I have been thinking of reviewing this book for a while now but kept putting it off because I found it very challenging to assimilate my thoughts, and therefore to write something worthwhile about it. As a result of this frustration I have now re-read the book (s) a few times and think I can put my finger on why I personally find this book so difficult, so here we go on Ivan Sigal’s White Road.

I got this book on recommendation from my good friend ‘The Librarian’ Sebastian Song and I have to say that he has an extremely good eye for what is interesting and usually a bit different. When the book(s) arrived we were both stunned by the quality of the packaging and presentation of the work and I have to say that the cardboard boxing and quality of binding and printing by Stiedl is top notch, that is not where the problems lie………………

Inside the marvellous packaging are two books, one of which is a kind of written diary that Sigal kept during the six years or so over which he shot the second, and much larger of the two books while working as a media project designer in Central Asia. The value for money quotient seems high here, however, despite being nicely presented, I find the diary a pretty boring and indulgent read and have never got past the first few pages. That may of course just be my very limited attention span and I would be interested to know if any of my friends who also bought the book have read it cover to cover. On to the main event though, and the black wrapped and very large three hundred and sixty seven page photo book of Sigal’s journey’s and experiences while working and travelling around the Cental Asian region including many of the former Soviet Union states. I will say that again and write it as a number, there are 367 pages, mostly of photographs and I think that is this books single biggest problem, Sigal in my opinion lacks the skill of tight editing (or the firm hand of a publisher) and as a consequence the book is way, way too big to support the content within. For me it should have been a third of this size for, as we shall see there are some very nice photographs inside that get lost in the mediocrity of the rest. I find this a real shame as I wanted so much to really like this book on my first opening and skim.

I always really worry that I come over like some kind of ‘smart Alec’ in these reviews so I am going to do my very best to support my views on this book with examples of what I mean but at the end of the day if you are interested in the book you really need to have a look for yourself.

One of the reasons that the book is so big is that SIgal seems to work scenes in a kind of circular manner and loop back to the original idea. I have a very big problem with this as he does it by using a panoramic camera and then different angles on a theme or idea in standard formats. Here is an example of this using two photos from a set on the theme of some kind of outdoor party.

Here is the first image, and for my money, its one of the few times in the book where he gets close to exploiting the dynamics of the panoramic format. The girl in the centre is beautifully picked out and the frame has edges that help you to stay inside the picture. However that is then followed by this image shot in standard 3:2.

This is a decent photo as well however I simply can’t resolve in my mind why they are both there, and rather than build on each other, I find that they compete and destroy any tension or interest that could be built around the theme.

Here is another similar example although I don’t find the panoramic as interesting as the previous example shot, I have the same issue with the second image simply creating repetition.

What do you think, do these shots build on each other or develop the idea? I will say it again, maybe its just me, but I can’t help but find this confusing and feel that it dilutes the value of interesting scenes.

I did mention the panoramic shots and I have a small number of books in my collection where very good photographers have used this format and its obvious to me that this is an extraordinarily difficult format to harness the potential of and very few succeed completely. Part of the problem it would appear to me is that you either use it as a kind of cinematic tool to create a sense of grand space and vista, or, and this is even harder, you use it in a documentary manner and for that to work you really have to have owl like eyes to fill the frame with interest !!!
Sigal tries to use it in both ways and although he has some beauties, there are a significant number that for me just don’t work and seem to be there only to support this circular idea of showing the same scene in different formats and from slightly different angles and I have already shared my thoughts on that. Here is an example of what I mean where he gets stuck between the vista and documentary approach and satisfies neither.

Look at how redundant and uninteresting the whole left hand side of the frame is and this is exacerbated by the spread across two pages. Here is another example on the same theme and although this is better, I still feel that the width is not exploited properly to create dynamic tension and interest in the photograph.

Okay, I have had my say on that and I can only refer people who want to see what can be done with a panoramic to Ernesto Bazan’s, Isla and many of the shots in Michael Ackerman’s End Time City, although thats a little more hit and miss than Isla. While on the subject of Ernesto I make no apology for saying that I consider him a master photographer and the best teacher I know and one of the most important lessons that I have learned from him is that everything in the frame has to be justified and play its part, it takes only one distracting element, no matter how small to ruin and devalue a picture. I could cry when I look at the following picture that has extraordinary potential yet for me is wrecked by the photographer behind the musicians. It distracts me and grounds the photograph in reality that takes away the mystery and undoubted beauty of the dancer and the whole moment becomes deflated for me as a result. It is my opinion that a great photographer would not have tolerated this and would have edited this one out, or had a better option from moving position, and it is this kind of thing that I believe hurts this book so badly. I will re-iterate what I said at the start, this could have been a very nice book if it was more tightly edited and two-thirds smaller.

