photography

Some astounding images of a dead Russian sea plane. (Spotted on a @eleventhvolume tweet).

Posted by poacher in photography at 09:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Belly of the Whale. Image by Robin Friend


Greenhouse. Image by Robin Friend


West Country. Image by Robin Friend

"The landscape is in danger of losing its capacity to keep secrets from us."

We've not had much in the way of photography on here recently, but I came across Robin Friend today (courtesy of youyouidiot) and wanted to share. His photographs have got a damp melancholy to them, and feel both secretive and oddly voyeuristic, as if Friend were trying to restore some of the secret nature he sees as being leached away from our relationship to landscape. You can more of his work at robinfriend.co.uk and youyou has an article on Friend in this month's Hotshoe magazine.

Posted by poacher in photography at 12:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Excuse the long hiatus, I've been sweating it out beneath the roaring sun in The Gambia and Senegal. I stepped outside work today, into the first pool of sun I've seen since being back and could scarce believe that just five days ago I was facing the same bright disc and barely able to stand it. The shot above was taken about 100km inland from the coast in Senegal at the a ford of a river. The area was rich with cultivation - onions, tomatoes, lettuce - and people tended neat gardens, pulling at weeds, taking water straight from the river with battered metal watering cans. We sat at the ford for a time and watched the comings and goings, which was mainly people passing between villages, some with things to sell, others on social visits or simply on their way to school. What I love best about the photo is the little feet. All three women had children in these back slings (though two are obscured), and each of the children looked as if they could sleep all day long. Amen to that.

Posted by poacher in photography at 17:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, China. Image from REUTERS/Jianan Yu


Chinese military singers take part in a chorus performance of patriotic songs. Image from AP Photo


A Hindu woman devotee offers prayers after taking a holy dip in the waters of river Ganga in the northern Indian city of Allahabad. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash

Dazzling, humbling 3 part suite of photos from 2009 over the Big Picture blog. There isn't much to say except go and take a look.

Posted by poacher in photography at 21:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A couple of dazzling galleries of images from the lens of Francis Wolff - from the peerless If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger blog. Woolf was an executive at Blue Note, a company set up by his childhood friend and co-German emigre Alfred Lion, and Woolff used his access to the rehearsal sessions to full effect. Awesome. Genuinely.


Elvin Jones


Eric Dolphy


John Coltrane

Posted by poacher in photography at 21:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The harbour bridge, obscure

As a city that is so concerned with itself as a spectacle, the current dustcloak that is choking Sydney must be doubly disorienting. There have been some amazing shots of the dust storms - the above is probably my favourite (taken, I assume from the Rocks end of the bridge) - but there are some other jaw-dropping efforts contained in these two Flickr galleries.

Edit: A fantastic piece on this from Dan Hill of City of Sound. (Cheers to John Coulthart for the tip on this).

Posted by poacher in photography at 13:27 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Eclipse - 6m 42s


Nebula NGC 6559

I routinely rediscover the NASA APOD every six months or so and promise myself I'm going to check it every day, follow the links, make myself humble. But I invariably creep away. Current events though have made me think of our place among the infinities and coming across it again today is no great surprise.

There's also a suitably epic track to download - Belong's mighty 'The Door Opens the Other Way'. Turn it up: it will fill the room.

Download: Belong - The Door Opens the Other Way

Posted by poacher in photography at 14:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tyneham - closed

Twice I have gone looking for Tyneham, the fabled lost village in the Purbeck Hills of Dorset. The first time we read the maps all wrong and ended up at another 'attraction' - a blue phone box in the middle of nowhere. The second time, a blazing February afternoon, we drove up, up into the chalk ridges, armed with pack-satchels and binoculars. Dorset has a peculiar cut-off feel to it as it is, Purbeck even more so - I feel time fall away when driving or walking there, other older timescales slipping across each other: the deep time of geological shifts, cut into the land in the toothed ridges, the impossible slant of the hills and chasms; the gentle yet ungraspable imprint of near history in the low-lying farms and the destructive clatter of the MOD presence - land claimers and land-shapers in their own way.

On this day the sense of being cut off was heightened by the presence of a heat-haze running deep into the valleys and hovering dense and white above the distant sea. Each ridge seemed a separate floating island of chalk and loam. We'd got directions off a toothy pub landlord and we're by now high on a ridge, scanning the MOD fences for a sign - anything to indicate where Tyneham might be located, crouching. Then, near the top of the next rise, we saw the sign telling us that the range, and the village were 'closed' - access denied. The ghosts of Tyneham were at peace this day and if we trespassed we were liable to get shot or blown up. Mostly I was beset with a kind of poetic tension - the tense urge to set eyes on a village, a village abandoned in full working order, and the feeling that it should remain sealed off, free from greedy prying eyes such as ours. As it was we continued to the top of the rise and tried to see into the appropriate valley, eyes straining to see through Purbeck stone, to see through Purbeck mist. It was an impossibility. It had to remain elusive for now. For ever perhaps.


Tyneham - ruins

The guys at Nothing to See Here however, recently managed to get sight of the place in all its cold-stone glory. In the quiet light of these pictures it isn't eerie or ghosted as I suspected it might be; instead it looks as though it might be waiting - waiting for the return of footfalls and the heavy thrumming weight of life. See for yourself with this Flickr set.

Also, check out Anne's iLike site if you get the chance.

And apropos of not much, I've been thinking about this track an awful lot recently:

Download: Meursault - A General Term

Posted by poacher in photography at 14:45 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The City Library of Stockholm


The reading room of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

Some stunning images of libraries around the world

Posted by poacher in photography at 13:55 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Snow Geese

Excuse the outsize image but this needs to be seen in all its glory: snow geese leaving their feeding grounds. This is beyond Escher...For an even bigger version see here; for more of Kathleen Connally's stunning photography visit her website. Is it possible to have nostalgia for a place one has never visited?

Posted by poacher in photography at 23:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)