wrong place for this info (i will re-post under Dialogue), but congratulations for the Strand Gallery work….cool..particularly since it is your family work..nice for them too i am sure….

cheers, david

For those among you who are London residents or will be in town between tomorrow and the 30th might be interested in seeing my work feature in a group show at the Strand Gallery, 32 John Adam Street, WC2.

http://londonphotography.org.uk
http://paultreacy.com

Cheers.

I am home now, and finally I was able to take a look at your images fullscreen on my Apple Cinamascreen instead of slashed, distorted and jumping all over the place on my laptop monitor gone bad.

In my first post, I stated that I was pretty sure that it was good and expected to like it better when I could see it on a stable screen…

Oh, yes…!

It is excellent! Superb!

And I do get the feeling of not violent but underlying anxiety regarding the future that you seek convey.

I feel it strongly.

I think we all, young and old, are apprehensive about the future these days.

paultreacy – thanks for the suggestion. I do not think that is the problem. If I plug in an external monitor, the image is fine. And while I have the desktop, in the time since this began to happen, I have not been home long enough to send this out and get it back before heading out again. When I go out, I really do need this laptop and a couple of portable harddrives, just to store and backup my shoots and to try to make a few blog entries. It is maddening, trying to edit, process and post pictures while working on such a screen.

David – Glad to make you laugh :)

the impression I got from looking through your images was of a lonely emptiness. Like something had been sucked out of this society. Once this observation became clear to me your point of view also became clear. An uncertainty.

Well done.

you need apologize for nothing…and i agree with everything you say…i was hoping that you saw my comment as an explanation/interpretation but not any kind of condescending lecture to you….so so sorry if that is how you took it…mostly i was simply paying respect to Roberto’s essay and motives which i do happen to hold in high regard, but always interested in other points of view etc….love the net, but sometimes we miss the mark with either semantics or timing or both….

cheers, david

This is the second time i write this reply. Ten minutes ago I was trying to justify myself for the choices taken, but I realized this is not the case. I don’t think I have.

Ritdiena is a project started from me, from my facing the future, from my lack of answers, from my being part of a stuck generation. I always find myself talking with my contemporaries about what is going to be, about the best decisions to take, about our worries becoming adult people.
I perfectly know that this kind of attitude has been experienced by every generation. Basically everybody in his twenties has been uncertain of his own future and has felt a bit lost. But anyway I’m experiencing that right know and when I heard of the Latvian crisis, so sudden and so strong, I immediately thought about the youngsters and about what that change could have caused inside them.

The future is just a concept, it doesn’t exist. Everything has still to happen. The future exists just in the perception we can have of it. And if this perception, these insights, get damaged or get changed, also the future itself will do the same.
And that’s why I meant to give prominence and importance to something which is often intangible like the feelings and the outlooks. They are the base where all our choices start from and on which we build ourselves as individual, as society and as country.
It’s evident that a project like this is quite ambitious and it can be hard to show something you can just feel. But my experience there was very intense, I think I got part of their private life, at least for a while. And I believe that if you look at the whole selection, without focusing on every single image or trying to analyze every option, maybe you can see in the end the atmosphere I breathed and I tried to restore.
Sorry for my poor english. I do my best.

I get your point… but actually, my photography is absolutely irrelevant to my comments on internet including this blog as well… these are two different mediums… When I show my work, the context is very important, and I don’t think my comments on internet is the context I want for my own photography presentation. When the day comes, I will show my work to David, and if he finds it worthwhile to be published you will see it… On the other hand, I don’t think that art critics, columnists besides their theses have to present their own paintings, films or photographs… I have had only three gallery shows in my country, and one international show which took places in Vilnius, Riga, and Moscow. Now I think, I don’t need any shows, my artist’s ego is doing absolutely fine without any shows:)… OK, the show at serious museum would be another story, as well as the book… For now, my main concern is to get access, and get as close to my theme as I can…and work, work… shows will be in five or more years… that’s my way, not yours… Cheers

‘…the very finest can often look like something very very simple… IF one is not really paying attention…fine fine lines…’

I had hoped that the nature of my observations and queries would at least suggest that I WAS paying attention to the work.

You also said:

‘…yes yes, great pictures ARE easy to take…funny though, few can take them..smiling…best way to prove this to yourself , as always, is to give it a try…’

No reason you should know this, but I HAVE been giving it ‘a try’, since 1979 when I got hold of my first SLR (borrowed for an afternoon when I was working as KP in a Dublin). Though I’ve never pursued a career in photography (writing is my first obsession), if I didn’t believe I’d taken some good photographs over the years I would have quit ages ago. I completely take on board that you have been inundated with all kinds of stuff (more than I could ever imagine I’m sure) and that you have learned to discern what is valuable in the quieter and more subtle work; I did not mean to give the impression that I don’t value such work myself. I have looked at a good deal of photography books/exhibitions over the decades and I think (I hope) I have some appreciation of what makes a good image. Incidentally, most of my all-time favourite are extremely subtle and the very opposite of ‘BANG BANG’.

But I probably shouldn’t have asked you to elaborate about Roberto’s essay; if something just ‘sets right’ there is little more to say. My apologies for that.

BTW
On the matter of websites. I have linked to the nearest thing I possess, which is (at present) my Flickr gallery. If I wanted to submit something to Burn would this be adequate?

A bit like the difference between American Idol and Leonard Cohen…

explaining how one feels about an essay is like explaining why or how one appreciates a fine film or a good novel…just sets right, that’s all…and sometimes, particularly with photo essays, an acquired taste after viewing lots and lots and lots of work…for sure the very finest can often look like something very very simple and NOT DRAMATIC and even very near like something that does not work, IF one is not really paying attention…fine fine lines…fine fine lines…….yes yes, great pictures ARE easy to take…funny though, few can take them..smiling…best way to prove this to yourself , as always, is to give it a try….looks simple, easy…is not….we are so so inundated commercially with BANG BANG and HOT HOT and GLAMOR GLAMOR and CELEBRITY CELEBRITY that i think it can be a bit lazy actually for us to look over the subtleties of the really more introspective essays…as fine painting, music, writing…you gotta work a bit for the very best…everything i do here on Burn is to point to these subtleties…even when i publish a more “mainstream” essay it is designed often to set up for something with more finesse…i am pleased you went to Boccacino’s site…i am sure you are now learning more than anything i could ever write….by the way, Roberto is new to me as well…never heard of him , nor seen any of his work before this….anyway, many thanks for your thoughts…

cheers, david

A suggestion:

If you run your cursor over the names of most of those who post here, you will see that they link back to their websites, blogs and such. This gives the reader the opportunity to go to their place and to see where they actually come from, photographically.

Your name does not link to anything. Would you please consider linking your name to your work?

Thank you.