I don’t intend to bore anyone with tales of my traumatic childhood … when I lived in box in the woods and was raised by wolves and the occasional elf. Or how my life as one of the world’s top sportsmen and a fully functioning member of our consumerist society was curtailed and largely hindered by … my personality.
But my prevailing reality is such that I’ve been unable to process images in anger on my computer for approaching three years; essentially, I’ve become as effective as a photographer who leaves the lens cap on. So, I want to plunge into, not so much the brave new world, as simply a world where memory intensive processing becomes a smooth reality and not simply a further drain on already shredded frustrations and thinning hair. [And actually share finished images with the friends and family of now two-year-old weddings!]
I had hoped for a fair financial tailwind that would’ve allowed this long before now but inertia has steadfastly refused its creep. So, with time sliding into the abyss of procrastination I’ve decided it’s time to allow my photography to raise the funds it needs.
Early in the New Year I will be looking into forms of crowdfunding with a view to raise money wholly for a new computer – and hopefully a portrait lens; and should too many of you go berserk: new camera body – by rewarding contributors with copies of my work in what might well prove to be utterly outrageous as well as contemporary photographic forms. [If you have any ideas, wishes or questions feel free to hurl them my way in the interim!]
To kick-start the idea I’m making available just ONE copy of The Calendar : 2016 featuring my street photography images, which I’m going to auction to the highest bidder from today! I’m one part excited, one part fearful that it’s going to end up costing me money to send it!
When I’m famous this will be collectible!*
I will be posting updates on the bidding process at the foot of this post and via Instagram, Flickr, F*c*book and Twitter. You can make bids in any location or via email and text and I will keep all locations up to date with the prevailing highest bid.
I propose to end bidding at 11:59pm on 21st Decemberand will ship the calendar with its heartfelt personal message the following day – hopefully this should ensure delivery by the New Year anywhere in the world.
{ Doffs cap }
* Guarantees of fame are not included. Neither is the towel seen in this clip.
Current Highest Bid: 47 Euros
[Approx. conversion: US $52 and UKP 34]
[Bid by Valeria in Italy … Note: If you’d rather not have your name publicly announced with any bid please let me know.]
Exposure can be a fine line in modern media and in the wider art world. Underexposure; and your world remains conspicuously quiet like a church mouse with laryngitis. Overexposure; and the world’s your oyster … if I could just get the damned thing open! And an antihistamine for my seafood allergy. Or, failing that … a pram, some toys and a good throwing arm.
The Sublime Meets The Ridiculous
The highlight of my photography year was undoubtedly having an image curated for the Mobile Photo Now exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art [CMA] in Ohio, USA. The exhibition itself proved to be critically well received and presented a significant step forward for the medium and appreciation of photography as an art form. The exhibition, co-curated by CMA and #JJ community on Instagram, featured 320 images from 240 photographers representing nearly 40 different countries.
Overexposed : The Tsunami Effect
Only this week I had another image prominently highlighted within the #JJ community.
The image is one I took of my father for the project: The Anatomy Of A Stroke. It clearly made an impact in the daily #JJ community theme: Profiles. More than 4,000 images were submitted, with 188 selected by the army of community editors. Just 4 were then selected by Josh Johnson himself and posted under the main #JJ communityhash-tag.
In posting Josh added “What a powerful and gripping image Will [Gortoa, my IG pseudonym]. I’ll just leave it at that. Anything else I write feels ridiculous. Thank you so much for sharing this.”
As you might notice by the numbers at the top of that image, the #JJ community has 636,000followersand for a few hours my church mouse stream went atomic-powered church organ! Well, all things are relative.
Within 24 hours – and an increase in my own followers of about 50 – things returned to … ruined church at the head of the dusty high street in a desert town with no name. Cue tumbleweed! But it was fun while it lasted: watching my notifications window spinning like a Vegas jackpot machine … the modern day social media phenomenon that quickly becomes yesterday’s news [or a quick whack with the Likeicon and onto the next Warhol].
Underexposed : The Pram
I also recently entered an image for consideration in the Royal West of England Academy’s 163rd Annual Open Exhibition. As it openly boasts “…[it attracts] leading artists from throughout the UK, it is open to all, and often includes work by unknown exhibitors alongside well-known names.” The selection process is notoriously … robust. And photography invariably maintains quite a low profile in the final selection. I was absolutely delighted to have The Falling Leaf curated for the 160th exhibition in 2012.
This year I was determined to go with a street photography image. I was pleased to get it through the initial online selection process, before mounting, framing and crossing fingers for the final selection. The subsequent email duly arrived … Selected! I do believe I may’ve done a moderate dancing movement – for anyone who knows me, they’ll know that’s quite significant.
