Over at Musings on Photography they’ve come up with a photographic alternative to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which is pretty much an internet tradition now. SoFoBoMo (or the Solo Photo Book Month) involves the creation of a photo book, from start to finish, over a 31 day period, with 35 images and supporting text.

It’s a great idea for a project that’ll also force me to dust off Indesign and get properly into book design, a skill that’ll prove useful for all the projects that are starting to stack up in the horizon.

As for the content I haven’t fully decided yet but I’d like to have a go at a typology. I’ve always loved the work of Bernd and Hilda Becher and, more recently, photographers like Stephen Gills . As a result of being seen in series their images of ordinary objects and scenes gather an increasing sense of weight and are at the same time both ordinary and deeply wonderful. (I particularly like Gills Billboards series). I think this approach will fit the SoFoBoMo brief very well.

Of course the question is what to create a typology of in Birmingham, there’s plenty of industrial bits and pieces to do in a clinical black and white like the Bechers but I think I want to do something a bit more cheerful. SoFoBoMo starts on April 1st, I’ll have decided by then.

I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in photography to have a go too, in this Flickr’d, internetted world in which images are pretty much randomly flung at us from the web every day it’s nice to think about a set of images as a collection and a series, more than the sum of their parts.

edit - there is of course a Flickr group for SoFo and it is here

There’s nothing like a college course to force you into areas of photography that you normally wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.

These are the first shots from an editorial fashion assignment and are an attempt at more artier shots based on shape and form rather than the traditionally pretty soulless style of most fashion photogs. Not that all fashion photography is terrible, far from it.  Penn and Avedon get more wonderful every year, pretty much any issue of 60s Vogue has amazing imagery, but modern fashion shots are usually pretty bland.

Gallery here

A cold cold day for the Birmingham St Patricks Day Parade this year but no less fun. I’ve covered the Parade for a number of years now and my focus of attention has gradually changed from the Parade itself to the wonderful variety of people who turn up.

full slideshow of my photos on Flickr here

other Brummie Flickrers images are going up on this thread

Sometimes photographic projects just sneak up on you when you don’t expect them. As the photo geek in the family I’m called in to help with family imaging emergencies. My mum keeps the traditional huge archive of family photos but due to recent redecorating she moved 50 years worth of prints out to the garage where they got wet.

By wet I mean literally swimming in water.

Sifting through them in the aftermath we recovered most of the ones important in a family sense but also discovered the beautiful patterns that prints make when submerged for a considerable amount of time. The most ordinary of photos comes alive with almost fractal like patterns and wonderfully bright colour. It’s helped that’s lots of the 70s era pictures were taken with really heavily saturated Polaroid film

Also piquing my interest was the wonderful thematic similarities that come together when you’re sifting through your familys history, here’s me with my mum in 1981:

and here’s my dad with his dad in 1960 (ish)

Exhibiting this stuff would be a wonderful challenge, I can imagine it as a spiderweb of connections, perhaps something that could be better plotted with tags and webpages than in a traditional gallery. Could you plot a familys connections through some sort of wiki structure? The cogs were turning in my mind as the scanner was slowly blinking across the prints.

Curating this material is a joy and is a job I’ve yet to really scratch the surface of. At the back of my mind there’s the faintest glimmering of a portraiture project where we try and find some of these locations again and try retaking some of these pictures but at the moment I’m happy digging through the layers of history.

Galleries :

Beached

Distortion

I was an excruciatingly cute child…

more to come.