2014

Its almost too cliché to bear to say that I am always re-learning my relationship to photography. But it’s true. A year is enough time for the ground to shift significantly for me, but also for the medium. This blog is a good example. In the world of broadcasting images, even a well tended and lovingly updated online diary struggles for traction next to the manifold digital highway. The internet isn’t a slow place anymore. And its permeation day to day makes our lives feel the same, distracted to the point of distraction. And so this place lies dormant, unable to match the speed my mind and my work move at.

But a year has passed nonetheless. So this post is no attempt to explain away the decline of the blog, nor is it a typical review of a year complete with boastful proclamations and grand ambitions. After all, it is about the only time of year we are allowed to think slowly about the past and the future, as we transition into a new year. It remains as ever, just another thankful nod to the camera. The constant change that my eye is always noting. Fastening down faint irregularities and profound expressions beyond the point of memory. As I think about all the activity ahead, there is a deep gratitude for all the little things I see and the stories I begin to tell, the non-moments that stop me. Frames of someone else’s world that build up the small picture, of what it is to be living in 2015.

The Best Seat in the House

The din of a festival rings in Edinburgh’s ears. 2014 roars by still.

For the last three years I have watched the closing fireworks concert from the best seat in the house. Photographers are allowed into the gardens at Princes Street and work in front of the orchestra’s bandstand during the full display. A performance and a view so spectacular, I cannot measure the privilege. The fireworks finalise a month of festivals in Edinburgh and the city centre closes for the city’s people to gather in round the gardens. The city’s unusual landscape comes into its own as people hike up hills, camp on rooftops and hunker down in the street to watch the display.

Sometimes the best seat is wherever you find yourself. This year I was untethered and let myself be carried through the tide of spectators. With only half an eye on the blazing acrobatics in the sky, the display for me was the unique collection of people that venture out and cluster together for the view. Fireworks are a devastating thing. They jolt our emotions out from the deep and pull us back to earth and into the present. They are maybe the closest thing to magic we ever know, a cosmological concussion on the heart. To watch the enjoyment of others spellbound, was to enjoy the show twice-fold for me. I relished the uncommon hush on the air beforehand, and took real delight in how gentle and patient everyone became, pulling in close and wearing their affection. Families, friends and lovers, the same faces from every day, still and contemplative in their own private turbulence.

For Edinburgh, they are the most cathartic thing. As glowing cinders and hot tips fall and dissipate into the black night, so too does the chaos and tumult of the last thirty days of festival delirium. The ash and smoke are carried off on the last of the summer wind as another chapter closes, and winter appears on the horizon again.

2013

A sun and a moon. A blink of an eye again.

In twelve months it is inconceivable where our feet fall. Mine have covered some ground. My shoes, the aged reliquarys of adventure, are always at the frontier of my expeditions. They are retired with grace and ceremony as the months wear them away. Parting with them, in their gait warped state, always brings a tugging reluctance. Twins of stability, accessory to my safe passage. Their silent companionship remains through the rain and frost of another year. They are seldom acknowledged for their service to how I see the world. But whatever I see through my camera, I wait for, on foot and on the street.

Here at the end of a year when so many things have happened, the compulsion to remember the major events often obscures the beautiful phenomenon of three hundred days passing unmarked. On my travels, I have picked up milestones in pictures. An esoteric measurement of the seasons that I search out or capture in passing. I have no way of predicting what the next year has in store, what I do know is that I will keep searching in the street for reminders of life playing out, and that I will probably need new shoes.

Happy new year.

Luminate 2013

Winter isn’t exactly renowned for its festival abundance in the city of festivals, except, of course, for that one. So as October draws to a close again, a satisfied man, I figuratively hang up my festival hat for the year. The last month saw me working again with Luminate, Scotland’s creative ageing festival, on a programme of events that spanned the regions of Scotland. Performances, workshops, classes, discussions and fairs on subjects from cinema to historical research through to poetry and contemporary art. The umbrella of ‘creative’ is straight-away a broad one.

So too is the handle of ‘ageing.’ I captured a selection of events from the programme and both audiences and participants ranged hugely in years. Nothing in the events were exclusive to older generations, and none of the issues and themes across the works were unique to them either. My assumptions were certainly bruised. New ideas and new technology go through the same processes with older as they do younger. Broad mindedness doesn’t fall out of style as you grow, it’s human nature to search for new means of expression and hidden creative outlets.

