Tag Archives: Photography

Leith wanderings.

 

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The Foot of the Walk (pub).

More aimless trudging about Leith on a Monday morning. It doesn’t half look grimy at times, yet the odd bit of gentrification aside, has a semi-charming honesty about it.

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Easter Road.

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Newkirkgate Shopping Centre.

The hideous trams are sadly expanding their accompanying plague into here, though – more congestion, more roadworks, more ruined small businesses, more vexing tourists without a clue where they are.

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Leith Walk. Trams to shit on here by 2023.

Trams are a nuisance, a conduit for cretins.

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Six days in Barcelona.

Barcelona was fine. I couldn’t be bothered seeing Las Ramblas or the Camp Nou, preferring the boulevards of Gràcia and its surfeit of supermarkets and bars – the district didn’t strike me as a ‘tourist trap’ even though it might have been. Most of my time was spent either there or ‘exploring’ the metro system. I am a geek for anything ‘Trainy McTrainface’, especially of the underground variety, so this pursuit I found most arresting.

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The holiday apartment building, however, was the noisiest place; someone inhabiting a room on the floor above would turn on the shower and subsequently the building would shudder. I barely got a wink of sleep because of the noise. In addition to this din, renovations were being done all day. I almost expected a wrecking ball to crash through our living room. Absolute fucking racket.

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Trip highlight – a midget sold me a cheap bunnet.

Trip lowlight –  Ryanair at Barcelona-El Prat charging me €25 for a too-big bag, even though it could clearly fit in the overhead locker. I’ve been on almost 50 flights with that bag (I call it the ‘Big Bag’), and this is the first time it’s been picked out in the queue.

Fuming.

P.S. Here is Homer and Marge Simpson in Gràcia.

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Edinburgh – winter is coming.

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Princes Street is ghastly – chavs galore and feckless tourists – but every Christmas it’s almost bearable. Because it rains and snows and people look fucking miserable. I like misery and I enjoy seeing people miserable. Great.

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Morning sun on Hutchison Crossway.

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It doesn’t often look like this at Hutchison. For a very brief instant, things were cinematic. And then it was gone just as a beaten-up Ford Mondeo staggered into frame. This was my ‘Decisive Moment’.

 

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Dalry Road, Edinburgh.

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Arty-farty pretensions with this snap from Monday. Interestingly, there’s a graveyard coming up on the left there and I once saw a (presumably hammered) woman clutching a bottle of budget cider wander inside and take a shite in a bush.

All very Edinburgh.

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Crawling about Leith.

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As a scion of Gorgie, it is with great reluctance that I have ventured a lot more into Leith these days, and I for a brief moment feared I had gone Full-Anthropologist. It’s not as mingin’ as I initially thought. In fact, some of it is quite lovely.

No junkies were harmed in the taking of this photograph.

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Morning chit-chat on Princes Street.

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Wee bit of humanity in this one. Splendid.

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Russell A. Kirsch and the first digital image.

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This is the first digital image ever made or seen. The bloke Kirsch, a computer scientist, converted a photo of his child into binary form with some kind of scanner.

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It’s a terrifying image. The whole affair reminds me of that baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

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Further reading:

https://petapixel.com/2010/11/04/first-digital-photograph-ever-made/

http://wafflesatnoon.com/first-digital-image/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/the-history-of-digital-imaging-began-with-a-baby-picture/382161/

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Conrad Schumann – life as an icon.

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Until the other day I thought this photograph, the so-called ‘Leap into Freedom’, was the criterion for liberty, no less. A cursory Google search (the snap came up in some morbid conversation about David Hasselhoff’s ‘Looking for Freedom’) says otherwise. The power of images is propaganda above all, the human story often discarded. It appears Schumann was the prisoner of *our* image, and reading about his life post-1961 – depression, solace in alcohol, his eventual suicide in 1998 – one can’t help but feel for the guy.

That primary life-changing decision with all its what-ifs, and he had to be reminded of it daily, us lot ascribing meaning to the photograph that wasn’t there, like we’ve owned his experience.

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20 years later.

I suppose the contemporary equivalent is becoming a meme and spending your life trying to supersede it.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-leap-of-hope-that-ended-in-despair-1167101.html

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/conrad-schumann-defects-west-berlin-1961/

http://100photos.time.com/photos/peter-leibing-leap-into-freedon

https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/famous-people-from-memes-then-now

 

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St. Giles’ Cathedral – the High Kirk of Edinburgh.

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Situated on the Royal Mile and in its current incarnation dated from the late 14th century, I’ve walked past it roughly 6,000 times yet have never been in the fucker. My reasons are multifarious, but one of them is that I don’t enjoy the manipulation, i.e., architectural determinism, of it all. The splendour I can enjoy from afar. Some find a solitude in churches; I just have visions of the terror they’ve inflicted, and this presently includes the tractor beam that pulls in hordes of cretin tourists. Sorry not sorry.

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