My wife got me a lemur for Christmas last year, through Whipsnade Wild Animal Park’s adoption scheme. You don’t get one to take away unfortunately, but you do get a pair of free tickets to the zoo. We finally got round to visiting on the weekend, and I wanted a photo of my lemur.
I like photographing animals. I just wish they’d hold still.
A photo of mine has just been used in the new Schmap tour guide for London, I found out today. Always nice to have them put to good use. That’s the second commercially used photo this year. I also had one of my stock photos of a llama used in an anti-tobacco ad in a little league baseball stadium, with the tagline ‘spitting is for llamas’. Such are the wonders of the internet.
When I was little I was fascinated by what was inside a hermit crab’s shell, but no matter how many you caught and turned over, you could never do it quite fast enough to see.
So, although slightly freaky, this picture satisfies a long-running curiosity of mine.
Everybody likes a good ruin, but the ones we usually value tend to be old, ancient civilisations, runied abbeys. But the 20th century has given us more abandoned places than any other, the cycles of innovation, industry and obsolesence leaving us with ruins in and around our cities, empty and crumbling, foreboding and locked away. I find such places fascinating.
So does Tim Edensor, my old university lecturer, who wrote a book on the subject.
His eloquent and thought provoking take on industrial ruins is online too, in writing and in photography, here and here.
“As spaces by the side of the road, ruins can be explored for effects that talk back to the quest to create an impossibly seamless urban fabric, to the uses to which history and heritage are put, to the extensive over-commodification of places and things, to middle-class aesthetics, and to broader tendencies to fix meanings in the service of power.”
Every last sunday of the month we do something a little bit different at Church on the Corner, and last night we hosted a photography exhibition. The photography club at International Students House displayed their work, and we had a lecture on ‘imaging truth’ and a prayer room upstairs. It looked great. The pictures are up for a week, so drop by and see them if you’re in the area.
Jeremy Williams 