, even if he was a big criminal.

Some of the stories about Capone are pretty incredible.

What finally caught him out wasn’t any of the sex, drink or death that he was linked to, but tax fraud. (let that be a lesson kids!)

He was told to keep a low profile at the trials which eventually saw him incarcerated in the infamous Alcatraz prison. This was to help avoid coming across as a rich, smug criminal. True to Capone style though, he turned up every day in a different brightly coloured suit… banana yellow one day, lime green the next.

I wish I had suits like that.

The surprise of the evening involved a murder mystery game, of which a few of us where characters in.

Perhaps inevitably, I was given the role of the murderer. Probably not the best choice since people were automatically suspicious of me simply because it was me, and not based on any of the clues.

It took a few minutes (and many glasses of wine), but by the end of the night I had convinced even myself that I really was the killer.

Like my red tie?

The thing about what I wore is that if I walked in the house on my own looking like that, people wouldn’t bat an eyelid; they’d just think I’d made an effort to dress a bit smarter.

I do love a pork pie hat.

If I could be bothered with the effort, I’d dress like this all the time.



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Jan
29th
Sun
 

The Cathouse - Saturday 28th January, 2012

One of the best things about this nightclub photography malarky is the unexpected folks that you meet.

Keeping in touch is the hard part.

Pale skin, red lips and blue hair = awesome.

I do love coloured hair. Maybe one day I’ll dye mine a ridiculous colour again.

I think she could probably pull them off.

People who’ve never been to the Cathouse must assume that white glasses are all the rage from looking at the pictures.

Til next week…



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Jan
27th
Fri
 

Cathouse - Australia Day

G’day. Tie me kangaroo down sport. Throw another shrimp on the barbie ya old cobber, etc… It’s time to throw on some ridiculous (and inaccurate) hats, drink pish beer and celebrate Australia day at the Cathouse.

This night only served to confirm that my memory is shot to pieces.

Not a good omen for upcoming degree exams probably.

This is a nice lassie. She bought me two drinks, and probably contributed to the destruction of my facilities of recall.

Working on a Thursday when you’re used to a Friday or Saturday really screws with your perception of the weekend.

I wish I could remember this girl’s name.

This guy looks like he really did just stroll in from the outback.

The wide angle lens makes the guy on the left look like a miniature person.

Sorry about that.

Got to love a bit of shoulder on display.

Ricky’s always a hit with the ladies.

I hadn’t really felt up to working this night after the emotional fracas of the past week, but I’m glad I did.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘community’ and what it means to be part of one. Something about the Cathouse has let it become an impressive (albeit dysfunctional) family. No matter what happens one day, it’s forgotten the next; as if it never happened. People you might fall out or have disagreements with never seem to hold a grudge, and it continually amazes me to be part of it all.

Here’s to communities in unexpected places.



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Jan
22nd
Sun
 

Wisdom dictates that one should not act in the heat of the moment, or write and post something online whilst angry and in the throes of intoxication. It can often be unwise and ill thought out.

However, as I’m sure you wonderful readers will know, sometimes you have to give words to feelings that you have immediately when they occur, else risk losing the zeal for them forever afterwards.

The past few days I’ve spent time with people that I’ve either not seen in a long time, or those who I’ve never really gotten the chance to hang out with outside of a brief encounter at work before.

On the way to meet one of my old friends tonight I couldn’t help but reflect a bit on going abroad and now being back home. Being in America, and so far away from everything that happens in regular life, it can be easy to dwell on the romanticism of disappearing off there for some sort of extended period. When you walk along streets that you know so well though, with people who work in the shops along the way waving as you pass, you can’t help but love your city. How else are you meant to find such a deep rooted sense of belonging than somewhere like that… a place that you love? No matter how long or how comfortable you get in Glasgow, there is always going to be a myriad of different people and things to experience… relationships that need to be teased out and explored. If you know somebody in one context, who knows how the dynamic might shift in a different one?

Case in point, this is Julie/Julz/Jules.

This fair red-haired maiden is somebody who I’ve known through a strange set of circumstances for quite a long time. Even though we’ve only ever had brief encounters before tonight, she’s a lovely girl who has always been dead nice to me, and given the close people in our lives that we have in common, it was way past time that we actually got together and hung out for a bit.

It should have been obvious that we’d get on since our connections are through some of my oldest and closest pals, but from the minute she turned up on my doorstep (okay, after getting lost a bit), we seemed to get on like a house on fire. Know where you can just talk and talk with somebody with no pretence and without playing silly conversational games, as if you’ve known each other for years? That’s how it was, and we both couldn’t believe we hadn’t been proper pals a long time ago.

Saying all of that, it’s amazing how the opposite can also be true, and no matter what ties you might think you have to the people in a certain place, how shallow and easily breakable they can turn out to be.

Whilst the romance of going abroad may be obvious, the romance of your home city can be just as deceptive. The feeling of community that is fostered between the weak relationships that we build up day-to-day is so easily shown up as hollow when you come up against certain situations, and leaves you wondering whether there really are any proper ties to your hometown, or wheter it’s all just social semantics.

One thing I am sick to death of is the pre-conception that males and females are unable to spend time together without having an alterior motive.

The social rigmarole that surrounds the idea of a girl and a guy together is probably the single biggest issue issue that pisses me off more than anything else.

As should be obvious from the focus I have on portraits, I love people. There’s something about the incredible complexity that is both fascinating and wonderful to me… and that’s without even considering the emotional response to that.

I often find myself battling against preconceptions because of this. Believe it or not, it is possible to be close to somebody of the opposite sex without having a primary driving motivator based on the physical act of sex.

Tonight I again encountered this pre-disposition in an ugly way, and am left feeling disaffected and jaded. Instead of rallying together to look after people who we care about in common, guys jostle for some sort of macho-bullshit-alpha-male position, not out of any real strength but some sort of deep-rooted insecurity, in order to claim some sort of ridiculous, superficial supremacy. Instead of recognising that those who we supposedly trust are able to be friends with the opposite sex and not simply some sort of arbitrary threat, time and again males opt for the defensive stance… which comes at the detriment of us all.

I am sick and tired of being treated a certain way because of my gender, especially by those who are doing so precisely because of their own corrupt intentions. It’s time that we start fighting back against this ridiculous idea of sexuality, and refuse to criticise those of our own ilk for their perceived actions off the back of our own biase. The more we adopt stereotypes for our own ends, the more we harm ourselves.

I apologise if there are too many big words in this post to be clear enough, and I wouldn’t expect those who I am directing this post at to understand, so let me state the general principle in no uncertain terms:

I will not accept being treated like an idiot again by anybody for being close to somebody of the opposite sex.

Clear enough?

Cool.



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