One knows that Winter is comming when seals start swimming upside down

Why the Scottish seal pup is shown upside down I have no idea.
All images from the natural history exposition at the National Museums of Scotland.

The Zombie Boy no longer

I can only assume that lots of people wonder (me included) how Rick Genest looks like under all these elaborate embellishments. Here is the answer thanks to Dermablend concealer. So? Well, he looks like...Michael Ackerman.

http://www.rickgenest.com/index.php/home/item/78-go-beyond-the-cover.html




Lots of love, still from Poland where tatoos are considered a taboo and for serial offenders only but where airpilots are the best in the world ( long live and fly captain Tadeusz Wrona!).

Bridges Walk

Yesterday we invited Monica to visit with us a venue where we will be working soon (and thus some reconnaissance was necessary).

One thing led to another and we ended up walking almost 10 miles towards South Queensferry from the Dalmeny estete, in a mixture of lashing rain and sunshine peeking through the clouds. The walk ended with a meal in the famous Hawes Inn (it is featured in novel 'Kidnapped' by Robert Louis Stevenson) just by the Forth Rail Bridge. The pies were on a small side I thought, but after several hours of intense walking (and talking, it is always good to have deep conversations about meaning of life with longknown friends) this kind of food was very welcomed. We demolished some profiteroles, apple crumble and pecan pie too. We have returned home on a completely empty Edinburgh bus and we slept like babies.

Can you imagine that someone tried to saw off the bronze horse that stands in front of the Dalmeny House?! I though that these kind of things happen only in my homeland...

London rush and riots

Last week I dragged my poor husband all the way down to London to work on a portrait commission for The Photographers Gallery. I have managed to wriggle in the Victoria and Albert museum as my photoshoot's location (hence we spent most of our time in West London though I went on a brief venture into the East end of the town, still troubled with the recent riots - I had to pick up studio keys for the second part of the working day and on my way in the underground I heard an annoucnment about Brixton station being on fire...).

It was a great stay though (this time we booked a room with a window, a permanently sealed one but let's not be picky) a bit stressfull (it was a work trip after all but as one fellow photographer friend commented London is always good to go to for work reason) and rushed (so not time to meet family or friends - sorry guys!) but I met many friendly and helpful people (special kudos to a lovely press officer from V&A and my charming subject who proved to be extremely photogenic and patient and I seldom work with complete strangers so it was an enigma how the cooperation is going to look like).

I had at least 3 passers by asking me if I need any help when I was flicking thourgh my London A-Z outside of the Euston and Hoxton underground stations trying to arrange map along East to West directions thus shattering a myth of uncooperative Londoners.

And of course it would not have been all possible without Simon's help and support. He is not just a voice activated light stand (as we jokingly call his duties patiently executed during working with me on my portraits) or just my London guide. His presence and encouragement are sometimes the only things that stop me from running away screaming with utter fear from the photoshoot that took several weeks to arrange! It would simply not be possible without him.

It was lovely to come back to our smaller in scale, calmer and slower in pace Scottish capital. Especially after waiting for 40 minutes at King's Cross train station's mail hall right in the middle of the rush hour. The sheer amount of passing faces can make one dizzy.

So here is the visual material. Oh, if you would like to know - I have just picked up my negatives from processing and they are all waiting to be scanned. So far at least they look correctly exposed and some of them look like they have some potential...

An authentic notice on a house railing in one of the main streets in Kensington. I hope it comes from the 1940s (judging by the font):

We have spotted this plaque on a house in Cromwell Road on our way to hotel. Is says that Albert Hitchcock lived in the house! Poor chap, no wonder that our hotel window was sealed completely, this road is extremely busy!

My better profile at the V& A's outrageously decorated cafe:

I hope I will one day have enough time and money to actually go to London for a couple of days just to dive in the richness of its museums collections (we have managed to squeeze in a couple of photo exhibitions - one in Tate Modern and one in Purdy-Hicks gallery nearby, as V&A was visited mainly for scouting best locations at the Hintze sculpture gallery).

So when are you coming, Monika?