Having got all of that criticism out of my system I want to end here on positives about the book and round up with some closing thoughts on what I find is an extremely frustrating book because it fails to reach what could have been its potential. As you can see with the opening photo, there are some extremely good shots in here if you look and I find that at times Sigal gets at something a little bit special.

I really like this photo for its simplicity and although its not panoramic, it shows that Sigal understands the vista and documentary dynamic but sadly doesn’t show it often enough for my liking. Here is another of my favourites from the book and, along with the opening shot, there are a number of times that Sigal hints at what could have been done here by creating a much more interesting and less obvious selection of shots for the publication.

I want to wrap this up now because I am getting a gnawing feeling that I have been too hard on Sigal and his book. I hope you don’t get bored by me saying this, but I selfishly write these posts to try to educate myself and, for better or worse, I have achieved my personal goal with this review and feel that I learned an enormous amount from looking really closely at the individual shots, structure, editing and sequencing of the work, and that is what I have tried to share here.

Right, lets get out of this and look at this weeks favourite photo(s) which has a neat little story behind its choice, and what was also turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me. It’s the cover of Tom Waits famous Raindogs album and the shot is by Anders Petersen.

Anders Petersen

About six months ago I was talking to my friend Harald Helle who is a very keen photographer from Australia and I happened to tell him that I really like Anders work and a chance had come up to go to a workshop with him in Italy. Without hesitation Harald immediately piped up that I should get a copy of Tom Waits Raindogs album for him to sign as it had a shot from his Cafe Lehmitz series on the front cover. That’s exactly what I did and, as you can see, Anders gracefully signed the cover for me and explained the photo which was of two of the people that he photographed a lot in the bar. He explained that the guy in the photo was very much in love with the girl but that she was not quite so interested and she sometimes got pissed off at Anders for taking so many photos. I think if you take a little time to look at the photo you will get a sense of that dynamic and the expression of the guy is wonderful as he nestles in his hearts content yet the girls laugh seems to diminish him. Somehow this photo is very defining of the classic Cafe Lehmitz work which is shot entirely in the cafe and a couple of bars nearby, and you can feel the authentic boozy carelessness that Anders captures so well and I guess thats why Tom Waits liked it as an image to support his music.

The pleasant surprise that I mentioned came when Anders pointed out that the rear cover was shot by Robert Frank and that he was in great company. In fairness the rear cover is nothing more than a nice shot of Tom Waits but I found that a fascinating piece of historical value and it has added to my sense of enjoyment of the whole album. Just to finish off the surprises, in that strange Sebaldesque (I think I just invented a new word) way of things, the title track is called Singapore.

Colin Steel, Sunday 14th September, Glasgow

I thought it would be nice to go for a change of pace this weekend and talk about a lovely little book that is a seductive blend of poetry and photography by the Russian movie director Andrey Tarkovsky. The book itself is called Instant Light, Tarkovsky Polaroids and, as is obvious, it contains polaroids shot by Tarkovsky in his later life. What makes it really come alive though is the blending of the small polaroid photographs with poetic musings, touching comments and delightful prose by Tarkovsky himself.

Instant Light, Tarkovsky Polaroids

“Extraordinary….photographs in which the organisation of colour and light can only be matched by painters as precise as Vermeer. This is a real gem of a book” so says the quote from The Guardian newspaper on the inside cover leaf. I am not so sure about that to be honest but what intrigues me is that many of the sixty featured polaroids give me a similar feeling and sense of timelessness that I get when I watch his movies and this is especially so with the shots that are matched to the wonderful poetry and comments, that’s what makes the book so special to me.

I want to use this short article to try to bring out some of that sensibility of the search for spirituality and understanding that for me lies at the heart of Tarkovsky’s work and I will use the poetry with my selected shots although not necessarily following the book exactly. I hope that you will grant me this liberty.

“An image is an impression of the truth, which God has allowed us to glimpse with our sightless eyes”

As you would expect for a master film director, Tarkovsky has an unerring eye for light and form but I don’t think that’s enough in its own right otherwise we would just see interesting shapes. These small images go way beyond that and probe at something much deeper in our sensibilities. If I can recall correctly, when asked ‘what is art, Andrey?’ he immediately replied something like, ‘that is the wrong question, before that you have to ask what is the purpose of life’ he then went on to explain that he saw art as providing glimpses of spirituality, and truth in this imperfect world. I come adrift from him a little bit with this but thats for another article, for now its sufficient to say that Tarkovsky used his art as a framework for others to super-impose their realities and as some kind of sensory map in the spiritual search for purpose and meaning (please don’t confuse spirituality for religion although religious overtones and imagery are used extensively in Tarkovsky’s work)

‘I dreamt of the quiet monastery cloister
with its enormous ancient oak tree
Suddenly I became aware of a flame rising up
at a point among the roots,
and I realise that it is the flame
of many candles burning
in the secret underground recesses of the monastery
Two frightened nuns arrive.
Then the flame leaps high,
and I see that by now its too late
to put out the fire - almost all the roots
have become burning embers.
I am deeply saddened by this,
and I try to imagine
what the cloister will be like
without the oak tree:
it will be useless, meaningless, miserable.

Anyone familiar with Tarkovsky will know that he was extremely economical with his output and only made a handful of movies in his lifetime. Some of that in his early days was certainly down to the obstacles put in his way by the Russian authorities but I am also very fond of this seemingly innoucous little quote that for me explains a lot and is a good piece of wisdom for us as practicing photographers:

How does a project mature?
It is obviously a most mysterious,
imperceptible process.
It carries on independently of ourselves,
in the subconscious,
crystallising on the walls of the soul
that makes it unique,
indeed only the soul decides
the hidden ‘gestation period’ of that image
which cannot be perceived
by the conscious gaze.

I would strongly urge my photography friends to read and re-read this quote as I believe it contains a very simple but profound message.

It seems to me that what makes everything, and I mean every thing that Tarkovsky creates, says or writes, so critically important is that his whole life is about human spirituality, it is at the centre of his thinking and expression and that is what makes him so unique. Never once is humanity and spirituality secondary to anything else in Tarkovsky’s films, photographs or writings and that is what gives them an enduring power. Too often in this world we are bombarded with superficially exciting and stimulating music, imagery and text, almost always orientated on short term gratification and lacking any real sense of enduring ideas. Why is it in photographic terms that there are certain photographers that endure and their work can be looked at again and again? I personally believe that its because they are not interested in instant gratification, sensationalism or even personal fame, what drives them is their humanity and the need to express their search for human spirituality. I am going to take a chance here so please respect that this is only my personal opinion, many will disagree, but one good example of this was my recent visit to Salgado’s Genesis exhibition in Singapore. Make no mistake, this is grand scale stuff, heavily promoted, beautifully presented with hundreds of stunningly framed prints and all on the laudable theme of the preciousness of the earth and human culture. What was I left thinking after walking around the exhibition……..I can’t remember, I was bored with the sensory overload and had no sense of wonder, did not feel at any time that Salgado was trying to show me some humanistic, spiritual insight, instead I felt he was continually trying to show off with his technical expertise. I wouldn’t trade that whole experience with five minutes of Kind of Blue or a flick through a Nakahira book or ten seconds with a Rothko and I believe the reason for this is very simple, they don’t ‘show off’, they are not in the least concerned with ‘how good they are’ , they are not even that concerned with whether I ‘like’ what they have created or not, they are driven by an intense internal, soulful desire to give a glimpse of something that they know is there but ‘cannot be perceived by the conscious gaze’.

Devoid of spirituality,
art carries its own tragedy within it.
For even to recognise the spiritual vacuum
of the times in which he lives,
the artist must have specific qualities
of wisdom and understanding.
The true artist always serves immortality,
striving to immortalise the work
and man within the world.

I want to finish this look at Tarkovsky’s Polaroids with a little personal story. I was recently in the very beautiful town of San Quirico D’Orcia in Tuscany and one day while sitting in a local cafe with my friends Monia, Marieangela and Luciano we got around to talking about photographic influences and I had mentioned Tarkovsky when a local man said that he knew him and had helped him when he was filming Nostalghia nearby. Shocked at this incredible news I asked if we could go to see the places where the scenes were shot and a lovely local teacher, Sabrina offered to take us so I spent some time at the natural spring spa of Bagno Vignoni where many of the films crucial scenes were shot. I would love to be able to say that I found this to be an incredible, evocative experience but I didn’t. Without the magic of Tarkovsky’s insights and creative touch I just saw a very nice hot spring spa that didn’t have any of the emotional experience I had been hoping for and therein hopefully lies the lesson.

I will be eternally grateful to Sabrina for her kindness in taking the time to drive us around the locations and I will close with Tarkovsky’s shot from Bagno Vignoni and reiteration that this is not what I saw with my conscious gaze……………

Takuma Nakahira

As with last week I wanted to finish with a look at a favourite photo and this week its a reasonably well known one from Nakahira’s ‘For a Language to Come’ book.

Firstly, apologies for the poor quality of my snap of this classic, I couldn’t get rid of the glare from my window but I don’t think that would have troubled Nakahira in the least !!! The photo showcased this week is one that’s usually chosen in magazines or books when there is any discussion or review of his work and I think thats because on the surface its one of his most accessible shots. This I believe does it an injustice in a way because I think there is a lot more depth to it than it is usually credited with. Initially, I suppose its a most unusual composition for Nakahira in that its almost conventional with the two girls and the third sun face on the towel to add secondary interest. When you start to study the photo more deeply though there are a few things that begin to become more interesting. The photo itself dates from I think 1970 and it has that nice feel to it in the clothing and look but what starts to interest me most is the postures, expressions and tension between the two girls, one in a revealing bikini (remember this is 70’s Japan) and the other rather more heavily clothed and covered. This more demure looking girl also has a somewhat more uncomfortable looking posture and you can’t help but be struck by the shape of the right hand and the meaning of that gesture. The girl on the left looks more liberated (remember this is 70’s Japan) but at the same time a little conscious of the risks that might come with that. I really love the hair and the fact that the eyes are in shadow it all adds to the mysteriousness. Even the little face on the towel looks a little unsure of himself and seems to have self doubts about his radiance and that is the overall feeling I get from the photo, no one is entirely confident with whats going on here and there seems to be a metaphor of 70’s Japan at play here in the struggle between more conservative values, modernisation and liberalisation and the search for identity. Its this final point that really allows me to use my imagination, I am never sure if the girls have been arguing, if the girl on the right is trying to reason and reconcile with the other girl or if they are at odds with each other and the overriding sexual tension is never far away.

If I was to pick a photo-book that defines Japan in the 70’s For a Language to Come would be it and if I was asked to chose a single image representation of that time then I would probably go for this one with its seductive ability to create imaginative possibilities. I don’t want to lock the photo into the 70’s though as many of its themes of age, liberalisation, relationship and sexuality are timeless and I think that is one reason that it still appears to me as contemporary now as it was when Nakahira pressed the shutter on it in 1970.

Colin Steel, Sunday 7th September 2014, Singapore.

I really enjoyed writing last weeks post on emerging Japanese photographers and the contrasts in their work so I thought I would take the theme a step further this week with a titanic contrast; we are talking East v West, big v small and lavish v modest, along with some more subtle contrasts of approach that I hope to bring out in the writings. The two books being looked at are Katy Grannan’s ‘The Ninety Nine’ and Maika Elan’s ‘The Pink Choice’. I chose these particular books because they both deal with people on the fringes, but as we shall see, in a very different way. Just to further spice things up I have also decided to do a very short weekly closing section focusing on one of my favourite photos, and this weeks is a very beautiful photograph by Ernesto Bazan.

Without further ado, fire up some of your favourite Sunday music ( I am on Bill Evans of course) grab a coffee and lets go.

Katy Grannan, The Nine and the Ninety Nine

The book(s) being looked at here came to me by way of a recommendation and the set actually consists of two separate books, one a black and white environmental landscape type publication, and the second a set of colour portraits of ‘Skid Row’ type people all taken I believe in South 9th street in Modesto California. Both books are pretty large scale and come beautifully packaged in a white sleeve with cutouts where the 9 becomes 99 and there is an embossed third nine whose only purpose seems to be to make the numbers look like 666 when turned upside down, ahmmmm……………..

Anyway, that aspect of the presentation aside, make no mistake this is a seriously lavish and large coffee table style book and I am sure that many of these will be adorning San Fransico lounges. I get the sense that the intent of the book is more salon style and based around selling prints as its also published by a couple of galleries and that gives it a catalogue feel which I don’t think is a good thing for a photo book. Let’s look at the books though and for simplicities sake I will start with the black and white ‘The Nine’

This is going to be completely unfair I know but I am going to say it anyway, the current benchmark for me in American urban landscape photography is the very beautiful ‘She Dances on Jackson’ by Vanessa Winship, and there are a number of extremely good reasons why I believe that to be the case and many of Katy’s photographs highlight that very well for me. Too often Katy resorts to the lone figure from behind, perfectly positioned in the frame, pleasing on the eye, sure, intriguing, evocative, erie, wistful, timeless, mysterious and striking at your subconscious, no, not at all.

Its the same for me with the above photo, I can see a gorgeous shot here without the person talking on the mobile phone, all of the ingredients are there. I know that Katy’s intent was to show the environment that the people she is focusing on live in and then show them in portrait in the other book, but I personally believe she would have achieved that so much better by removing the people and inferring the human presence as Winship does in her non-portrait shots. This creates a completely different platform for the introduction of people in the portrait shots. Having said that, there are a couple of these urban shots that do work very well and I just wish that there were more of this quality and also that she had developed these in the colour portrait book. Here is a very good example of this where the human presence does make the photo for me and I find myself wanting to know more.

I also have a problem with the structure of the book and the two thirds spread of the photos across the pages. It shows the grand scale well but I keep feeling uncomfortable with the break points in the spread. I guess that some of these shots, like the one above would look stunning in large scale prints and maybe that is where they are at there best. to bring the ‘Nine’ part of the review to a close, I should say that, along with the previous shot there is one other that works particularly well with Katy’s themes and its the following photo which I also think is a good point to leave the book on. Incidentally, there are a few very nice full landscape shots in the book that seem completely unrelated to the themes at play and again, I can only assume that there inclusion is to help showcase them for print sales.

On then to the ‘Ninety Nine’ which is the colour portraits accompaniment to the urban landscape ‘Nine’ again, all shot it would appear in an edgy area of Modesto around 9th Street. I feel compelled to say that shooting this kind of subject matter has become pretty commonplace and it therefore has to have something special to lift it above the classics on this theme and I am afraid that, for the most part, this work really fails to do that.

Time after time I found the slightly bleachy looking photos shot in hard light (I think this is a kind of trademark of Katy’s) very uninteresting, uninspiring and in many cases, cliched. They might give some wealthy Californians some feeling of being close to down and out edginess but for me, its the equivalent experience of looking at animals in a zoo. They can’t hurt you and you get utterly no insight or sense of their real lives, thoughts, fears or longings.

And then, out of the blue come the following two stunning photographs that show the potential of what could have been achieved here. Here is the first one and just compare it to the previous two shots that I showed.

For me there is an obvious depth and mystery to these portraits that is completely absent in the others. Like in the landscape shots that work, I find myself intrigued and have a desire to know more. Here is what I think is the most important observation that I think I can make about Katy’s work and that is that in most of her shots I can sense a camera, I can feel the shot being composed and structured whereas in these two I don’t and my mind is free to imagine the realities that may or may not exist in this place.

I am very fond of these two photographs and I found myself repeatedly returning to them as I read the books and I think that’s a sure sign of their success from my own personal viewpoints. I don’t want to draw any conclusions about Katy’s book at this point as part of my purpose here was to develop the theme of contrasts so here we go with Mika’s book.

Maika Elan, The Pink Choice

I bought this book from my friend Kevin at IPA where he has a nice selection of Asian books for purchase. Many of these are self-published and hard to get so have a look and see if there is anything that interests you. Maika is a very popular and respected photographer in her home country Vietnam and she is now becoming better known on a bigger stage.

The book itself as you can see is a little complex in its delicate packaging with a nice string and brown paper wrapping. This looks great but in practice I find that its very tricky to reassemble and I found it a bit of a challenge to return the book to the sleeve in particular. I also found the concept of the postcard type prints a little weird but its entirely possible that I am missing something in the intent behind this. For me it adds nothing to it as a book other than to make me worried that the perforations are going to break and one of the individual photos will fall out. All very fragile and delicate and I am guessing that this is that actual intent to support the theme of the work. Enough about the physical structure, lets look at the content and contrast it with the previous book of Katy’s.