But then something really quite cruel happened. I was to discover another category that I didn’t even know existed …
Just a few days before the exhibition was due to open, I received another email from the RWA with revised wording: Artist Selected Not Hung. Essentially this meant that the final curation essentially lies at the hands of the hanging team. But all is not lost … because in three panels placed around the exhibition is your name – effectively hung and displayed for all to see. And quite possibly point and laugh.
Well, I laughed. But when I returned downstairs another artist had brought in a pram containing a large number of toys and began hurling them out in quite dramatic fashion.
Exposure. Whatever the outcome, I think you should probably keep your dignity and modesty covered.
Some things are just meant to go together; albeit some are more readily appealing than others. Peaches and cream. Lemon drizzle cake with, uh, taramasalata icing. Glastonbury and trench foot is the classic formula, of course; as well known an equation as E=mc2:
G=rm2
[ Or … Rain + Mud + Music = Glastonbury ]
I honestly couldn’t believe it, though, when the inevitable Glastonbury torrential thunderstorms duly arrived after an entire month of unbroken sunshine and lightly baked earth.
I’ve never been quite unhinged enough to actually attend the legendary Glastonbury Festival, even though I’m only a relative stone’s throw down the road, but its appeal is very close to my heart. So… why aren’t I standing in the proverbial field? Well, I went camping. Once. “Never again”, I told my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder therapist while crying in her lap. Scarred me for life. But that’s another story, for another storm and tempest of an English summer’s day.
However, thanks to the BBC and my newly acquired flat screen television and sound plinth, Glastonbury 2014 still comes flooding into my living room… without the raw sewage. But it just didn’t feel quite right. So, determined to experience it fully, in the relative comfort of my home… I pitched a tent in the corner of the room and began peeing behind the couch.
As Friday evening drew in… I pulled on my wellies, filled up two big buckets with 1 part water, 1 part mud, 1 part bodily fluids, stood in the middle of my room, one foot planted in each, and gazed at the televisual marvels of the digital age. Well, I say gazed at it… To fully realise the authentic atmosphere I planted a few meaningless flags, hoisted an inflatable alien on a stick and erected some cardboard cut-outs of people’s heads who are just a bit taller than me and plonked them right in my eye line… So, in reality, I can only just see the top right hand corner of the screen. Perfect.
Later, after watching Friday night’s main headliners, Arcade Fire [and their one known song about Waking Up or something] – on my smartphone propped against the kitchen window while I stood squinting at it from the bottom of the garden – I grew increasingly hungry. Ideally I would’ve loved something hot, but couldn’t be bothered with imaginary queuing for some cow’s spinal cord in a baguette and still hadn’t quite worked out how to light the camping stove, so plumped for opening a tin of tuna with the rough edge of a stone and eating it with muddy fingers. Mmmm…
I wake up Saturday morning, cold and damp, to find some bastard has stolen my wellie boots from outside the tent! It’s a few minutes later when I realise that my wife has actually put them outside the back door and is wearing a disapproving expression. I thought she was staying at her bother’s for the weekend. She completely misinterprets the presence of the girls in wet T-shirts… It’s been raining! But the fact that I also persuaded them to wrestle in the mud is harder to explain away.
I finally cajole her into getting with the spirit of the weekend over a shared cup of cold tea and some damp bread, and we busily set about building a Solar Powered Wishing Tree in the garden. I hang up a cardboard sign that reads Healing Field and persuade her to give me a massage after spending a bit too much time aimlessly wandering around the house with a ridiculously heavy backpack all Thursday afternoon. Finally, I dig a rudimentary chemical toilet in the greenhouse and fill it with a dozen eggs that have been fermenting in its low heat for the preceding balmy month: the pure odour of authenticity.
And now, as the sun threatens to break through the clouds, and I sit here in my pants having neither shaved nor washed for three days while flicking bits of peanut shell out of my navel with a toothpick, I can only imagine how amazing Metallica will be tonight… singing along to all their classic songs. You know, the one about Nothing Mattering and, uh,… the other one.
If you’re not English. If you’re not old enough. You might be forgiven for not knowing when England last won the World Cup. So, I’ll tell you… 1066. No, hang on… that was the Battle of Hastings. [We lost that, too, by the way.] Nope, it was 1666. [Pardon? Oh, the Great Fire of London, of course.] Then it must’ve been 1766.
Uh, at least that’s what it feels like! Actually, no! What am I saying with my chucklesome historical reference points… the fact that it was 1966, and I was 3½, means I have absolutely no recollection of that heady nationalistic home-of-the-game fervour. I vaguely recall the subsequent disappointment, aged a tender, yet football fever emotionally phlegmatic 7½-year-old, in the boiling Mexico heat of 1970 and a glorious defeat to the Pele inspired Brazil.