Friends and survivors

I did not feel like bore you, my dear friends with descriptions of my life in recent weeks (well, not exactly living, more like functioning for work...) but since some nice things happened, I decided to make a post about these nice things. We all have times when we do not feel like crawling out of bed (especially when nobody is offering these tens thousands of $$$) especially in face of another working day to finish at 4 am but I hope that we got into grips with our working lives now and life is back to normal again: cups of tea, watching The Hour, reading books and more regular working and bedtime hours. Certainly no travelling (during the weeks of my absence on the blog we went on assignments to Leith AND London and Simon was sent to Ukraine for almost a week) and feverish email and textmessages exchange while hopping in and out of underground amidst recent London riots...

I have even managed to visit a performance during Edinburgh Festival! Sejin very kindly offered to take me to a new Ruby Wax's performance ('Losing It') and I have enjoyed every minute of it. I think only in Britain it is possible to do a comedy show about depression and get it genuinely funny. Thank you Sejin, it was not only a big laugh but also a big eye opener, especially for someone like me, who comes from a culture that treates depression as something one can just shake off within several days and if you are not able to do that you are just being silly. More about Ruby and her preformance here.

Which leads me to another dear friend Monica who is now visiting from Germany! Last time we saw each other when she very kindly agreed to be my vitness at my Oxford nuptials. Since then lots of dramatic things has happened in her life so when I have finally met her at the Edinburgh airport I gave her a big, well deserved hug for survivors. It is good to see her healthy again, bubbling with her usual sense of humour and to have again these long discussions about the meaning of life, the Universe and everything. She will be back with us again in couple of weeks after her horseriding holidays in the north of Scotland.

Both ladies presented me with some lovely and usefull gifts - the body weight monitor is from Sejin (ok, now I happy as I have cut out the fluffy, British bread and I am consuming Vasa aka Ryvita here instead which made a substantial difference in the size of my bum and waist) and the sleeping mask is from Monica and is a bliss during light summer nights in Scotland when it gets dark about 10 pm and light at 3 am again. When all this melatoning was suppose to be produced by my exhausted body? Last two nights contained the deepest sleep I have ever had in our southfacing flat! Thank you!

Afternoon in the countryside

Yesterday we had a REAL summer day in  Scotland (yes, like a summer for reeelz!) so we decided to do some work on the sunny early afternoon and visit one of the venues where we will be soon working taking pictures. We had all the lovely bits within one day - sunshine, baby ducklings and lots of history. A very pleasant afternoon indeed and now we are back to the usual Scottish summer which means rain all day and temperature hovering not much above +15 degrees...Luckily I have to sit all day at home and process images for clients!

House for An Art Lover Picture Heavy

House for An Art Lover

Some of you who know me might recall that I am a big fan of Charles Rennie Mackintosh work. To the extent that when I got a scholarship in Paris (in a very prestigeous ESAG design school) instead of Glasgow School of Art, I was very disappointed (well, untill I went to Paris that is, where I had the most inspiring time of my life). However my sentiments to Charles Rennie's work remain the same.

Last weekend we have managed to visit a reconstructed Mackintosh project (the house was originally designed by Mackintosh and his wife, just on paper for a competition and never been executed in real life) - a House for Art Lover in Glasgow. One can get there by a 10 minutes ride on a train from the Glasgow Central which lands one in a very affluent neighbourhood. It looks like a perfect location for a property for an art enthousiast.

House was built with community funds overs several years in the 1990s and seems to be pretty accurate reconstruction of Mackintosh architectural utopian idea though I could not help but notice that sometimes the particular for Mackintosh work proportions were lost (understandably though as the idealised drawings had to be translated into real building with all its ingeneering and construction demands) and council put some weird art works (not at all connected with architect's work style and quite frankly ugly) in the garden. The groundfloor cafe had some peculiar objects for sale (like a comic about the architect's life and lots of silver jewellery better or worse inspired by his work) but it was full of people willing to spend an afternoon in this still very eye pleasing place with good vibes of a coherent concept. It is a clever combination of old architectural forms (the main hall remaining a medieval castle) with some naval forms and 17th century houses windows proportions (Simon remarked that one of the facades really looks like his old family house which was a building from mid 17th century), all incorporated in an unique form of a very modern looking building.

