Jacqueline y Marcelo

If you walk into Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park in Southwark through the eastern entrance you will see on your right two araucaria araucana or 'monkey puzzle' trees.

The trees were planted in 2004 to commemorate Jacqueline Drouilly Yurich and her husband Marcelo Salinas Eytel, a young Chilean couple forcibly 'disappeared' in 1974 under Pinochet's dictatorship.

Here's their story alongside some poems and songs.
http://www.memoriaviva.com/English/victims/drouilly.html

And here's a video to tell their story and remember them by.
Marcelo y Jacqueline - Disappeared in Chile - Part 1
Marcelo y Jacqueline - Disappeared in Chile - Part 2


Jacqueline y Marcelo.

LIP 26th Annual Exhibition

The LIP 26th Annual Exhibition organised by the London Independent Photography community opened this week at the Embassy Tea Gallery on Union Street, a short hop along from the Jerwood Gallery here in London. The space itself, although underground, is a huge improvement on last year's cramped gallery up town. 

There is a selection process for the exhibition, but no theme other than "your best work from the year", which does result in a somewhat overall lack of focus, but there is work to be enjoyed, and here's some of the the work I personally found interesting.

The show is on until the 2 November http://www.londonphotography.org.uk/exhibitions/LIP26Annual/

Geoff Titley - Postcard From Another Place No 2 (Penshurst)

Tom Gifford - Elephant and Castle

Brigitte Flock - Thames Estuary

Tiffany Jones - Untitled, Rochester

Behzad  Sharouz - Mist Over River Thames

one of three –The Scratch Orchestra review in The Wire

The other week three people got in touch about using my photographs for three quite different purposes. Here's the first one, in this month's Wire magazine review of a performance by The Scratch Orchestra. I took a whole heap of photographs of the event,  https://flic.kr/s/aHsjZgASke  and I like the one The Wire chose to use. I also like seeing my work in a magazine! It's a good review from Phil England and I think they're planning on another performance sometime soon at Cafe Otto. 

Whilst analogue might enhance the photographer's process where's the importance for the viewer?

One hundred and twenty six days have past since I posted here, and since then spring has turned to summer which turned to autumn.

A week or so back I went to the London Analogue Festival, an exhibition 'promoting analogue technology and its use in art' – and didn't really get it. While I could imagine that the photographers might have enjoyed their analogue processes I couldn't see what difference it made to me, the punter, looking at the prints on the wall. As a relic it doesn't work. But wait, might I feel different about a Polaroid? A truly original artefact? Maybe, just a bit – but really it's the photograph itself which intrigues me and not the process of its making.

A week ago I decide enough is enough, I can no longer stand pecking away at the computer keyboard with two fingers – I am going to learn to touch type. And so now I'm just breaking the 10wpm barrier. Not quite sure if that has anything to do with it, but it might – this was all typed with hands in the correct position, a finger for each key and no peeking.

And finally here's a photograph I made recently – taken on an iPhone, a Hasselblad or maybe neither....

ESTATE OF MIND – the book

I can't quite believe that I've finished it, but here it is: Estate of Mind – the book. I'm pleased with it. 32 photographs and over 3000 (yep that's three thousand) words by the writer Christopher Jones.

Here's a sneak preview of some of the images http://www.martindixon.org.uk/index.php/projects/estate-of-mind/

If you would like to see more then and you're reading this before June 2014, then do come along to the Westminster BA Photography degree show. Private view on 12th June and on until the Tuesday, all at the Truman's Brewery on Brick Lane, London.

SHOEFAYRE

Finally I take a photograph. Here it is. A photograph of the old SHOEFAYRE shop on Borough High Street.

back to the edit

The book project Estate of Mind is finally coming together and I’ve nearly decided on the final edit. It’s been a roller coaster journey. I started off with the idea of photographing my neighbours which to make more interesting, I decided to shoot on medium format film. Shooting on the college’s Hasselblad on a tripod certainly added theatricality and a slower pace to the whole process of making a portrait. That is once I’d figured out dark-slides and winding the film on correctly at the start.

In parallel I was busy taking digital photographs of the estate, trying to avoid the clichés of decay and grime and instead looking for the intrigue and the marvel of these wonderful brick built pre war blocks. The next step was talking with Chris Jones to see if he might be interested in writing some text to accompany the photographs. As it turns out that was exactly what he wanted to do, and so off we went on a two hour walk around the estate, looking here and there, picking up bricks and chatting. On the back of this Chris then wrote a remarkable text about the estate, bricks, historical figures and community.

Now the project was shifting it’s focus and although I tried hard to incorporate the portraits they just didn’t fit with the pictures of the estate and the text. Well I’d scanned them all already so I’ll print them up and l give them all a print of their portrait, but they won’t make the book. Maybe the start of a new project in the summer? But meanwhile I’ve been buried deep in laying out the photographs. After much struggle I ditched full bleed layout and also running the images across the gutter. Now it’s simple. Images on the right framed by a white border and text on the left. That’s it. But it’s taken a lot of work to get there. And even then there’s the issue of the text: fonts, alignments, line spacings and columns. Next time I must try and team up with a graphic designer. Although my fellow student Christina has been a great help with her sharp-eyed graphic designer’s sensibility. So next week I’ll try some test prints and have chat with the bookbinder about covers and embossed text. Although the book as ‘final BA photography project’ is one thing, I would like to find a way of printing it cheaply and making an affordable version.

And also I’d like to get back to taking some photographs as I don’t want that college curse of studying for four years only to end up not being able to take photographs anymore. Meanwhile it’s back to the edit.

the home straight.

I am finally on the home straight after four years of studying photography at Westminster University. N. asked me what I'd learnt. I said that I'd remembered that what I like to do is something that I was already doing nearly 40 years ago. Then I would wander the streets of Plymouth with a camera with no greater purpose than to look at the world and find photographs waiting to be taken. My degree's final project "Estate of Mind" is just that. A book of photographs taken on numerous walks around the Tabard Gardens Estate, often accompanied by my son on scooter or rollerblades. A pivotal walk was with writer Christopher Jones who then wrote a text to wrap the photographs in. I'm very close to the final edit and then off to get it printed.

205 days have past

Two hundred and five days have past since I last posted here.
Enough time to write a dissertation, start a final project and drink lots of coffee.