Since then England have served up a seemingly endless catalogue of temptation. That is, a glorious flattery to deceive… before the bitter reality bites home like chomping down on… not just a lemon. Oh, no. But an unripe lemon! World Cups, European Championships… endless, endless sweet cherries dangled before my eyes, then chomp… always the unripe lemon, er, painted a sweet cherry colour. So, not even just lemons, but a mouthful of paint! And most probably a lead-based paint! Which might account for much of subsequent emotional instability in the field of football. [Just don’t talk to me about penalties outside of a secure psychiatric unit.]
Until… this World Cup. Everything was calm; realistic; the lowest expectations ever. An England side essentially appearing vulnerable from the start, yet bristling with youngsters for the future. [Yeah, we’ve heard that before: the golden generation. One that subsequently delivered… lead-based painted lemons by the bucket-load!] So, what do they go and do in their first group match? Lose to Italy. But can they just lose and we all offer a hapless Bless ’em collective shrug. Oh, no. They play really well and lose. The worst kind of loss. Why? Because it raises expectations again. A very decent Italian side were considered fortunate to win, and we’ll breeze past Uruguay [after their lamentable first match performance] and Costa Rica… then who knows what worldly riches might lay just around the corner? [As the draw lines up, another glorious defeat by Brazil, probably! But that’s not the point!]
So, I sit – with my dear old dad [possibly for our last World Cup] – perched on the edge of promise. And what do we get… the sound of a large lorry reversing up the driveway, and on its side a mouthwatering image of luscious ripe cherries… which someone has roughly spray painted over with the word ‘lemons’. The bitterness never tasted so… er, sweetly predictable!
It feels genuinely lousy; like something of great anatomical importance has unexpectedly and alarmingly prolapsed. My dear old dad limps away into the night like a wounded, aged animal, muttering how he won’t be back for the entrails of Costa Rica. And I’m left watching the highlights… alone, knee deep in the detritus of shattered hopes and lemon peel.
So, some things never change. Or, apparently they do: it seems we’ve never enjoyed the particular misery of losing both our opening games in a World Cup before. Which must mean I now have the full England Football Misery set. [Panini take note – a special edition in the waiting.]
On a final serious note… [I’m used to hiding my misery well with gallows humour! 😉]
I was genuinely astounded to hear, having taken the eminent sports psychologist, Steve Peters – the man credited with underpinning the incredibly successful British cycling achievements of recent times – as the game kicked off last night we were informed that Steve Gerrard and Frank Lampard [the epitome of the lemon deliverymen of the aforementioned golden generation] had given a pre-match speech on the wretched misery of losing. So, these youngsters, untainted by failure, as a lift[?!], were schooled in the fear of failure before what was probably the biggest match of their careers, so far. How can that be a psychologically positive thing to do? It’s not exactly steeped in accentuating and visualising the positive, eh?! And maybe it wasn’t just coincidence that the team appeared almost collectively crippled by fear in that first half, and the opening minutes of the second period, too. Too late.
As for Uruguayan brilliant irritant Luis Suarez, half fit, with one good leg, the only thing missing from his armoury was a helmet from the Norman conquests; although he pretty much fired an arrow into Roy Hodgson’s eye.
For the love of sponge! I possess an almost pathological fear of public speaking. I’d rather plunge my face into a hive a bees – who are known to adopt a rabid stinging frenzy at the merest hint of the smell of jam – while wearing a face-mask … made entirely from jam!
So, when I was approached last summer by the steeped in history*Bath Photographic Society asking if I would consider giving a talk during their up and coming season of lectures, why exactly did I say yes? I know why… it was in part down to me going through a phase of accepting every opportunity, while also subconsciously safe in the knowledge that 27th May 2014 was not only forever away, but would most probably never come. Clearly, there was at least one serious flaw in my logic: that of the inexorable march of time.
Time waits for no man.
* Bath Photographic Society shares the same birthday as Kodak Eastman in 1888; a year before the invention of the first flexible photographic roll film!
Essentially, I’m an observer, not a talker. [Although my closer friend’s might doubt that assertion when I’m talking all over them! The fear has always been associated with public speaking. I have inevitably had a couple of brief experiences feeding the pathology; predominantly recalling levels of hyperventilation in danger of sucking the entire audience from the room!] And now I’d committed myself to talk to a roomful of people for a mind-boggling hour and a half! So, how did this curious alignment even occur?
During the previous season of lectures my ex-friend Dave Lewis-Baker gave a talk on the History of Street Photography. “You’ll be fine,” he assured me. That’s … early retired Professor of Politics at Warwick University David Lewis-Baker: the professional lecturer! Since first meeting Dave about 5 years ago he’s been very supportive of my photography; and slipped two of my images into his own talk amongst the historical great and the good. It was in the aftermath he persuaded their secretary, Liz Bugg, to approach me.
