After Christmas

I cannot believe that it is already the end of the year!?

Wow, we have just been wrapping Christmas gifts, oggling our friend's Mark special Christmas tie while in Haddington and now we are back in the work grind and this delicious cake is nothing but a distant memory!

Just like that much snow in Scotland (which I have managed to photograph before it all disappeared). Edinburgh was back to its normal cloudy, grey, windy self today. Just as if  *real* winter has never happened, everything was as it is suppose to be in Scotland at his time of the year - lads just in t-shirts were back in the streets with a vengeance (I think I saw at least 5 of them this afternoon).

Blast from the past

We had a fantastic Christmas in Haddington and we are now back in Edinburgh, finishing some things before the end of this year and even more duties arriving.

While in Haddington, Simon's son Lyova, dug out some old family photos and we have enjoyed an interesting glimpse in the past - do you recognise this handsome chap?  I could not help myself, I had to marry him!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I have managed to call almost all of you with greetings, my dear Friends, so now I just would like to wish all the ones that I have not managed to get in touch that I am thinking about you lot guys all that time! I hope you will have a great, quiet, cosy time with your beloved and your families.

Thank you Sejin for our beautiful gift and I have never received so exotic Xmas card before! Lots of love and let's catch up after Christmas!

Big hugs to my friends in Berlin - Adam & Dea and my dear friend Monica who though based in Berlin might be now with her family in the South. To Agata (and her family) and Marcin and Kasia and Lukasz in Krakow. I hope we will be able to arrange our next year schedules so that we will be able to meet.

Lots of love to my Polish friends Kasia + Joanka and Karolina and Magda with their families! See you hopefully in January, gals!

Meanwhile an impromptu Chritmas card from snowy Scotland:



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Warm up!

Snowbound

Scotland is still blocked by snow and courrier companies with the Postoffice in tow refused to take on more packages to be send before Christmas. Therefor some of you will not be able to get your Xmass greetings from us on time - I will add some New Year greetings as well, to keep the cards more appropraite especially when you receive them after Christmass...

Here are several images to give you an idea why it is actually difficult to get out of the house: shops scare you with their empty shelves as even big retailers are not getting their stock on time, buses are runnung even less reliably than ever, underneth the snow there is a black ice hiding - a Scottish weather invention which is basically a very thin layer of ice on the tarmac which you cannot see untill you actually slip on it dramatically, people who have never heard of winter tyres and are still driving, a runner on Meadows who jogged by barefoot in the snow (my first though was that somebody must have stolen his shoes! but then I spotted white cable of his iPod, so maybe just Shackelton was his idol), a hot chocolate that does not keep you hot for too long, a high heating bill, not being able to crawl out of bed in the morning, a threat of a photoshoot in the snow far away from home and with frozen models...

Missing for graphic designers

I was missing Paris again recently but this blog kept it at bay. A bit.

http://parisvsnyc.blogspot.com/

Winter - continuation!

Winter - part 2

Wow! Edinburgh looked today as if we all moved to Poland w/o travelling. I went out just after noon to catch up with my friend Simon (one of not many of my friends who were not snowed in or down with a cold) and ended up in a blizzard of a decade:

The time was approximately 1.30 pm but it was dark as if the night was about to fall! Cold wet wind was smacking one's face with falling snow and I had to wear my heavy winter boots (I call them 'walonki Puma's style') and my famously burned puffa winter coat (that I subsequently had to chop off at the bottom). And all that just for a 10 minutes walk to Peter's Yard. Of course it all stopped when I settled down over my ham soup at PY and sun came out again so Simon arrived all rosy from the cold not even knowing what he had missed while working at the library over his essay.

Winter!

So we are in the middle of the snowiest winter in Scottish history. Not that it differs too much from what is happening in Poland at the moment... However I have still managed today to spot a lady in 11 inch heels on bare perfectly pedicured feet, fighting her way Bambi style through the snow drifts. But I have not seen any people in t-shirts, at least that.

Several days ago:

Today:

Paris = great time, no shopping

^ Simon and I before entering the buzz of Paris Photo, which was just too much. Photography fatigue at it's hardest that no amount of coffee could help.

I was so happy to meet with my dearest friend Aurelia and her family again!

I must say that I was much more keen to spend my evenings (as the portfolio review was taking my time up until late afternoon) with them and have our long conversations at the kitchen table, accompanied by Aurelia's fantastic cooking (oh la la! What a fabulous cook this girl is!), than doing any visiting or shopping.

Being determined girls, we have ventured to the Galleries Lafayette though, but with a huge portfolio box in tow it was not fun whatsoever and even though I have vowed to return later and buy some items I have spotted at Bensimon, I have not returned in the end as I thought I must have lost my phone and then my camera (you would be glad to hear that I did not loose them in the end), so I was not in mood for any shopping. And by the time I returned home and found both items by my bed, I did not feel like going out again.

