Time again....

To start blogging..why?..i dont know..i feel like it. Yeah yeah, its been 11 months but who says i cant take a break.. Since I last wrote I got older, Climbed Mt Ventoux on a bike, went to Burundi and watched my son grow older. We live in a house in north London, in a place called Arnos Grove, closer to Scotland than Central London. Had a scare with my mother as she was diagnosed with cancer but the doctors caught it early and she is healthy today.

Photography continues to be a love-hate relationship. I love taking pictures but find the making a living part troublesome. Still I love photography and I love being a photojournalist.

The other big news......I got a Leica D-Lux3. My new point and shoot toy.

Norfolk

I was in Norfolk today. I was photographing a woman with a brain injury. She came out of a coma convinced the world she was seeing was just a dream and longed to wake up and go back to her real life. It took her a couple of years to realize that in fact she was not in a dream but living life, her real life.

I try not to drive anywhere. Its realy easy since i don't have a car. So I see Britain via the rails. During the winter months I wait for the train on cold damp platforms. And i really enjoy it. I only wish I was not loaded down with gear, usually lights and stands and too many cameras. It would be nice to experience this with just one camera and a couple of lenses. Most jobs are portraits these days and i can't rely on the sun to help me out. Its been raining for 2 weeks and i have been lugging lights for 2 weeks.

My mind is occupied by thoughts of contracts, copyright disputes, the future of this damn business (journalism as a whole) and when its gonna stop raining so i can go cycling. and stop carrying so many godamn lights.

Does Jeff Wall suck????....Nope.

More stuff on my mind

I shot this image late last year of Michael Longley, Poet and winner of the TS Eliot Prize in 2002. I mention it because It was one of those rare events last year when I shot film and B&W at that. We had a nice conversation and he enjoyed that I was shooting with a mamiya C330 twins lens reflex camera. I shot about 6 rolls, awkwardly changing the film after every 12 frames .

I know that my photography has suffered from the switch to digital. I have been shooting medium format since 1995 and I remember enjoying the challenge of the square format. It was slow , cumbersome and I had to learn to compose again. And I think that is what I enjoyed about it so much, the learning to see again.

The switch back to digital also meant the switch back to 35mm format. I enjoyed learning new skills with my Mac and Photoshop but what was much harder was learning to see again with 35mm. I love SLRs and Rangefinders but most of my work now consists not of reportage but contrived situations like portraits and commercial work. The 6x6 format seemed made for that type of work and i learned to bend it to my reportage work as well, revelling in its limitations.

The digital age has made photography a lot easier but i would doubt that it has made it better. Not knowing exactly if your image has worked out has forced photographers to hedge their bets by shooting as much as possible. Today, and I include myself in this, photograhers stop shooting when we think we have "the picture" maybe a better photograph was waiting around the corner if we had kept shooting.

anyway the point of this is that my work has suffered because of digital. The fault lies with me. And it is something i will have to overcome if I am gonna grow as a photographer.

Happy New Year

Well dear fans of photomexican, i am back. I have been on a non-stop global journey of what we call "Extrememly Busy". In November I had the pleasure of working in Guatemala for ActionAid. It was a great experience. It has been a while since visiting the country and i forgot how beautiful it is. One of the great things about working for NGOs is that their projects take you to places that one would not visit either as a tourist or covering a news event. For me that was the case as we both worked in the Highlands or in the Jungle Lowlands. It was almost 3 weeks of having the joy of being a photojournalist again. These days my assignments tend to be "go photograph somebody and you got about 15 minutes" So shooting from dawn to dusk everyday reminded what fun it is to be a photographer. It was hard work and sleep came easy everyday.

It was also the first time I worked this way in Digital. I ended up shooting almost 80GB of pics. At the end of everyday i spent all my time backing my work up, which took forever as I write DVDs very slowly (2x) and of course backing up that on an external hard drive. Left little time for editing and working on the pics. The huge anount of pics i took hit me when I got back to London. It took me 2 weeks of post processing to deliver the work to ActionAid. 2 weeks of working til midnight.

Luckily at the end of this I had a holiday to look forward to visiting my family and my wife's family. But soon I was struck down by a sinus infection and horrific flu. I laid on a sofa trying to recover and watched bad american TV in my in-law's house.

I am back in London still not feeling a 100%. I am finding it hard to get back into the swing of things. The future is still kinda gloomy. Uncertain.

What!!??....WE Gotta learn to shoot Video?!

Well this is depressing for me at the moment. I may or not may go to Guatemala for a story and i am all excited about it because i seem to do "stories" less and less. The job may still fall through because of money and other bullshit. Ok maybe for the first time in my life i am scared that i may not be able to make a living in ten years and believe me i dont make much of one now.

Free newspapers, news websites that dont seem to suffer from not having compelling photography in them, the you_tubes of the world with their free visual content that no one pays for or cares that a lot of it cost money to make. I think we are entering some form of "Tower of Babel" world of information. a lot more of it out there but that negates itself with the sheer volume of crap that one has to navigate through.

The Daily Telegraph here in London has just fired its whole picture desk department. Lots of writers sacked as they move into new offices that are the latest in technology. But no one is talking about photographers making video content, but reporters. The Telegraph wants it writers not only to write but produce video diaries. Soon they will all carry a small video camera and produce visual content for the new look Telegraph website, which will post stories as soon as they come in and not wait for the morning edition of the newspaper to come out....

