A year in pictures.

I’ve now pretty much left Instagram, bar for commenting/liking, and have moved my day-to-day photos towards Flickr.

For a while, I’ve had a feeling of wanting to take longer-lasting photographs, of better quality, that actually stand-up to time  — something which Matt well articulates. This post-Instagram, post-filter landscape has been accelerated by Instagram’s recent behaviour that has undermined its value to me and sullied the gentle social: the main reason I loved their service.

It is still a good record of the bits and pieces that I’ve experienced over the past year — including getting married, a handful of trips to Mitteleuropa and more Copenhagen — but next year I’d like to get better at photography, with a better camera.

So, 2012, through Instagram:

January.

February.

March.

April.

May.

June.

July.

August.

September.

October.

November.

December.

Breaching Experiments.

A new show opened at Site Gallery today by Finnish artist Pilvi Takala. It’s brilliantly observed work focusing on banal absurdism, mainly around rules, perceived rules and behaviour. It’s deeply funny and well worth popping into if you’re nearby.

Watch an excerpt of Takala’s The Real Snow White for an example of how she pokes things with a straight-faced stick.

 

 

 

Duck & Cover.

One of my long-standing hobbies is watching for discarded notes. Most notably over at Other People’s Shopping Lists, but I keep my eyes peeled for any kind of abandoned writing or photographs – fragments of people’s lives – mostly hoping for treasure maps or Dear John letters in amongst the lichen and chip papers.

Such as this torn beauty:

A document of a holiday fling that ended sourly, found on the street in Liverpool one summer many years ago.

Yesterday, I spotted a square of paper that looked like more than a lost to-do list or B&Q inventory. I kicked it down the road a bit before picking it up. This is what I found:

This is the kind of thing that you keep an eye on the discarded and the mundane for. Folding it out, there is a whole page of name ideas for the Nuclear Winter Menu, with a side section for Kruschev Cocktails:

Some decent pun work – including People In Blankets and Garlic Mushroom Cloud on the meal side, and Berlin Wallbanger and Sex On The Bunker cocktails – is let down by some pretty shit ones (Holocaust Halibut).

I can’t quite see that the anonymous, slightly racist, fantasy landlord will ever quite achieve their dreams of drinking a Sexed Up On The Beach at their less inspired franchise idea: The Baghdad Bistro.

In search of the Sublime.

This might be my second post about Instagram. About its worth to me, personally. It’s quick and superficial — looking at the “the continuous partial everywhere” of Cerveny and Juha, but maybe in terms of Coleridge and Wordsworth. I think I’m coming to find the opposite of Juha’s experience; a continuous partial nowhere.

The constant awareness of other people’s locations – thanks to foursquare, twitter, instagram – is causing a small sense of dislocation. I am not really a part of those locations. It’s wonderful, of course, precisely because of that. It’s cause for fantasy. Of escapism.

I’ve found the photographs I’ve actively liked on Instagram are pretty much a straight split between food/drink, brutal/urban, and pastoral/remote; the rest made up of moments and (what would once have been) noticings.

It’s pastoral/remote images like this:

This:

This:

and this:

I think I’m increasingly drawn to them because they’re over there. Not here, part of my daily routine. They’re a foreign bit, and they are very definitely somewhere. I find myself following people from Finland, Portland, Norway, adventurers and people near lands of tall pines, mountains, fjords. I follow them to escape briefly from the urban, suburban, bricks, mortar and railway tracks.

This is the nearest I have to a contemporary Romanticism; to reconnect with landscapes I haven’t known. Finding moments of the Sublime in amongst the bus rides in the city.

It’s the pastoral companion to Bridle’s Robot Flâneur. It’s post-industrial escapism delivered by the ultra-modern super-computer in my pocket.

(Images by Anne Holiday, Jez Burrows, Graeme Douglas & Jørn Knutsen, respectively)

The logic of a MacGuffin.

Some brief ambling today led me to Hitchcock’s definition of a MacGuffin.

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?“, and the other answers “Oh, that’s a McGuffin“. The first one asks “What’s a McGuffin?“. “Well“, the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands“. The first man says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands“, and the other one answers “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!“. So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

Superb.