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