Middle class

At the moment i am exerting my middle class upbringing by sanding the floorboards in my house in Walthamstow. The work is agonizing especially with edger as I'm using it like an anglegrider balancing it with my elbows on my thighs. All day i hear myself breathing and the sander raging, my eyes sting with the cloud of dust and were it not with the help of my friends this would be crap.

I realize how lucky I am when i notice how my hands have gone from soft photographer hands to wrinkly hard callus ridden things. I notice how much food im eating and a craving for chicken and beer at the end of the day, it seems that no matter how much food I eat I'm still hungry at the end of the meal. Im reminded of George Orwell's, 'Road to Wigan pier' when he discussed the food of the working classes and how hot stodgy food worked perfectly when working in manual labour and how the middle and upper classes did not understand this.

I have also been without a fridge for 3 weeks and my milk sits in a bucket in the garden with last nights curry, which is sort of hilarious as i realize, you can do this, that I'm a spoilt, white western male sold on the 3rd economic miracle of consumerism.

I remember on a daily basis the incident when walking down a rail track in Madagascar and 3 children at the end saw me, screamed and ran away. I couldn't work it out until my fixer told me they had probably never seen a white person before let alone a camera.

http://www.timothyfoster.co.uk

A cat called 'Rambo'

One jewel blue day in September my housemate shouted up the stairs, "Come quick, you have to see this"! I thought someone had been killed on our busy road outside, but was surprised to find a large male cat, lying on it's side, bleeding, and warm dead.

My immediate reaction was to stroke the cat closely followed by burying it. We have a small yard in a very jewish area of north London where upon getting a neighbor and a friend to help, we buried it with a small cross made from lolly sticks.

The cat, clearly a stray, was strong and tabby coloured and without its collar, nameless, "what shall we call it"? said Mark. "Dunno, big cat like that, samink like 'Rambo'?" said Marks friend Andy. "Rambo it is then". A funny and fitting moment where we 3 blokes suddenly became all too quiet for our age.

Two weeks later the jewish neighbors below our flat snapped the cross in half and put it in the bin with a letter on our doorstep.

"...we kindly ask you to respect the fact that the religious symbol you have recently placed in the front garden is both offensive, antagonistic and provocative to us..."

Its a shame as most places i've lived in London neighbors want to know and talk to each other, yet here in Stamford Hill I've found the conversation to be as dead as a cat called Rambo.

homeless in London

Homeless in London ©timothyfoster

Homeless in London ©timothyfoster

I think you see homeless more often in central London when your feeling a little low. Your eyes change in this emotive state and whereas you would once spend most of the day avoiding eye contact, your eyes reach out when you feel like shit, and those in the shit reach back. I rarely give money to the homeless as I have friends who work for homeless charities and it seems to carry as an excuse to ignore, and thats how you become living in london. Filtering out things in life like in a photograph: you see what your tuned into at the time. People always ask, "how do you find these people", and I say, if you think about the colour brown enough, eventually you will see the colour everywhere even though it went out of fashion in the 1970s.

I'm really hesitant of photographing the homeless but when I see them sleeping I loose my confrontation with guilt and let myself see their vulnerability.

Homeless in London ©timothyfoster

I remember taking the first picture and there were all these needles lying near by, and thought if I move one or two needles into shot it will look better. Crazy shit. I also remember when I once went to Perpignan photojournalism festival and Tom Stoddard said to me, "What point of photojournalism isn't fake"? But I still didn't euthanize the picture and I think the picture still said a lot about the mans condition. In fact I think the most beautiful thing in this image is that someone had placed a book and a banana in arms reach for when he came out of his state.

I always wondered what he must have felt like waking up and seeing that someone from the millions like myself that continually walk by, had actually given a damn and put those simple objects next to him. Maybe when he woke it gave him hope, maybe it made him more upset, but it was worth a try who ever put it there and it was more than I'd done.

Modeling i sometimes wish i'd never done

email I received this morning...

so i was sitting in a restaurant in cuba street, wellington new zealand, enjoying a wee cuppa and a bite, and I look up and see your face with a gobful of spaghetti looming down from a poster. Random but nice to see you so far from home!

hope you're well.

L x

email from america

Hey Timmy, nice hearing you today.. yesterday -doh!

Hired a madass car today, 1980's Ford Bronco pickup, drinks more fuel than a tank. Solid as a rock. Brilliant stuff. Rent A Wreck.

Great out here, just for the weather it's worth the lot. Was diggin' up a garden today to lay some slabs for a patio, walking around all day in flip flops and sitting around outside all the time. Computers suck.

Californians talk to you in the street and say hi sometimes, they chat to you in shops or in the street, it's scary. What happened to the world?!..

