Flower Photograms

Fuck it, flowers it has to be. Sorry Elaine - and the colours too! Ou est le fromage?

Elaine Duigenan

These images are from the Hairnets and Nylons series by Elaine Duigenan (her show Intimate Archaeology opens at Klompching Gallery on July 10th).

I interviewed Elaine yesterday for the BJP and she was so lovely and eloquent about her work I thought I would post.

The images are from digital photograms, and explore Elaine's obsession with the underbelly of the ephemera of everyday life, something she has been pursuing in her earlier images of old animal specimens.

Photographed on an ordinary household scanner (an old epson), they have a weird organic quality - they're a kind of photographic Rorschach Test.

Anyway, Elaine has really pushed the digital photogram to its limits here, but anyone can do it, albeit without the depth and complexity. Just one recommendation from Elaine - "You have to move on from flowers."

Remember that everyone, No Flowers!

new work up on site

New work is up my website at www.colinpantall.com, including the Life on Mars series and Flora, the Flower portraits, both of which are works in progress. Any thoughts or comments are welcome, especially on the new Life on Mars images.

Thanks to Tadhg Devlin who did my website.

Flower Portraits

I'm in the process of updating my website (thanks Tadhg ), including these new flower portraits.

Peter Goullart, Joseph Rock and Tribal Wives

The Heading East Blog featured the marvellous photography of Zhuang Xueben.

There is a huge resource of old images of China and Tibet, starting with British Photographers in Central Tibet
(Spencer Chapman is a highlight here).







Tibet has been romanticised at least partly by the absurd myth of Shangri-La (as featured in James Hilton's novel, Lost Horizon), a paradise where nobody ever grows old and wisdom and peace reign supreme.

Hilton's notion of Shangri-La emerged at least partly from the photography and writing of Joseph Rock (whose images you can see here).

Joseph Rock lived near Lijiang in Yunnan, and he recorded the people, flora and fauna of the region for National Geographic.

Hilton borrowed a few of these ideas for Lost Horizon and the result is - Lijiang is the real site for the mythical Shangri La.

Nice line for a travel story and one that the Chinese have lapped up - since the 1996 earthquake in Lijiang, tourist numbers have risen from a few thousand annually to a few million - and Lijiang has been tranformed from a lively and beautiful regional market town for Yunnan minority people to a sanitised showpiece of the Naxi people teeming with Chinese hotels, restaurants and tourists.

Joseph Rock was a marvellous but mad photographer and you can find his images here and in Colour here.

And if you want to find a record of what the places he photographed look like now, go to the In the footsteps of Joseph Rock blog.

Best of all you can read about Joseph Rock and the culture of Yunnan in Peter Goullart's magnificent record of Yunnan market-life Forgotten Kingdom.

Nick Ut by Dave Brown

Views on war, terror and politics by the Independent's Dave Brown .

Mutilated Landscapes

One of my favourite things about Parr's New Brighton is the flawed landscape it shows ( it's the landscape that is flawed in The Last Resort, not the working classes - unless you think that people are defined by their environment).

New Brighton is a mutilated leisure landscape, a landscape that is as apparent in Britain today as it was in the eighties. But all British landscapes are mutilated, including the idealised ones that appear on chocolate boxes.

It's just that their modifications took place a long time ago and have been redefined and assimilated into a traditional ideal of Englishness.

That traditional ideal is what you find around Bath - the beauty of its mutilated landscapes, deforested hills, and managed woodland tied in with human habitation and an overwhelming obeisance to the car.

It still makes for beautiful places though, and these are two of my favourite places in the west of England - Brown's Folly and, overlooking Solsbury Hill, the Larkhall allotments.



pictures by Colin Pantall