This morning i was to photograph Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine "Private Eye". Of course i was to do the photo after the interview. the writer went over hs time while i slowly started fuming as my time slowly dwindled. I thought to myself if that writer does not finish soon I am just gonna pack up and leave. Why should I try to make a great pic in 5 minutes, knowing full well that i will be in such a rush I will probably produce a crappy pic. But I thought to myself, "will the paper really care if i dont come back with a pic?, Its not like they wont be able to source a photograph about one of the most well known journalists in London." So I did my photo in just under 10 minutes, all, frantic like, rushing to get as much in my small amount of time.

And in all this I thought to myself, do i really make a difference, a contribution.???? Right now I dont feel indispensable and from the looks of it, neither does the industry feel that way about still photographers.

Spain hates me

I had an assignment in Malaga/Marbella Spain. To photograph a dude the Americans think is evil.Unfortunately due to the new restrictions i am no longer able to take my cameras with me on the plane but have to check them in.Which I duly did and what happens.......my bags did not arrive for 2 days.I have already had a failed assignment in Spain this year in which my subject never arrived. Now My bags had not shown up. the first night i spent in the first hotel i saw in Malaga. It looked really cool from the outside. old and colonial. (though in spain it technically cannot be colonial) it was cheap. 30 euros. but i soon realized it was the kind that you go to to fuck your mistress, girlfriend, gay boyfriend...etc etc....i was surrounded by people fucking. i could hear it. no tv nothing, just a big bed in my room which was ok because one of my worst habits is watching tv until i fall asleep in foreign hotels. so i tried to read my john irving book until i fell asleep amid the sounds of pleasure......the next night i upgraded to a better hotel after sitting at the airport all fucking day and again no bags. i decided to go buy some toiletries to wash my butt with and then headed out to malaga town center, which was beautiful and hopping with night life on a tuesday night. I had a great paella and a really nice walk. Its nice walking in a city at 1am with the streets still full of people.. my bags arrived on wednesday noon, then i rushed to Marbella where my subject was and do my shoot. my subject is on a list of 41 people that the USA and Iraq government say is bankrolling the insurgency. he claims he is innocent. he lives in a fucking huge villa bought with the proceeds of a lifetime being an arms dealer. he was also tried and found innocent of bankrolling the Achilles Lauro (Laro?) cruise liner highjacking in which a guy in a wheelchair was shot and thrown overboard. needless to say he is no boy scout. his house is filled with photos of himself with a who's who of the arab nationalist cause....saddam hussein, his son Uday, arafat, abu abbas, assad, mubarak, every gulf royal, qaddafi and best of all Kenny Rogers. he gave me 15 minutes and said not to get the pics on his walls in the photo. (people might get the wrong idea he said).The photo posted is the worst from the shoot and its soft.

so with the shoot complete, i headed off to Marbella. Stayed in a really really nice hotel next to the beach. Met with the reporter Aram Roston who works for NBC nightly news but has been freelancing more as a writer ( he is up for 2 Emmys on Monday) we went to the seafront for dinner and Marbella is the Monte Carlo of Spain. huge mothefucking yachts in the harbour (as opposed to the parking lot), way way underdressed women either arm in arm with a really old man or with a loud obnoxious young guy who reeked of never having worked a day in his life. we chilled out in a restaurant with a sea side table for us to people watch....we also had a view of the road along the seaside and people were cruising...ferraris, range rovers, dodge vipers, convertibles of all types. the only difference was no cops harrasing them.

after re-arranging my flight twice i finally went home of thusday afternoon. I tried to change my flight at the british airways office but even though they lost my luggage they said it was not their problem and i would have to buy a new ticket. after yelling at them telling them it was their fault i was stuck in spain, i stormed out and called the BA press office in London, told them my heartbreaking story of a photographer without his cameras and underwear and they agreed to give me an open return ticket. So when I showed up at the airport to go home I was startled as i was checking in, my name flashed up in their screen. the worried look on their faces made it seem that I was on some watch list like Senor Atta. Someone knew I met a susppected rich terrorist. I was being watched!!! but no...It was a message from head office to please upgrade Mr. Antonio Humberto Zazueta Garcia Olmos to first class.

Summer Part 2.....

Summer's highlight was the visit of my mother and Andy, her partner/husband whatever. A good excuse to hang out with my family for 2 weeks..

we spent most of it sightseeing for Andy's benefit as he had never ever been to europe. I think it was an eye opener to be in a place that is becoming in many ways so different from the ever changing American Culture of cars and tv and mass consumerism. Well I hope it was.

we were in Paris as well. beautiful city. never get tired of it but some of its madness became very apparent to me now that Pablo was in my life. The world is full of dangers and i think you learn to tune them out but with a child they rear their ugly head. Crowds, traffic and anybody remotely weird become very obvious.

I miss my mother and sisters very much. London becomes more and more permanent every year. America seems less attractive too as the years go by. having a child re-awakens the need to have family close at hand, not just because they would help quite a great deal but because it helps to teach your child that they are part of something bigger than themselves....family.