Always on the lookout for the unusual I came across stylish cover in the road while on a cycling trip around Brittany a few years ago. There it was gleaming in the midst of the tarmac speaking to me like a strange handleless tennis raquet.
Monthly Archives: February 2014
Took this shot of a man power washing a taxi somewhere in London’s East End in the 80s. I happened to be cycling past and stopped briefly and caught this moment.
I find the image quite strange and somewhat sinister, as if it’s a still from a creepy black and white film.
And you are?
Came across this wall in all its faded glory on the south side of the River Douro in Porto, northern Portugal just after, or was it before, going on a port tasting tour. I like the two men talking together on the street, the faded lettering on the wall and the wonderfully crooked hotel sign with just a glimpse of Porto across the river under a cloudless sky. There is also just visible a mirrored reflection in the street of the hotel lettering.
The title of this mini holiday blog comes from the pompous tour guide, “Hello, my name is Bruno, I speak Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and English. And you are and what languages do you speak?” Bruno was just too much, he was almost a parody of himself, we ended up sampling much port of all kinds under the supercilious nose of Bruno and couldn’t wait to get away from him.
This was my first trip to Portugal since about 1970 when as a youngster I landed in Lisbon for a couple of days when it was still in the fairly tight grip of the post Salazar regime, long before the coup d’etat of 74. Having had a couple of childhood holidays in Mozambique I was familiar with the Portuguese colonial approach, which was to extract much and not put much back. Unsurprisingly the people took up arms against their colonial masters…
I knocked on the door of the house with this chimney and told the people inside that there was a moon stuck in their chimney. They looked quizzically at me and shrugged their shoulders, so I showed them this picture on my camera and then they believed me.
I captured this informal shot of Fidel Castro, then El Presidente, between meetings at the conference centre in Harare, Zimbabwe in August 1986 where 90 odd heads of state from the Non-Aligned Movement gathered to discuss important matters, like how to deal with apartheid South Africa. He subsequently launched into a two hour speech in Spanish, the gist of which I’m sure had an anti capitalist theme running through it. We didn’t have much of a conversation, my Spanish was quite limited at the time, but he did agree to let me take the picture and several others.
Barbed wire sunset
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Taken at an industrial estate in Acton, West London in the early 80s in what was a difficult time politically with the first Thatcher government a couple of years into power and beginning to flex its muscles and put concepts like ‘privatisation’ and ‘monetarism’ into the public domain. For me this photograph sums up those years, bleak, soulless and uncaring.
When living in the USA in the second half of the 70s, not only did I have to prove that I didn’t have TB (X-ray), wasn’t a member of any Communist party, but that every January I had to register myself as an alien. A concept I always found strange, having absorbed many sci fi books and films. (We, citizens of the USA are just fine, the rest of you are aliens.)
Photo taken in San Francisco one January wearing my second head on my way to prove I was an alien and yes they believed me. After five years I returned to the human race.
Citizen Cane picks up his camera 