Kathryn's aunt and her mates are totally punk rock. They're in their 50's and sit around all day chatting and smoking weed out of pipes.

We're total wimps..

They know everything about the land they live in, plants, mountains, history, politics.. everything, these are true californians, they were the baby boomers straight out of the sixties that didn't turn into Starbucks and fuck the world times over. Some of them live on indian reservations and have husband's called 'Wolf' and go hiking up in the high Sierra mountains just for fun.

The rest of LA might be shite, glitz, movie industry, mexicans practically run the whole city for less than minimum wage, but I tells ya, this place is still a knock out. The light in this place is something else, I can see why people came here to make films in the old days..

Anyways gotta get sum gaaaadam shut eye boy. Speak again soon, and I'll send you some stills from the new camera, the files are so godam big gotta get a new drive to store it all..

R.xx

The Urban Countryside

My trip to Epping forest today was met with as harsh a view of the city I was trying to escape from.

I saw a hawk sitting on top of a wood pigeon pecking at its head until I approached. Then I met a ginger cat which was very friendly at first but then kept bitting me and kicking me with its back legs in a fits of pleasure.

I then stood in a massive horse shit and then drew a circle in the ground around it with a stick and linked it with a line to another nearby mountain of dung. I then started to join other shits on the road with the marks of the stick like a huge crime scene.

You can take the boy out of the city, but if you clothe a naked horse would it become a clothes horse?

http://www.timothyfoster.co.uk

Share and share alike

Today I broke up two pigeons fighting.  They were fighting over a piece of burnt bread in the road, whipping each other on the beak with their wings.  So I walked over and took the bread and broke it in two and put each piece away from each other.  Then both Pigeons approached the separated bread and one went for the closest one and pecked at it, whereas the other saw the other bread piece but decided it wanted the other bit, and the fight started all over again.  

red head in club

homeless sculpture

credit crunch

Businessmen in a builders cafe.

Spoon on a chain.

98p - discount on a discount store.

Bol d'Or - Magny Cours - 24hr motorcycle race

lady crying in cafe

It's always a fine line in photography with the perception of yourself and that of others. So when confronted with the decisive moment where an old lady started to cry on the table opposite you are faced with the options of compulsion, do you take the image without asking or ask and possibly ruin this decisive moment?

I chose the option to talk, where upon I took two frames one where she blinked slightly but looked upset and defined the moment i had witnessed, and this one where she started to talk to me so i framed the image further left including myself in the frame.

It transpired that she was upset with the anniversary of when her husbands death, we talked some, and i paid for her coffee when leaving. Would i have gleaned this information taking the image without asking, and is the information important when displaying the image?

The answer is subjective, and only to realize that the job of a photographer is to make pictures that people want to see but would be uncomfortable taking themselves let alone witness a photographer making.

FMX

Little smiling hooks

Christmas is a weird time of year. I think it’s the ‘ist’ in Christmas that rhymes with Cyst that evokes malignant feelings of the festive season.

I spent a lot of this season with friends and riding motorbikes through mud filled fields and walking and drinking and swearing (not at the same time you understand) which was wonderful until I arrived in Wigan.

Like Marleys Ghost in a Christmas carol, I’d been avoiding going back to Wigan to see my past where I’d grown up, as in that past was loss. My friend had died earlier in the year and subsequently I'd made 2 promises this Christmas, one that I'd call by on his wife and daughter, and the other a promise to myself that I'd visit his grave. The grave was the first place I went, and in full bike gear I staggered through the stones and uneven ground towards his memory. With waves of unhappiness on the sight of his headstone combined with waves of joy that I was near my friend, I knelt down and cried at his gravestone.

I think the sight would have amused, clad in Kevlar and kneeling with my right hand out holding my helmet and in my left hand holding my tears, I imagined I would have looked like an odd modern day knight after battle.

Anger followed sorrow when I discovered one of his friends had left a cheap bottle of Heineken on his grave stone still filled with beer and sentiment. So I forced off the top with my knuckles and poured the contents on his grave as my friend had once shown me years many before. And as the beer slued out of its container like a snail falling off a lettuce leaf full on its steal, the anger rose and I wanted to smash the bottle on the gravestone, waste met with waste.  

But I resisted shamefully.

Afterwards I headed to his wife’s house, and upon discovering that she wasn’t in I couldn’t bring myself to write her a note to say I'd called by.  So I picked 3 smooth stones from the garden and placed them on her window ledge, 2 side by side and a third on top of these two. 30 miles and minutes later I got a text saying: “I know you’ve been here, and I understand”.  

To be understood was the greatest present I could have received this Christmas.

woman in a box - short

Nicholas Penny