Many hands

Make light work, as the proverb says. Still the work required of this festival is only for the hardy. And hard work is not taken lightly.

It has been hypnotically fascinating to watch the machine of the Edinburgh International Festival come to full fruition. While I am only around as the photographer for the peak of action, it is easy to spot a year of hard work embedded in the frantic activity that is August. Artists and ambassadors from polar corners of the globe, full crews and sets and companies appearing in Edinburgh overnight by what seems like calm coincidence. As diverse a production as any one that appears on its stages. Diverse to its very core, it is easy to overlook the local hands that keep the show afloat.

Thanks for a brilliant festival.

Staff at the Usher Hall wait at the stage door as a performance closes

An instructor from the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble keeps time during a dance class

Wardrobe staff prepare the dancers point shoes behind the scenes at the National Ballet of Scotland

A dancer practices classical Indian dance positions at the Nritrygram dance class

Legendary artist Wu Hsing-kuo performs on stage as King Lear

BBC crew prepare the lighting for the Review Show with the Legendary Music of Rajestan

Wu Hsing-kuo and the First Minister of Taiwan

A Rajistani musician tunes up before a recital

Pyrovision fireworks crew prepare a week early in all conditions for the ultimate Sunday night display

A festival patron on a touch tour of 1001 Nights where visually or hearing impared are guided through a performence using touch and description

Melvyn Tan customises his piano to play a percussion duet for his performance

A performer of Ea Sola prepares the mat floor backstage before a show

Pianist Yefim Bronfman

Shen Wei dancers warm up with slow breathing exercises before a morning dance class

A weaver at the Dovecot Heirlooms exhibition spins fine silk on a traditional loom

Sally Hobson, head of programme development with the festival

Jonathon Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival

Back in the fish tank

Some of the crew from The Wind up Bird Chronicle at the Kings Theatre

A few more visual updates from on and off the stage at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Semiramide at the Festival Theatre

The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan at the Festival Theatre

1001 Nightsat the Lyceum Theatre

Princess Bari at the Playhouse Theatre

Festival : on

It has arrived! Today is the first day of the Edinburgh International Festival and it is time to get to work.

I want to get a series of posts rolling over the next month that show the tiny mechanics of this great Festival. It is a performance of sorts itself, simply on sheer scale, and i am looking forward to documenting my way through all the smoke and mirrors. Without diluting anything with words, stay tuned and Behold!

Goodbye summer

I like it in Scotland when you can talk about a season with no reference to the weather. Summer is a strict MayJuneJuly affair, rain or shine (or rain). So now that it is just at its end for the 2011th time this epoch, it should be celebrated. Not to say that the sun and games are at an end, contrary, August in Edinburgh means just that, but its nice to take a little time aside and revel in the sun we did have and all the deviancy it brings. This is no time for writing, there is weather to be had…

How can I not thank Ollie, Elaine and the wonderful S for all the sun times? I cannot!

The Fountain

I took this photograph last night. It marks the most recent advance in a long list of failure.

Failure isn’t something widely talked about, especially by those fraught with it. And especially not, by photographers. I am lowering the tone but after all my recent grand successes and fruitions, it is only to strike a balance to write about that which is forgotten when fortune rides around. Success itself is a frustrated process, only so because of defeat and disappointment. But there are no moralistic preachments here today, as i’m sure i normally would have it. I have no words to turn vinegar to wine. This kind of failure is failure complete, from which there is no turning around and any lesson learned is a false compromise. This failure is the failure to act, and here no one wins.

Above is the folding façade of the Fountainpark Brewery. Closed in 2004, before i ever arrived on the scene. Some rusting megalith to values and industry of a forgotten past. Having never lived more than 10 minutes from the site, I walked past it so many times it became invisible. It wasn’t until tiny protrusions of scaffolding and jet-black hoarding began to appear that my ears pricked up. In an area now overrun with clean, new, polished, empty apartment complexes, i saw the inevitable in the old brewery. What was actually a skeleton of a once enormous brewery was due to start full demolition September last year. Nearly a year on, and it is all but razed to the earth.

