totem

Dungeness on a sunny day is crawling with photographers. The desolate ambiance of the enormous expanse of shingle, the nuclear power station in the background, the caché of Derek Jarman's former cottage, or the picturesque decay of the boats and huts on the beach... 

I was fascinated as well by some of the things sitting there in the shingle... Whether old engines on blocks, big barrels with mysterious numbers on them, or other constructions--all seemed to be somehow animated, as if possessed by spirits. I imagined them as totems, spirits of the dead, the revered witnesses of a past age. The modern day tripper still feels their presence, but cannot understand them. The local version of those Easter Island heads, really. As a kid, I would have happily spent a whole summer there, preferably early in the morning or in the evenings when I would be alone with them; I would have brought them back to life...

parting as friends

A few months ago, I moved out of my flat in London, which I had bought as a trainee doctor together with my German partner at the time. It had been a big, inexpensive flat, quite central on a 60's council estate in Hackney. The architecture still exuded 1960s modernist visions of community living and civic society. Of course, it was built on the cheap--floors that seemed to have been made from orange crates, crumbling concrete, peeling paint, doors as substantial as a postcard. Years of neglect, the drunken screaming at night, vandalism, the smell of dope wafting through the corridors, and the inevitable CCTV cameras all pissed on what little was left of modernist utopia. Finally, the neighbourhood had become ultra hip--pointy shoes, Pete Doherty lookalikes and Macbooks everywhere. This abrupt change felt as odd to me as the deprivation that had preceded it.



When I finally sold the place, it was without a sense of nostalgia. It had not been a bad flat, but nothing to wax lyrical about. I did not hate it; I was just fairly indifferent to it. And yet, when almost everything was packed and the flat was almost naked, I could not just sneak away without a nod of acknowledgement of the years we had shared, the flat and I. A quarter of my life, partners had come and gone (and eventually stayed), illness, birthdays, guests, shags, flatmates, dinner for friends, and my cats barfing on the carpets... It was this intimacy of living that had turned those charmless walls into my home. I had changed the place to some extent, and I had certainly changed while living there. It had been "mine" for better or worse. I took out my camera during the last couple of hours, put it on a tripod and took some pictures that, to me, demonstrate this intimacy and this ownership. We are both naked; I face the camera; I inhabit the flat as much as my body, which bears the marks and scars of my life.


We part as friends...

a few more at
ninthplanet's photostream

PhotoBearUK

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of meeting a photographer whose work I absolutely love. He asked me if he could take my picture. Much of his work fits the category of gay male nudes, which I normally run a mile from. Much of the fetishistic gay male glamour photography stuff bores me to tears--there is already tons of it around. I find much of it all surface, no depth. It perpetuates the myth that gay man are, or at least should be, hypersexualised always-ready-when-you-are totty. I have to confess here that I do not even like most porn; it simply does not turn me on--it usually has a sense of deja-vu, and it remains too distant from me, certainly more than my own fantasies or experiences. All in all, I do not often find gay male nudes very interesting.


Vincent's are different. They are less nudes than naked portraits. The models are not passively consumed by the viewer, but actively engaged as most of the pictures are shot dead pan. The quality of the lighting and the detail lend the images depth and palpable presence. They can be sexy (and most of the men in them are sexy to me), but they are so without negating the sitters' individuality and personality. 


So, I agreed. I was wearing an orthopaedic boot after some foot surgery, which was not an obstacle to doing these pictures apparently. I am by now reasonably comfortable posing in the buff though I am not that confident physically. But I actually like these pictures very much. There are two pictures of the session here, but there are hundreds more (and of much more attractive models) on Vincent's Flickr site where he operates under PhotoBearUK. He also takes a huge variety of pictures, from flowers to landscapes, and a trawl through his Flickr site is hugely rewarding. 


Check out his websites:
PhotoBearUK
mascularstudio

easyjet bauhaus vunder

In easyjet's in-flight magazine November 09, I read an article titled bauhaus vunder--a fashion shoot in front of "Bauhaus" icons in Berlin. So, what's not to love?

Leaving aside that these fashion pictures (fashion + models) look to me like the sort of 80's horror that I hoped had died along with Duran Duran, there is nothing bauhaus about them... and wunder is still spelt with a "w" inspite of the many reruns of "'ello, 'ello". Some pictures are taken in front of Daniel Libeskind's German-Jewish museum, others at the Holocaust Memorial. Libeskind's structure is anything but Bauhaus--it is a building that is designed to disorientate and surprise. It has nothing of the cool form-follows-function predictability of Bauhaus. 

I am generally not a big fan or friend of memorials--they have a tendency to be instrumentalised by calculated piety and "Berufsbetroffenheit". Racist, homophobic, genocidal, or corrupt politicians of all colours are scrambling to be seen laying wreaths at the feet of these memorials without batting an eye lid. As a rule, if there is a TV or press camera around, the original meaning of such a memorial is turned into its opposite. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin has always felt different to me; rather than being purely symbolic, it is a sensual experience. One can lose orientation amongst its hard, relentless monoliths. There is no way of predicting what is around the corner. It is about modernist dreams turning into nightmares, a merciless machine that swallows up men, women, and children. It does require a moment's reflection and attention to appreciate the horror, which it reminds of. No such reflection for our "bauhaus vunder" crew. The genocide of 6 million Jews (plus the many other victims--Sinti and Roma, gays, communists, people with congenital illnesses., Russians...--whose memory has been excluded from the memorial by its planners, but which remains inseparable from it) to them is just a lovely backdrop for a little fashion sale. Shame they did not go all the way... morbidly anorexic models with shaven heads in striped suits, for instance. I bet someone was just doing their job...

Constructing myself

It's me in my finest rubber looking out of the window of a WWII bunker into a garden where my mother, age 68 (or age 9), is sitting on the swing her husband built for her 6 years ago. Her little girl's fairy tale world is as carefully constructed as my late fetish--clothes, setting, posture. Both worlds are very separate from the rest of our lives (with the potential for disaster or comedy when they meet). My mother's construction is a lonelier one--straight 68-year old women have not built an underground tribe around their little girl fantasies. They probably also have not been identified as a consumer group. Yet.

Those constructed constructions are a home of a sort, in a world where dislocation is the cultural norm. Where do you belong? In a world all by yourself or is nowhere a better place? If one is lucky, one never had to ask the question, or one can afford to buy a place...

Wir sind das Volk

Wir sind das Volk! was the slogan of East German liberation--We are the people and cannot be ignored!. It changed slightly to Wir sind ein Volk--We are one people, when Germany reunified.

An exhibition on Alexanderplatz in Berlin commemorates and documents those historical events. I was there in August to see it, at this square whose architecture to this day heralds the dawn of a new age, this modernist utopia that was the shopping window of socialist East Germany. Large metal panels are suspended above the square carrying the words that signify the values and hopes of that era. From most perspectives, just behind the panels, are suspended the brand and shop names that represent the vision for society 20 years on. Freedom has been transformed to consumer choices. We are what we buy. Our right to buy, to spend, to build our lifestyle identities from the building blocks on the shelves is framed by the high aspirations of the past--dignity, freedom, democracy, upright citizens, human rights, the battle for power, wir sind das volk, for our children...

Berlin is rapidly dividing into wealthy and deprived boroughs. Private schools are formed, dividing children according to their parents' wealth. Their freedom, their dignity will fundamentally differ from those who will have to count their money to shop at Aldi's. For a brief period, we seemed to be "ein Volk"--one people, but it no longer looks like we will be