From the small moments I shared with the different groups, I realsised ageing is something we all have in common. And not, to contradict popular consensus, necessarily a parallel of maturity.

Underpass Mural in Livingston

Stone Carving Workshop at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow

24 Carat Gold performance at Dancebass, Edinburgh

Open Mic Night at Glad Cafe, Glasgow

Poetry Slam at Ghillie Dhu, Edinburgh

Music Workshop at Howden Park Centre, Livingston

Insider’s Guide to Edinburgh

For all you jet-setters this month, check out my profile feature on Edinburgh for Aer Lingus’s CARA magazine. Photos AND text. Get me!

Huge credit to Albie for my portrait. Thank you to all the featured companies for their help (and for being awesome)

LeithLate – Shutter Project

Over the last 6 months, my local Leith Walk has had its grey and shady veneer peeled away to the vibrant, motley heartwood underneath. Leith has always had the handle of being a colourful neighbourhood, but the curatorial eye of LeithLate has seen this put forward in vivid hues. LeithLate chief Morv has paired visual artists with local businesses whose street shutters are lent as a steel canvas to their ideas and artwork. With no shortage of interesting businesses on the walk, and some truly excellent artists in the local, the range of expression and creativity has been awesome.

Speaking as someone visual – it has not only been a great idea, but a great success. My roving eyes have more luscious pigmentation on which to feast on my walk up the street. I think we could all happily see more artistic collaboration within our commnuity – bravo folks.

Games Master – Jamie Johnson

Fairtrade Coffee – Bernie Reid

Paradign Shift – Dave Lemm

Inner City Sanctum – Liana Moran

Word Of Mouth – Fraser Gray

Origano – Richie

Big Day In

Sunday is classically the day for putting your feet up and doing nothing. It’s not often you find an offer good enough to have you on your feet doing everything. Sunday at Edinburgh’s Electric Circus saw a raft of great music dominate the entire day from the early afternoon playing live into the early morning.

Having some great work up our sleeves from an earlier shoot with Discopolis, this was my first chance to see the guys play. With Dems and Dutch Uncles also on the roster, it was really a no brainer where my Sunday was going. Easy knowing it was a bank holiday…

Lyceum Season 2013/14

The Royal Lyceum announced their productions for the year to come this Tuesday. With new writing from Ian Rankin. David Haig and Tim Barrow, collaborating with Artistic Director Mark Thomson, a varied and exciting season lies ahead

Author Ian Rankin discusses Dark Road

Writer and Director Tim Barrow on his writing of Union

Artistic Director Mark Thomson introduces the season

Writer David Haig discusses his upcoming premiere of Pressure

Science NOW

Finally, a post.

From the chaos of March and the illness of April (changing seasons after all), I haven’t been able to man the blog and have had to let it rust by the way side. Well no longer, I have much to talk about.

What better to start with than the most recent and most interesting. Last week, before succumbing totally to a bout of tonsillitis, I attended an event organised by ASCUS, as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. They hosted an open workshop where members of the public were presented with a collated version of a published scientific paper and had to in turn interpret the academic rhetoric into a poem.

Teamwork! And interestingly, the room was split accidentally into scientists and artists who banded together. The results were curiously different. Myself, Mark and Graham concocted our own method to blindly extract individual words from the prose. Through the legendary power of the post-it, we curated our words into a work that obeyed rules of poetry but also lovingly summarised the paper at hand, and the nature of academic articles in general.

High Five! It was a very fun way to apply our disciplines to something unfamiliar. Our team’s word choice was so random and so repetitive that we would have been delighted to contrive anything at all, let alone our interesting two stanzas that are posted below.

Steve Mason

All too aware that this March is turning into this April all too quickly, I had better step up my pace and keep the world up to date with my whereabouts. 2013, slow down will ya?

To coincide with the release of Steve Mason’s Monkey Minds in the Devils Time, The Skinny asked me to shoot him for this month’s cover. I heard the words “protest” and “somewhere like kind of a wasteland”, and my head skipped a few chapters and went straight to “smokebombs!” We took a walk to a lesser-known spot overlooking Leith Walk and stirred up a storm of smoke and flashes. In hindsight, only in hardy Leith could this go unacknowledged.