When i found out for certain, i’m not sure what stirred me, but i felt hugely sad that I was on the doorstep of a chapter of history closing. I discovered on an old map drawing from the 1870’s that the Fountain Brewery was indeed writ large. As was Edinburgh, with huge thanks to its brewing industry arm. Exporting internationally and competing in the elite, it was young muscle on an economic ledger. Here now is the great symptom of modernity. Forgetfulness and thanklessness of our past. In Leith, in Slateford, in Canongate, in Craigmiller, here at the canal, old terraced houses built for the families of the factory workers. Roofs that weathered the storm of paucity and hardship to ferry their families to a more comfortable future. And a promise fulfilled.

Kicking my way down Gilmore Park some freezing night, looking at my breath against the blinding fluorescence of the wrecking crew lamps, I realised there was nothing i could do, and i was out of my element even trying. So i did nothing. I took a few choice pictures of the outside and gradually the sensation of calm and curiosity i enjoyed when i took a shortcut past and smelled the canal and the old stone and metal, became replaced by guilt. In the final months of college I launched a feeble project to document the structure’s demise. I focused on recognisable markings of the plant that had been marred by the demolition. I never approached anyone about access to the inside. Maybe they would have said yes? Either way, the photos are not very good. But they draw on a power that dictates all of photography, the power of time. That soon all will be gone and the photos will age, showing an old place where a brewery once stood.

But this is no documentary. In these photos you cannot feel the heritage and age of this old site, the frantic activity of the canal, in a time long ago enough to be a foreign land. You cannot imagine the faces of the workers, and their expressions when the doors closed and their overalls hung up for the last time. You cannot feel the change and the time that has seen this thing through. You only feel the empty silence of an old utility plant crumbling down. And you cannot feel the strange romance i have developed for the place over the last 4 years, all falling away.

Revamp or decamp

With a very sporadic posting calendar so far this year things are starting to feel a little stale and worn around the blog. With a re-routing of efforts into s i t t e r s and finishing college this year there is a little inertia lingering about writing at the moment. To top it all off i am sitting on a mountain of imagery, photographs and footage from the last year and, while i like to look to the latest and greatest, there is a lot to be revisited over the next while. To level the playing field of where my skill and craft has taken us, but also to return to some of the more important moments in the last few months of my life. I have a little wall to climb to get back into regular posting so i’ll start small if thats ok.

The big question for any graduate is “whats now?” but since i fielded that quiz 3 years ago , “i’ll just have more of the same please.” But i’m not without a schedule. I am over the moon (and secretly perplexed) to be the official photographer of the Edinburgh International Festival this August in Edinburgh. So whatever for now, i know that i can look forward to a tremendous month of doing what i love. This is a luxury to have for most people in my position, in and out of photography.

But i haven’t forgotten since day one, a qualification doesn’t make you qualified, and the only grade you should trust is your own. You better believe, your papers will be nowhere to be seen when you are pushed to the edge of your work. All you will have is your own time and your own tools. And if you look after both, no establishment can improve on that.

End of an era

It has arrived. Newness.

Great eh? Its really good to be able to close and engage the toilet door for a while and get back to writing for the main blog. The last few weeks finalising s i t t e r s has been such a radical high, that i almost feel emotionally burnt out now that all is revealed, stamped and handed over. I cannot remember ever receiving as much praise for something as i have in the last week or so. Never in my life. Which means that i am still right on the cusp of the brand new. Its hard to take stock of the last few months , or last TWO years, and not be floored by the quantity of brand new things i have run into. Things i could never have predicted, that no man could dream up. Both successes and failures but, to be real, a very imbalanced and frightening shortage on the failure side.