It was lovely to be part of your household for several days, with Edgar The Archetipical Cat at Monika and Michael upstairs, watching Matthieu's band videos (he is a bass player apart from his lovely designer job and their first record comes out soon! Check it out, a genuine wit combined with a good music, I loved it!) and Oskar and Maelly play and being little angles. Oh, we cannot thank you enough!

Bisous and see you all very soon!

And this time, we will go and have a proper look at all these Bel Airs, Majes, Iros,  French Trotters, Marants, Bensimons, Jacobses and Pierlots.

Back from Paris

We are back from Paris, straight into the worst attack of winter that Scotland had in years! Edinburgh looks more like Krakow with snow up to one's ankles!

I had a very interesting portfolio review there, meeting with Katka and Nikita again (Katka at the portfolio review and Nikita at the Paris Photo fair in Louvre) and what is even more important, I had an opportunity to spend a great time with my friends there and their family - I would like to say big MERCI to you guys, because without your help this stay simply would not have been possible!

Me, after leaving Paris Photo after 5 hours of strolling through the vast exhibition - completely brain frazzled, n'est ce pas?

Central Europe + travel

With such a solid dose of travelling the blog inevitably had to go into hiatus, so I will try to update it now with our latest adventures ( I know, it is quite a backlog!).

Let's start with some images from Prague, where we visited our familiar haunts - we had a chace to have a proper look at Tchech capital, where my friend Magda (ahoy!) lived there and she very kinldy put us up for the time of our visit.

Friendly smile of Krecik:

A fellow ReGeneration2 photographer - Ania Orlowska with a broken thumb at the Martin Parr show in Bratislava and Katka Prackova unwrapping a very Slovakian treat - in Poland known as wafelki and in Slovakia as napolitanky - thank you Katka! With their enormous (positive) energy capacities, both Katka and napolitanky kept us going through meetings with reviewers:

Nope, these are not potatoes but knedle (I am not able to recall their Slovakian name, sorry!  in Slovakian called slivkove gule as Katka recently filled me in)  - they actually

have a plum wrapped inside and are very VERY tasty.

^ Katka and Daniel looking through prints of Katka's exquisite work. I wish I had the money to get one, as I know how much collectors are forking out for them...

Simon at our favourite cafe - Mayer, which serves the most delicious cakes in Bratislava - Martin Parr is actually sitting at a table in next room but I am too shy to really stalk him. We have met him several times at various exhibition openings and then it turned out that we actually all stayed in the same hotel!

So we have met lots of lovely new people as well (^ a bunch of supertalended and superentertaining Russian photographers. Nikita Pirogov, who is the boy in a stripy jumper, won this year's Portfolio Review and will have a show next year in Bratislava. Another boy in company of two Olgas, Denis Vasilyev,  very kindly presented us with exqusite prints of his beautiful, intimate work. Wow, we have not expected such a moving gift! Thank you Denis!

Simon agreed to pull a Leonardo so that I could photograph him as a winner of the third prize of the Portfolio Review. I am so proud that his lovely, intelligent work is getting more and more recognition it deserves.

Scottish Autumn, 12:05

Autumn 1 : Sylwia 0

Scottish Autumn, 12:04

Lecturing

Last week I had my lecture at The Scottish Centre for Photography aka Stills gallery but before that Simon and I we went to the annual lecture at the Scottish National Galleries. This year it was Simon Norfolk as a speaker. And what a speaker he was!

He was talking fast, had audience in stiches more than dozen of times. One could not slack for a moment because it would mean getting out of a loop of a networkcentric warfare, liminal states of the launched satellites and other toys for boys with Dr Strangelove prominently referenced. His lecture was absolutely brilliant, hillarious, intellingent and so charmingly presented that one even forgives the author some not very precise research on American government's military budget data.
It was wonderful to see someone so keen on his research (which I have not seem to get down with for my latest project, yet. As Gery Windogrand paraphased Capa in Mister Norfolk's quote: ' If your pictures are not good enough you are not reading enough.') and finding how the world actually works. However when you do a google search on Norfolk most websites describe him as a fine artist but stay silent about his political views which I found rather too radical for my taste. And as one friend put it rightly after the lecture - his photography seems to be very incidental in comparison with what he really cares about.

I have managed to sneak a picture of Simon Norfolk in action - in reality he looks nothing like his famous Afghan selfportrait which he coyly described as 'a gay astronaut' :

On our way to the Hawthorne Theatre I have turned around and spotted this fairytale like scene - very appropriate as Norfolk's lecture started with Claude Lorraine's radical landscapes - my little digital camera does not quite do it justice:

My Mum on the net

A beautiful portrait of my mum was featured today at an excellent blog Pictures of My Mother.
Here just a sneaky peek, go and have a look and read the story behind it for yourself: