Homecoming queen?

Gotta laugh…

Gizmo lays into the US of A

Not a nice place to be but the lure of the chair sirened me inside – and the gate was open… The place has become a pigeon roost big time and hundreds of them were shuffling, cooing and shitting around me. I loathe these filthy creatures.

I couldn’t go inside, despite a tempting sofa photo opp. I would have become a victim of the resident overlords. Shudder.

Greets from the Loa of the dead and sexuality. I’m Baron Lakwa and I’ll be dealing with cemeteries, graves and sex from now on so just enjoy.

Remember – we all die.



Look out for me

Interesting light and shadow on the Power Station Pier today

EAT ME! – the fab EGP cafe fairy cake. Lewis Carroll style. If only…

Is EGP a well kept secret or something? I’d heard of it but it isn’t exactly easy to stumble across (or spell for that matter) tucked away behind the Woolwich Road.

I am roaming further with The Dog because I am heartily sick of the petty dog politics and cliques and squabbles of Greenwich Park, particularly a (very) small group of sanctimonious dog owners (the spell checker replaced wankers with dog owners…). Though why I should let them spoil the park for me is something I need to sort out. Typical addiction mindset. Focus on the 0.1% negative, forget the 99.9% good.

Well, EGP is part of the 99.9%, definitely! It has an ace cafe that serves really good reasonably priced espresso and fairy cakes. These can be ordered and paid for from the door so no need to leave The Dog (I don’t anyway and would forgo the coffee if I had to do that). The staff are super friendly and chatty and best of all, The Dog gets to run around with normal dogs walked by normal people (ie like me… lol). This could all change of course, we’ve only gone there three times.

Slightly disturbing is the plaque near the exit/entrance informing us that just behind us are the buried remains of 3000 pensioner seamen… Don’t turn around, go directly to the exit! Brought The Amityville Horror to the forebrain.

Entrance, Woolwich Road, East Greenwich

No 6 Creekside, Deptford

Intensely backlit and hard to photograph. I think I used EV -2. The little Ricoh lens has coped pretty well though. I’m pleased with this

Photography once tried to be accepted as an art form by aping paintings. Central to the debate was the question as to how far the new technology could be considered ‘art’ since the images were mechanically produced. Baudelaire once famously said:

Photography must (…) return to its true duty which is that of handmaid to the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, like printing and shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature.

Charles Baudelaire 1859

It is easy in retrospect to dismiss Baudelaire’s lack of vision, pomposity, downright wrongness, and being a complete tosser, but it wasn’t until early in the 20C that representational, socially progressive modernism overturned these preoccupations with traditional fine arts. Rather simplistically put, the ‘art’ of photography became based on the photographic and the aesthetic of what constitutes a good photograph rather than how much it resembled a painting.

Personally, I cannot abide pictorialism in photography, or any photography that is manipulated to mask the photographic. Unless of course I’m doing it…

Occasionally it works. These discarded plastic sunflowers looked insipid before I tarted them up in Photoshop

Le Miroir du Maroc