Roses: small £3. large £5.

After taking this photo the woman offered me a banana. I returned later to give her a copy of the photo, but she's never been there since.

document type: reflective

I’m doing a photo project about healthcare workers for a UK magazine called Bad Idea and I’m looking to follow it up with further stories about the UK healthcare community.

I ring the communications officer of a brain injury charity who I’ve had some contact with. He tells me that the only projects that he would be interested in would be those that would get the charity national media coverage to his target audience.

I can see his point – that’s the economics of running a small media office for a national charity. It’s good to be immediately asked ‘What’s your target publication?’ ‘Who have you contacted so far?’ It’s a good way to identify what a weak or a strong project is. However, it does mean your juggling external interests right from the inception of a project - It needs to be sufficiently justifiable to both the news outlet and the charity on their differing criteria.

The problem is that the photo story is pretty much extinct in this kind of national context.

If I’m going to do a self-initiated project then it’s got to stay true to my trusty question : ‘How can I see this subject in a unique way?’ – ‘Why does this project belong to me?’ Keep to this and the strength of the pitch should see it’s way through any obstacles.

Night London

Progress - Healing - Cancel

Atlas

If shampoo gets into the eyes, rinse well with warm water.

London to Newport, South Wales

The blog title, stolen from the poet Adrian Clarke:

'I continue to struggle with your melting borders and fluid saying, your texts, nets and (k)nots; with my nomads, robocops, cybershysters and the Nova Mob, pagani and peasants, dwellers, potential neighbours and bedsit plotters, benign or not. And I am all too aware that the demon lurks... tempting me now into taking my moment to freeze frame a trick angle on an accelerating complexity it is beyond my ability to schematize, even in fragments. But still insuficently chastened, I'll make my pitch DEMATERIALIZED IS IMMATERIAL.'

From Foil: defining Poetry 1985-2000 ed. Nicholas Johnson (Etruscan)