Toy camera in Tuscany

It seems that every landscape photographer who visits Tuscany shoots these locations. Not always through choice, but clients love the layouts of cypress trees, isolated rustic buildings and rolling renaissance landscapes.

Once you are familiar with them you start to see these iconic scenes popping up all over the place in ads. The two farmhouses above are currently featured on the lids of rival brands of Olive spread; Bertolli and Tesco.

You will never be alone in these locations. At dawn and sunset it can be like door stepping a celebrity with the press pack. Professionals and groups on photo holidays jockey their tripods for a decent spot. The rising sun melting the mist or golden sunset lengthening shadows doesn’t last for long, so once the commissioned shots are in the bag there is time to experiment a little.

These 4 shots were taken on a Holga – a plastic toy film camera that leaks light, goes soft around the edges and vignettes the image darkening the corners.

Lovely

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Daytona Bike Week

The 100,000 bikers who invade Daytona Beach each spring look intimidating. Big men on big Harley-Davidsons wearing black leather, tattoos and a scowl.

The sort of men you would regard as worth avoiding as they were probably rather familiar to law enforcement officials and the inside of a courtroom.

However, a closer look will reveal that their ragged jeans are actually rather new and carefully torn.  The tattoos are somewhat less than permanent and any familiarity with the legal system, is probably down to their employment as a lawyer. 

It wasn’t that long ago that Florida’s annual bike week was the destination of choice for two wheeled gangs who brought a whole lot of trouble to the town. It got so bad that the mayor told the organisers and the police to clean it up or close it down. So, out went the street racing, nudity, fighting and public drinking and in came organised fun and a family friendly atmosphere.

Once the bikers swapped tales from the road and traded punches in bars. Now they network and exchange business cards.

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Graffiti – A wall and a thought

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When does graffiti become art ? – or vandalism a celebrated historical artefact ?

The Aboriginal people of Australia were drawing images on rocks 20,000 years before the word ‘art’ was invented. These Dreamtime paintings told the story of their creation and were a visual history book to pass down thegenerations. The depictions could also impart powers to the tribe. Paint a picture of many animals and a good hunting trip would surely come your way. These nomadic tribes are long gone but on the walls of caves and hollows in Kakadu National Park many of their pictures survive.

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There is little evidence remaining of where the Berlin wall once stood. The wide scar that 
bisected the city at Potsdamer Platz has been filled in and built upon and the former wasteland is now home to major international corporations. A monolithic slice is all that now remains, surrounded by towering new offices.  Its coat of protest that once shouted is now reduced to little more than a sanitised whisper.

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The quiet Belgium town of Poperinge was a much livelier place a hundred years ago. At any one time there were a quarter of a million British soldiers transiting to and from the front line trenches nearby. For some of them though the town was their final destination. They had been accused of cowardice or desertion in the face of the enemy and for the sake of morale and discipline, had to be made examples of.

Military courts were held in the town hall and following a brisk trial and an inevitable guilty verdict, they were consigned to a cell in the building. At dawn the following morning they were shot in the courtyard. The names and messages they scratched into the plaster walls of the cell still record their last thoughts.

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Edward Elgar may have been the first musician to work at these recording studios in London’s Abbey Road, but it was the Beatles who made the place famous. Not just for making several of their albums there but also for using the zebra crossing outside for an album cover. Its association with the band eventually helped the building to become protected against future development.

The permanent webcam shows a stream of tourists antagonising motorists as they re-enact the Beatles march over the crossing. They can also be spied upon as they scrawl messages to their musical heroes on the Grade 2 listed property. Sadly few of them to Elgar.

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The real life ‘Rocky’

Harry Andrews leads out Darren Hamilton in Rotherham 2010

I have regularly photographed Darren Hamilton ever since he restarted his boxing career two years ago. Down on his luck he was broke, homeless and sleeping on the couch of the gym I go to. Last night he won the British title.

Harry Andrews was a promising boxer whose career was prematurely ended by an injury. After his dreams of becoming a champion were thwarted he became a trainer at a London white collar boxing gym. The sort of place that caters mostly for financial folk wanting to work out in-between spending their bonuses.

One day a ‘washed up’ boxer came in to exercise and punch a few bags. Harry could see that Darren still had the potential – but first had to persuade him to believe in himself. So they teamed up and began the long journey that starts on the bottom of the bill at small halls in provincial towns. After a fight most boxers have down time for a while before preparing for their next bout. A chance to enjoy themselves, to relax and eat and drink and do all that’s forbidden when they are training. Harry wouldn’t allow that, he wanted Darren to train every day. To be permanently fighting fit so that whenever the break came, they would be ready.

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Five days ago the phone rang.   British champion Ashley Theophane’s televised defence fight was in doubt. His opponent was ill and had pulled out so they needed to find a last minute replacement. Someone who they thought wouldn’t trouble the champion too much…

It sounds like a corny film that’s been made too many times before.

