Venice produces many surprises.

The old schools in Colombo in Sri Lanka are completely fascinating.  The architecture, the traditions, the uniforms and the influence they have beyond their sandstone walls are something else.  They’re just so historic and colonial- and I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way! During my recent visit to Colombo I visited some of the schools that my parents and my parents’ friends always talk about, including St Thomas in Mount Lavinia, Ladies College and Royal College . Many of the schools that I visited originated in the 19th century and seemed to be copied on Oxford or Cambridge or some other old British college.

I got some good photos in St Thomas as we managed to talk our way inside the school gates but we were not so lucky at the Royal College. Enjoy the photos!

St Thomas in Mount Lavinia

Royal College

Some photos from my trip to France:

Clock at the Musee D’Orsay

Fauchon Chocolatier

Ensor Exhibition at the Musee D’Orsay

Shakespeare & Co Book Store

Arc De Triomphe

Moulin Rouge

Ok, I have been having way too much fun here and neglecting my blog but thought I would share some pictures of Kandyan dancing and drumming that I took in Kalutara.

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We drove 2 hours to Ballarat in country Victoria for the Ballarat Foto Biennale. While there were some decent photography exhibitions, it was the buildings in which the photos were being exhibited themselves which were impressive.

Mining exchange

Railway crossing

Gallery Toot Toot (actual name!) at the railway station

 Lunch at Daylesford- poor fella wants to have a bite with his hooman.

picture source unknown

The Melbourne Writers Festival 2009 is on at the moment. There are all these cute stalls in the city related to the festival.

Volunteers at the festival, happy to be snapped, red berets compulsory

Necklace made from books

typewriters!

I asked one of the guys at work today at the gallery whom he would say is the most influential contemporary photographer. After umming and aahing for a little while he listed a number of photographers and then finally settled on the American Garry Winogrand (b.1924-d.1984). Looking through a beautiful coffee-table book on Winogrand’s work, it is easy to see why he is virtually worshipped by street-shooters everywhere- his influence on street photography is unmistakeable (although Winogrand himself thought the term ‘street photographer’ stupid and preferred ‘still photographer’).

Winogrand certainly had personality and grunt. Frank Van Riper of the Washington Post describes him as a ‘street-smart Jewish kid from the Bronx, who considered himself whole only when he held a Leica to his eye, hit the road, savouring and reflecting life through his lens’. He has also been called an ‘an undisciplined mixture of energy, ego, curiosity, ignorance, and street-smart naiveté’. I’m pretty sure we would have gotten along. Friends say he was fearless in the way he approached strangers to take their photograph, although with disarming charm. A good tip to remember, no?

During his lifetime, Winogrand obsessively took photos and had hundreds and thousands of undeveloped rolls of films at the time of his death- basically millions of photos he never even saw himself.  From the prints that are available, we can see Winogrand’s appreciation of everyday life, beautiful women, animals, politics and the complex dynamics between these things. There is so much irony and absurdity in his photos, mostly taken with a wide-angle lens, I wonder what others photos are in the undeveloped rolls of film.

Some of Winogrand’s photos from the 1960’s to 1980s, mostly from the hot streets of New York:

New York, 1961.

Hot. Hot. Hot. These three would not be out of place in Garance Dore or The Sartorialist.

Central Park Zoo, New York City, 1967

Series from the Bronx Zoo

Apollo 11 Moon Shot, Cape Kennedy, Florida, 1969

Los Angeles, 1964

Untitled c.1954

Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton c. 1954-55

New York, 1969 or earlier

Untitled. 1950s

World’s Fair, New York City, 1964

“No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something”

“Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts”.

~ Garry Winogrand