New Education

I’ve spent much of the last year eating rubbish food in vans, plundering the rider, wandering around empty supermarkets at unsociable hours, sympathising with Port Vale Football Club’s plight, and watching my very good friends New Education move through the gears.

Their second single for the Kids label came out in the summer and things have been warming up nicely. Chris Potter, who did The Verve’s Urban Hymns lp, has been pushing the buttons in the studio, and NME has been saying very kind things. I’ve got another shoot with them on the near horizon and there’s a full screen slideshow of some of the adventures I’ve had with them so far here.

Missing Persons

www.findinglosttime.co.uk for details of forthcoming shows and to buy all 12 photos from the Missing Persons series in an individually handmade wallet (sound required, Internet Explorer preferred).

A thousand thanks to Kate for the packaging. Just perfect.

disconnections

Full screen slideshow featuring more from this set here, limited run prints here.

Luc Delahaye: Winterreise

Luc Delahaye’s Winterreise is a ‘melancholy road story’ that documents a journey from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian express in the winter of 1996, across what the introduction calls ’…a grotesque empire, a dull and almost empty space’.

Amongst the bleakly intimate moments that Delahaye records are heroin overdoses, families scavenging on rubbish dumps, the immediate aftermath of street robberies, smalltime mafia violence, bruised psychiatric hospital patients, and vodka binges in squalid, Dickensian conditions.

If this all sounds horrendously grim, it is, although Winterreise is not without humour: in one photograph, an old woman foraging on a rubbish tip cheekily pokes her tongue at the camera, to the delight of the women around her. But moments like this are rare, and for the most part the book is an unflinching, garishly beautiful document of the social fallout of economic depression.

Winterreise seems to be less well regarded than the war photography that established Delahaye, and there’s precious little information about it on the net. This interview briefly touches on it and will also mildly annoy those who worship at the Church of Cartier-Bresson.

3 people from Stoke-on-Trent

3 Summers

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Homeless bloke sitting by a cashpoint on a Saturday night

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Paul Graham: Beyond Caring 25 years later

Between 1984-85, Paul Graham put together Beyond Caring, a series of photographs of English dole offices, whose angry depiction of the grim reality of unemployment in the mid-1980s pulled no punches:

These photographs are all the more remarkable for the fact that they were taken undercover: such was the difficulty in doing this without being discovered he wasn’t even able to look through the viewfinder for a number of the images and had to compose instinctively, with his camera buried inside his coat.

The book’s almost impossible to get hold of: my local library had its copy nicked, the British Library have struggled to source one, and the cheapest second hand copy listed on Amazon is £375. If by some minor miracle you know of a copy that’s at a loose end please get in touch.

In certain respects the world of Beyond Caring is a far cry from that of the modern job centre. Savvy interior designers have stepped in and replaced the chipped paint, graffiti and fag-burned carpets with a glossy IKEA aesthetic that’s more Hollyoaks than Boys From The Blackstuff. You tell me what this says about the benefits system, the people who run the country, or the state of the nation, because I don’t know.

The Paul Graham Archive is the definitive online resource for his work.

Light and Darkness: black/ white prints

Formby Point storm