Substitute boxing for horseracing, athletics or motor racing and it’s an all too familiar screen tale. The thwarted career of the mentor, the self doubt of the protégé, together they realise their dreams.

Sometimes though, it’s a true story.

Darren Hamilton – British Light Welter Weight Champion

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Drinking in Hemingway’s footsteps

Bellinis in Harry’s Bar Venice

Pastis at Cafe Les Deux Magots

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It may have been the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 that really drove Ernest Hemingway to drink. He was finally earning money from his writing in America, but the puritanical ban on alcohol meant he couldn’t spend it on one of his greatest pleasures.

Paris though still clung to its bohemian culture and it attracted many of the worlds’ finest young painters, writers and philosophers. Disillusioned by war they coalesced in their search for life, love  and pleasure at bars like the Café Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank. Hemingway became part of this “Lost Generation” and in the midst of the creativity and madness produced many of his finest novels.

Rising early he would work undisturbed until noon and then reward himself with the first Pastis of the day. The aniseed liquour with its herbal essences forming a perfect aperitif to prepare for a very good lunch. Then to fill the time before the evenings festivities began he would move on to his own creation, a ‘Death in the afternoon’ cocktail. Inspired by his new passion for bullfighting it was an unlikely mixture of 1 part Pastis to 4 parts Champagne. His original recipe ends with “Drink three to five of these slowly”

He left the city in 1928 but later returned in 1944 as a war correspondent with the frontline American troops. As the soldiers swept across the city he commandeered a Jeep and went on his own mission. Ignoring the small pockets of Germans still fighting in the capital he picked up some irregulars and careered into the Place Vendome to ‘liberate’ the Ritz Hotel from the Nazis and open a bottle of champagne.  After the war the Hotel renamed their small bar ‘The Hemingway’.in his honour.

Hemingway didn’t so much live in Venice, more reside there in Harry’s Bar for the duration of a particularly long and cold winter. Long enough though to be granted his own table where he would hold court and down the Bellinis, invented by the bars founder Giuseppe Cipriani. Mixing sparkling Prosecco wine and peach puree may not produce a cocktail with a strong hit. But when you are not going anywhere for several weeks its as well to pace oneself.

Mojito at La Bodeguita del Medio

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In between leaving Paris and its liberation Hemingway spent much of his time in Havana. When not fishing or hunting unsuccessfully for German submarines off the Cuban coast he would divide his time between his two favourite bars.

La Bodeguita del Medio was just a minute’s walk from room 511 of the Ambos Mundos Hotel where he used to live and write when he first arrived in the city. The speciality of the bar was its Mojitos; a sweet mix of rum, limes, sugar and mint mashed up in the glass. The rough and ready recipe of the cocktail complimented the clientele in this spit and sawdust bar for locals. The sort of place you could write on the walls and no one minded. Even Hemingway added his contribution “My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita”.Its still there.

The rather more comfortable El Floridita bar had long been a favourite with holidaying Americans when he arrived. Grog was the rum once regarded as only fit for sailors in the Royal Navy. But when chilled, sweetened with lime and sugar, called a Daquiri and served in a classic cocktail glass by a red jacketed waiter – it become something much more elegant.

Eventually Hemingway bought a property outside of the city, there were less distractions and he could concentrate on his work. But when the sun went down he and his wife would still drive in for their evening daquiris. The Regency styled interior hasn’t changed since he drained his last cocktail in the 1950’s and its not just his ghost that lingers. His bar stool remains at the end of the long mahogany bar and astride it is a life size bronze figure. If you keep buying the daquiris the old man will listen to your fishing tales all night.

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Daquiris at La Floridita

A good view was important to Lee Harvey Oswald

The Museum of the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic workers party in front of Oswald’s old apartment building

 

 

Oswald  travelled to Russia in 1959 and renounced his US citizenship, but his defection did not go quite the way he planned. Instead of a rewarding place at the Moscow University he was given a job as a factory lathe operator in Minsk, the capital of neighbouring Belarus. Housed in a large apartment building the only consolation was the view onto a shabby old railway workers cottage.

The cottage has been spruced up in the half century since he looked down on it and is now enclosed in railings carrying the hammer and sickle motif. It was preserved not long  after a secret meeting was held there in 1898 when, after an apology for absence was read out (Lenin couldn’t make it), an early manifesto was drawn up for what became the Russian Communist Party.

Its open to visitors – if you can persuade the sullen babushka inside to leave her small electric fire and unlock the door. Faded photographs show hundreds of eager comrades queuing patiently outside as they wait to pay homage to their doctrine. Today you will almost certainly have the place to yourself.

Tapestry of Lenin in the Minsk Museum of the Great Patriotic War

In 1962 with a new wife and family, Oswald returned to the United States. The following year he hid on the 6^thfloor of a book depository overlooking Dealey Plaza in Dallas as President Kennedy passed by. Soon after, he was himself assassinated.

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