I wonder if Charles Rennie and Margaret would like how their idea was translated into real life (maybe minus weird, starck white, health-and-safety railings protecting one from falling off some 5 cm high steps in the garden...) or being perfectionists, they would be slightly dissapointed by financial and aesthetical compromises that had to be made in the final execution of the project. I rather think that they woud be jolly glad that finally someone in Scotland realised that they were unique artists. And now Glasgow can cash on the architects whose work was considered too sophisticated and he was not able to make a living out of it.

Cows and seaside

A nice, SUNNY day that we spent in St Andrews, what an exception this summer, but note my canvas coat still being with me! I am finding cows to be rather intimidating but these were friendly and nostalgic, sending longing looks towards the sea, probably dreaming about sailing tall ships towards foreign, distant lands. I have always thought that after a long day in the field cows go home for a nice cuppa but no, they are being left on the field overnight, what a shame, missing so many great programmes on tv (BBC2 The Hour with Romola Garai and Ben Wishaw is on this week!).

 

Matrioszka reflection in a window of a tatoo salon in town

Fonts

Some great examples thet I have photographed just in one place - a seaside backwater (the pun very much intended!) aka Dunbar during another work realted research trip:

Alice in Edinburgh

My Mum is visiting us this Easter and Simon very kindly got the tickets for us, Ls and our guest to see the latest production of the Scottish Ballet. What an appropriate name it has:

This is soooo me!

Spring has vanished today into a freezing wind so it is the best time to dream about Italy! Approximately at the same time last year we went for a quick getaway to Florence dodging the volcano ash cloud and having a wonderful time. Katherine Hepburn was 48 when the film was made (1955) and I am thinking more and more about how society perceives women in their 40s. I am unstoppably getting there although my mental age stopped somewhere around 26-27...

Spring continues

I hope you will all understand why blogging had to be exchanged for a nice time in the sunshine (we were soooo deprived of that in Scotland in recent weeks!) with the work fit in between and some cultural events thrown in as well.

A fellow Edinburgh photographer Laurence Winram joined us to see the latest photography exhibition in Edinburgh which is the collection of portraits by August Sander. And talking about all the things German (our friends there would be happy) we have just finished watching a great documentary series about German culture of the Enlightment by Al Murray (his German Adventure). He is a British stand up comedian who made his money on laughing at various European nations as a pub landlord caracter. I have heard one joke about Poles ('how dare they bring their work ethic to our country?!' or something like that) but he was a bit more ruthless with Germans so he decided to cooperate with BBC 4 and produce a programme that explains how fascinating country Germany is. So let's hope we will be able to have a wee break in Berlin soon!

A little bit Kielce-like

As some of you already know (because we were talking about it so much!) we went to Derby Format festival portfolio review at the beginning of March. We have met with excellent team of reviewers and heard some helpful stuff about our old and new bodies of work. The highlight of the stay was meeting with Amy Stein (see her blog in the bloggroll on your right) - she is smart, charming, intellightn, helpful and funny.

You know as you sometimes think something when looking at your own work but are too lazy or too shy to actually change the direction of an advanced project and start from scratch. That is why I was deeply impressed with Amy's scrutinising eye. What she said will allow me to move my work forward. I am on a lookout for a studio space now so that I could continue my project. Though it is actually quite weird to hear somebody whose work you admire to pronounce aloud what you were secretely thinking about your own work. Well, she said she liked it so fingers crossed for the progress of this new work amidst the wedding work whirlwind.

Derby is a very weird place - visually, of course. I think it must have been quite damaged during WWII (a nearby Coventry was completely flattened) and then rebuild without any particular plan in a very haphazard way. On Sunday morning, while Simon was meeting with his agent (Regina was one of the reviewers) I went in search of Sunday newspapers and it took me quite a while to find a newsagent open at 10 am. Luckily people who I asked about directions were most helpful and I got my Sunday Times and Telegraphs in the end of a quite a long walk in the rain. Just in case I went to say a short prayer in the nearby church (again an interesting architectural mix - gloomy and medieval from outside, pink and welcoming inside!) - for a preagnant Amy, Simon's trip to Warszawa to photograph The Polish National Ballet there (he was going litterally a day after our return from Derby), my mum and dad and many other things that one does not write in a blog post.