%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
|
Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Card Art Many years ago in Zimbabwe I had a friend named Phil - the same guy who appears in my story entitled Chimanimani in fact. I mentioned that he was a photographer but that says very little about Phil's artistic talent; he was, in fact, a genius. When I first met Phil, he was trying to be a painter and produced strange works with an eerily innocent feeling to them that inspired an answering painting by myself in tribute. But he was becoming frustrated by his limited technical ability; he had never studied technique in a formal setting and was reaching the point where he could no longer do justice to the pictures in his head. That was when he discovered photography. From that moment we saw little of Phil; he was always off somewhere on a photographic project, returning at rare intervals to show us the most fascinating and original photographs I have ever seen. His eye for the unusual and beautiful was unerring. Very quickly he found his metier, a concentration on the tiny details, the unnoticed beauty in everyday things - what we would call macro-photography now (no, I've never understood why it is not called micro-photography either - presumably it has something to do with the fact that it uses macro lenses). In Phil's hands, the camera became an eye into another universe where lichen on a pebble became a new world and moss at the edge of a stream a seething jungle. But Phil wanted more. He packed his bags and went off to university in England to study photography. Years later, when I too came to England, he was working as a freelance commercial photographer in London and occasionally he would visit to show us his latest work. Sadly, it was typical of the commercial photography world: slick, sharp images of cars on a beach in the dawn light, that kind of thing. Gone was the eye for the unusual, the strange beauty of the miniature world that passes unseen for most of us. Phil knew what was happening too. He accepted that his bread and butter was in these sophisticated images designed to sell and looked forward to a time when he could express himself freely again. Time passed and Phil moved to Germany where there was more opportunity to make big money. And then, just a few years ago, he dropped in on us on his way to America. He was off to the land of the free to make his fortune and now lives somewhere in California, still working as a commercial photographer. But what brought Phil to mind was that recently I have come into contact with a branch of commercial photography that could have been made for him. Weirdly, it's the selling of credit cards. And there are plenty of very ordinary photographs out there that try to sell us on the whole idea. But just a few photographers have realized where the real beauty of credit cards resides - how to make them almost irresistibly attractive. It's macro-photography that does it. Show a hand proffering a wad of these cards and they look so ordinary that we shrug and move on. But get really close and into the tiny details and suddenly they become a landscape of rich, glowing colors, eerily metallic protuberances and misty distances, yet always they remain instantly recognizable as the humble credit card. I have begun to collect these images, so fascinated by their strange beauty have I become. The fact that they are designed to sell is now irrelevant - I see them as works of art. You may laugh and consider me weird, that's fine, but take a look at just a few examples from my collection and tell me that these are not somehow fascinating and beautiful to look at.  Word count: 633 |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
