30 Aug 06 Days go by
Summer is nearly a distant memory already! The heatwave has long passed and morning chills have set in.
I’ve just finished pulling together my submission for the annual London Independent Photography exhibition coming up in mid-October. I made five prints from images I took for the Street Photography workshop at Tate Modern awhile back, all black and white, 12×18 and mounted for framing. I drop them off tomorrow and should find out by September 10th if any are selected. So cross your fingers for me ;)
This past weekend was great fun with a bank holiday on Monday, which also happened to be Matt’s birthday! We ventured out into the woods for another country walk, this time to Saunderton. The weather was so variable that our trek alternated between clopping through mucky forest paths under a bit of rain to crunching across dry harvested hay fields. In the wetlands we saw hundreds of snails and a few slugs; in the dry it was (you guessed it) sheep, numerous pheasants (that run around in zig-zags), the odd rabbit, horse and a single fawn. There was a surreal minute in the forest too, when rounded the path and entered the Matrix! About 50 feet ahead of us we spotted two goths dressed in long, swinging black leather coats. They slowed down to take photos (and, of course, to give us the opportunity to get a closer look at their outfits). Both wore black leather caps, dark sunglasses, leather pants and boots - all this for a stroll in the country! Surreal.
We stopped through West Wycombe to tour the Hellfire Caves and Tearoom. Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? The chalk caves were excavated between 1748–1752 “to provide work for unemployed farm workers following a succession of harvest failures” and for the owner of the land, Sir Francis Dashwood, to hold underground meetings with his member-buddies of the Hellfire Club. The caves are impressively enormous and wind deep underground, though I can’t recall how deep - perhaps 100 meters. Disappointingly, the place is a certifiable tourist trap swarming with kids tearing around in the dark, narrow corridors, so it’s difficult to get a sense of how creepy the caves might have been in the mid-18th century.
In other adventures, I spent part of the weekend visiting with my friend from Chester whose samba band rolled into town to play the Notting Hill Carnival. The band, called Batala, numbered nearly 150 players gathered from the UK and France. Saturday night was kind of preview celebration with all sorts of carnival players performing in a sweaty community hall, and Sunday was a 6+ hour Batala rehearsal at a small university gym.
This section made up about a quarter of the band. It was difficult to photograph in the low-lit gym and because of space limitation I shot down from the observation balcony. Anyway, this day all these players worked incredibly hard preparing for their 4-5 hour carnival parade on Monday. Tuesday morning they were rewarded with a double-page photo spread of their performance in the Guardian! Hot stuff.
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