Old Istanbul

Sezen Aksu's "İstanbul Hatırası", from the movie "Crossing the Bridge" is one of my favourite clips. With the singer's rendering effortly absorbing all the attention, I hadn't looked at the old pictures that were shown in the clip. Until this evening, when I realized that they were all Street photography, and the kind that I've come to like: not focusing on photography, but on the human story and emotion in front of the camera. I wonder how many of these photographers had even heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Gary Winogrand? However - no fancy composition and rhythm, no negative space, no visual jokes - just human emotion.

Beautiful People

This afternoon, I went through some of my old slides, en in a tray with strays I found a casually shot pair of portraits done in the tiny place Lendas, south coast of Crete, 1993.

I'm not a portrait photographer. Slightly nervous, I had pressed too soon, which led to the picture above. So, after the woman had sorted out her headscarf and posed herself, I turned my camera to portrait-orientation and took a properly framed shot at the "right moment". On that picture, there's nothing to be seen from the context except part of the pickup truck, but the woman's smile had frozen, en the man too looked less than candid. On the other hand, the picture above looked even worse to me when I saw it again - the light was off, and there was all this clutter!

Lendas has never been more than a row of houses and a small beach, framed within rocks. We had been advised to go there by a friend or colleague who had a good time there. Typically for many Greek places is that you regret your arrival - what on earth am I doing in this mess - and you regret your departure even more. That kind of place. Even now something was built that was outscaling the old little houses, Lendas remained authentic and endearingly improvised. Once, it will have been a fishing village. "Once" must have largely covered the lives of my two protagonists. But although tourism changed and maybe upset their life, they loved to pose. The 'clutter' around them can't harm them, it was part of their history.

Slide, scanned digitally and postworked to correct the light.

How to begin a blog?

On this blog, I hope to share my thoughts about travel, photography and culture. I start modestly, but I hope you'll enjoy yourself.

This was shot on a alpine meadow in Slovenia, 2006. Slovenia is an amazing little country, it straddles the borders between Mediterranean and Slavic Europe, and it has a bit of the (extended) Alps as well as gorgeous bits of coast that remind me of the best parts of Italy. Amazingly, this little spot was a bit boring. We were lodged in an eco-farm B&B. The ad had said that all modern languages were spoken, but in fact we had to do with the oldest son's scattered bits of German. The food however was eco, terrific and came in huge quantities. This was taken with my old Canon 350 and its standard lens. The light was amazing, but I had to do some masking, curves etc. to restore it the original mood and memory.