Personal photography
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time is: what will happen to my photos once I’m gone? I’m not talking about whether the actual images will still exist (hint: print). I’m talking about what will people do with them.
To start the series, I’ve taken a random photo from many years ago. In May 2009, I visited the isle of Islay, on the West coast of Scotland, with my wife and my parents. Islay is a pilgrimage place for people interested in peaty whisky and both my wife and my father are into it. So it made sense to have a visit.
Paris used to have a train line going around it. It was called the PC: Petite Ceinture. It was closed a long time ago (before I was born I think).
Most of it has disappeared: covered, built upon, or recycled. It was even converted into private gardens in places. There are few sections that have been converted to walking tracks.
I don’t often take colour photos, but this time I made the conscious effort to do so.
I liked all the blue things. That’s taken at the back of Beaubourg. The less touristy side.
I was in Paris a few weekends ago to visit my parents. I took the opportunity to walk around Paris for a few days.
I had to wait a while to get people and the pigeon in the right place.
Warning: this is photography-adjacent only.
Sometimes I buy second hand books. Either on Amazon or on local markets. Mostly because when you buy a lot of books it becomes expensive. Especially photography books. And I need the money for photography and astronomy. On occasion, these books come from libraries that have closed or that have sold some of their stock of rarely borrowed books to replace them with books people prefer.
I love when these books still contain their date stamped lending cards.
I’m still trying to identify why I like Substack so much more than other social platforms. So navel gazing warning is in place.
One of the things that annoyed me with Substack is the fact that the various people writing on it do so for duplicates of themselves.
I’m not a street photographer. Part of it is that I live in the middle of nowhere and we don’t really have streets. I was in Paris at the weekend to visit my parents, so I experimented a bit.
Sometimes, photography reminds me of scientific research. Both disciplines demand an intense focus on minute details, adhering to conventions that outsiders rarely understand, communicating in a formalized way, and both often seem incomprehensible to the general public.
During my last visit in Paris, I went to a Richard Avedon exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
