Farters, selfies and subjective art

11 October

Amateur Photographer arrives in the shops for sale on Tuesday; but those of us who subscribe to it, we get our copy on Saturday. That gives us few extra days to be reading it. Anyway, the mag has gone through one of its periodical face lifts and now the first page has the usual editor’s column but it also has a feature called, Online Picture of the Week. This week’s pic is of a building on the South Bank taken from the north bank, and I actually like that building.

This touches on something I wrote about a few months ago, the subjectivity of art. This particular building, St George Wharf, has won an award for being the worst building in the world. The Architects’ Journal is the awarding body. I wonder what they don’t like about it? After all, modern architects were quick to jump on Price Charles when he moaned about some of the buildings being designed and built a few years ago. We all have our views don’t we, and none of them are right or wrong.

The photo it’s self is a colour image, yet at first glance it looks like a mono image. As I said above, I like that building but I like the reflection of it in the river just as much. Such reflections I have been interested in for years and I do have a few of good shots of this type. Looking at the photo in the mag again, it strikes me just how lucky the photographer, Simon Hadleigh-Sparks was at the time. The Thames is rarely as flat and smooth as it is there, and that for me makes the shot.

There’s a lot of fuss about selfies just now; no idea why or why it has taken off the way it has. Perhaps the mobile phone that has brought it on, but really, there’s nothing new in it at all. Photographers have been doing it for years, me included. I have a print of me in the mirror behind the bar of a pub in Whitley, and that was shot in 1977! It’s a pretty good shot too. Then there’s this one … 

I got it in Bournemouth earlier this year.

Saturday of course is history day … The man we have to thank for baked beans and the smells that come from them at times, HI Heinz was born in 1844. And not only that, but in 1958 the BBC broadcast the very first Grandstand programme.

Today’s photo then … 

Not a selfie.

And today’s funny …

“Hey Jim!” said Jim’s friend Sam. “If you stick out your tongue I can read your personality.” Jim promptly stuck out his tongue. Sam’s reading was quick in coming, “I can tell from your tongue that you are gullible!”