Still, at least I had 9 months to prepare, right? Ah. See, there’s another flaw in the logic associated with hoping time stands still: fear induced procrastination. So it was probably less than 9 days before the talk when I finally began to select images and order a brown paper bag** from Amazon; which isn’t necessarily as crazy as it might sound, as I generally respond well to deadlines. But things did get a little hectic in the last couple of days, with the format only decided upon the preceding day – a hastily borrowed laptop [Thanks again, Dave – well, it was all your fault!]; realising the planned use of PowerPoint was completely impractical; writing onto cue cards; mysteriously losing an entire batch of images only hours before; a late morning timed run-through that hinted I might overrun – but with tweaks still to make; a subsequent timed run-through that hinted I wouldn’t overrun so long as I didn’t breathe, waffle and nobody so much as looked at me. It was too late to change anything now. I was halfway up the stairs to shower and make myself beautiful when I suddenly turned on my heels, returned to the slide-show and took out 20% of the images! A few minutes later I sat under the shower and wondered … at this late stage, would faking my own death be seen as an overreaction?
** One of the best concise pieces of advice had appeared on my Instagram feed from a virtual stranger no longer than 24 hours earlier: “Let your work do the heavy lifting. Know what you want to say, but approach the whole ordeal with a relaxed, devil-may-care attitude. Mind the speed of your speech, and pause and breathe often. What’s the worse that could happen?” I did reply “The worst? .. I forget to breathe often enough.” Scott quickly retorted “Alright, so you pass out. Just make sure there’s a great image on the screen… no one will notice.” I pondered the eventuality and thought of a backup plan: maybe, like the bus in the film Speed, if the images drop below a certain rate, the slide-show switches to auto… and the remainder of the speech is written on the souls of my shoes. Simple. What could possibly go wrong?
You get the point: Street Photography. Following the gut feeling, last moment 20% untested reduction in images the talk runs for… almost an hour to the minute. Gasp!Seascapes : The ethereal use of light in my coastal images. [Don’t give up the day job, Rob! 😉 ]
In the cool, relaxed light of reflection… it was a lifetime pathological fear duly exfoliated. I may well have forgotten to breathe in the first few minutes, but the warmth of the reception carried me through. And the subsequent feedback [anonymously requested], so far, has been truly humbling, as it is equally encouraging … now where did I put the jam?!
Feedback from past day or so:
Me attempting to get my head around new technology with the ever resourceful and helpful Chris.
“…we saw a very personal exploration and a piece of your soul. You were articulate, thoughtful and thought-provoking.”
“It was wonderful to hear the how-where-when-why, for each shot, from the horse’s mouth – it made such a difference to my appreciation of what you have achieved.”
“Overall, the evening was excellent and ranks among the best that we have seen this year.”
It’s getting serious now! [Dave Lewis-Baker looks on.]“While you are not familiar with public speaking, you clearly prepared very well and this delivered a top-notch presentation.”
“A very enjoyable and informative evening, up there with the best of them.”
“… well-balanced great presentation …considering it was you first talk your passion came through…”
View from the cheap seats.
“You were funny, very open and informative.”
“Excellent evening. I think your imagination and creativity are very original.”
“One of the most interesting evenings we have had.”
“A very inspiring and entertaining talk.”
Taken towards the end of the break. They seem happy enough?! And still awake! [I also had prints, books, etc. at the rear of the room.]“… your knowledge of and passion for your subjects [made for] an amazing first ever presentation.”
“For me, you should have no qualms at all about your ability to talk publicly. Your knowledge and sincere enthusiasm with excellent images speaks volumes!”
The calming presence of BPS president, Geoff Wood.
“The photography was brilliantly original, esp. the street photography. I know of no photographer who can spot visual puns like Nigel… [the] street photography is a very personal development of Cartier Bresson’s concentration on people in their own environment, and can be viewed in the same context. He has the very rare ability to photograph people unexpectedly without causing offence.”
I’m indebted to… Dave Lewis-Baker for the initial shove and subsequent support; my great friend Rob Jordan, who filled the car journey to Bath with distracting laughter, helped setup and took a few photos as evidence; my wife,Sue, for agreeing not to come [maybe next time!]; and all at Bath Photographic Society for the opportunity [especially Liz Bugg for my exponentially frazzled emails and texts!].
![It's getting serious now! [Dave Lewis-Baker looks on.]](https://nigeollis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/set-up-1.jpg)
![Taken towards the end of the break. They seem happy enough?! And still awake! [I also had prints, books, etc at the rear of the room.]](https://nigeollis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/happy-disciples-111.jpg)
Nige' Ollis 