For the last two years i have been a registered, full-time student moon lighting as a photographer (or the other way round sometimes). I have enjoyed the buzz and prestige as well as the sheer guidance of the photography department at Edinburgh’s Stevenson College. So sound an education I received that I was allowed to get away with thinking it was all down to me, cruising my path and carving out my own way unmonitored (but with a student discount.) It wasn’t however, and there is as much to be said for giving instruction as there is for withholding it. So much so that not only have i been very strictly encouraged to develop my professional tools and skillset, but i have been galvanised with finding my own way of doing things. Phrased very succinctly, one of my lecturers said of a stdents work, with a shrug “Well, I hate it. But if I tell that I could stop someone doing what they love.” And with unsung thanks to our teachers, and their unimposing (though not always subtle) direction, there is an army of qualified image makers released to the corners of the world, all with their own story to tell. And in their own unique voice

Now, i well know i have a propensity for over-proportional drama and dubious way of beating around a point without actually making one. But here again I am at the door of something brand new. I am constantly, though rarely acknowledge it, in the throes of completely new, completely unrepeatable situations. Everyday different. People, locations, ideas, props, light, vibes, different. Today i finished my college education and thus completed a MEGA step of the journey ever. It is, with all literality, a brand new day. In one improbable swoop, this course has symbolised the effect that solid hard work can have on approaching something without any crumb of knowledge and given the old pessimist in me a good whats what. I am now unbearably adamant that nothing is out of bounds to anybody who wants it. Like an overzealous self helper. Before college, there was no photography, nothing. Today i received my grades for s i t t e r s. Did i get an A? I got more than that. I got some of the best marks in our entire class. Has that ever happened to me before, in any of my 18 years of education? There is always room for the brand new.

The path to professional photography, i have learned with a thrill, is paved with the new and the inimitable. And to be slowly ambling my way up this path and joining a small, select throng is (sorry parents) very fucking exciting. Can it get much better than that?

Yes. I have over 30 contemporaries and colleagues all out there, all on that same path. If excitement is anything to be enjoyed, it is only best done shared.

Congratulations everyone

S i t t e r s video preview

All the action is over at the s i t t e r s blog at the mo!
The Video preview has been released and all the final images will be up on the blog on Friday.

Only 2 more days! How will you cope??

Sitters from eoin carey on Vimeo.

l’Exhibition

This is the image i submitted as my final print in our exhibition last friday. At the end of 2 weeks of some very heavy shooting it makes a huge impact being able to see the fruits, ripe and framed. For all of us, we produced and amazingly diverse exploration of Paris and French culture to a really high standard. The exhibition gave us the rare chance to see everything together for once though. We don’t often get to see a collection of our styles and subjects spread out in front of us, and less so do we get to do it with a glass of french cider.

Paris: le doc

Documentary chat 101. The reason i am in Paris at all is on a work experience project funded by a European educational foundation. The nature of bringing us here is to allow us two glorious things. To explore a foreign city and plunge right in to its cultural tide, but to also expose and document what we see as we see it. We are, if nothing else, given a small voice. It is also engineered to encourage us to represent through photography, Paris through the medium of documentary. We are granted licence to investigate something foreign, visually. We are allowed to be our own masters, to try new techniques or approaches, to push ourselves out of our comfort zone or refine our workflow with a time limit and a dead line.

In order for us to carry this out we have a few nifty treats at our disposal. The first and second are free flights and free accomodation directly in the heart of Paris. The third and in the same vein, is a little cushion of cash to allow us transport, access and the all important cuisine. So we are, if nothing else, given a small voice and a lot of money. But once the struggle of finances is taken care of, we have little excuse but to get right to it, and since the word is documentary, its about time that we get out our dictionaries.

For the documentary photographer, there is clash of identity especially when landed in the centre of the biggest tourist hothouse in Europe. When everyone carries a camera and every subject is aware, jaded and unwelcoming to the turn of the lens, there is a hard and difficult moment where you need to stop being a tourist. For me over the last few days the shutter has been snapping less, the gaze has trained in and my pace has slowed down. The barrage of beutiful and compelling shapes, colours and textures is ebbing away and now i can feel a story out on the streets that needs to be told. At the moment, this is what i think is the call of the documentary. I am not really taking pictures, i am now looking for images. And a cheap pint.

The search continues, stay tooned

Mesdames, Messieurs, le disc-jockey Sash! est de retour.