It soon becomes obvious that, just as Katy used harshness of light and processing to support her themes, then Maika uses softness and I find a big difference here in that the colour choices actually support the work much better than Katy’s which tended towards bringing out the wrinkled and haggard skin tones only. Maika’s subject matter is also fringe based and is focused on gay people in Vietnam and I understand that they are normally portrayed in the Vietnamese media as faceless, garish and often as guilty of some criminal offence. Maika it would seem wants to show that is far from being the case and these are very normal people with real personalities and lives. This lies at the heart of the contrast that I wanted to explore here, both are fringe people themes but I never understood what Katy wanted me to know or feel through her photographs whereas I do with Maika and for me, she really succeeds in showing that these people are real, they do have lives that are not as they are stereotypically shown and as a double benefit, she does that in a photographically and artistically satisfying way.

Sure, some of the shots have a ‘staged’ feel to them but I didn’t find it objectionable and even in these shots I found myself intrigued by the composition and context as opposed to simply being aware of it. As in Katy’s work, in all of the photos the subjects are aware of the photographer but Maika manages to suspend that awareness where I don’t think Katy achieved that very often. I get a real sense that the relationship that Maika had with her subjects was completely different and much deeper and that shows in the work.

As in Katy’s book, there are a couple of real stand out shots in this book and its important to say that there is nothing exotic or contrived about the subject matter or environment of these shots, these are just the mark of a very good photographer at work.

I think its obvious by now that Maika has not sensationalised her subjects in any way and the sexuality is always present but never exploited. She has for my money (and it is my money, which makes me feel entitled to critique these books) used good photographic artistry and technique to really empathise with the her subjects and develop her themes. There is an undoubted female delicacy at work here and it would be interesting to see a somewhat different and harder male view at some point to counterbalance this but all in all I find this a delightful little book that succeeds in spite of the unnecessary complexity and trickiness of its packaging.

Ok, I hope you managed to stay with me on this and of course this is only my opinion and it may be fundamentally flawed by how little I know about either of these artists. I have a very simplistic approach to the books that I buy though and that is that its the books and content that I look at only, what I may or may not know about the artist is irrelevant and the material has to succeed in its own right.

Now that I have that out of the way I am probably going to be completely unkind to Katy here but I want to give my honest opinion. I feel that when I look at her book I see coffee tables, designer lounges and beautifully presented prints in expensive galleries. I was never clear though on what she wanted me to feel or imagine when I looked at her work, I just saw something lavishly packaged to sell. So for me the book(s) don’t work by what I look for from a good photo book, despite having some extraordinarily good shots inside which only lead to compound my frustration with what this might have been. As I said, I saw this as a review based on contrasts that I found personally interesting, and, despite some rather obvious flaws in its design, I think that Maika’s little book is infinitely more successful as a photo book. Her subject matter is thoughtfully and sympathetically explored and I very rarely felt that any of it was contrived to make a point. Having said that, for my personal tastes it didn’t take me into any fantastically new territory either but it did work as an interesting and worthwhile purchase. At the end of the day this is just my view and like everything in life its better you make up your own minds on these things, I am simply commenting from my point of view and trying to raise awareness.

As I said at the beginning, I want to finish this week with a look at a favourite photo and this week its a portrait from Al Campo by Ernesto Bazan

Some people who know my own photography may find this a surprising and interesting choice, people who know me well won’t be at all surprised. One of the reasons I write this blog, and believe me it takes me ages every week, is to educate myself by being more explicit in understanding photography and developing and deepening my own knowledge. I often look at this photograph and I really had no clear understanding of why. Al Campo is a book full of lovely, interesting photographs on the loose theme of the Cuban countryside but that is, I believe in my mind, about the true beauty of Cuba and its people, the real heart of the place. So why this particular photo, let me try to explain as best I can.

Ernesto Bazan is a fantastic documentary photographer with a real humanistic touch. For me he has done for Cuba what Robert Frank did for the US with his ‘Americans’ book, he has shown the reality of its people in an artistic and realistic way without resorting to sensationalism and all of the time there is the very real depth that comes from truly caring about people and that is what sets Frank apart for me as well. The reason I say this is that I truly believe that Ernesto cares very deeply about the people he photographs and this shows in the images. So when I look at this image I think the heart of its attraction to me lies in the fact that Ernesto has created something universally beautiful and that the photograph is a framework for my lifetimes experiences and memories. I see my mother, I see my grandmother, I see beauty despite age, I see a desperate longing to hold onto beauty, I see an utterly clear link between beauty and nature, I see timelessness, I see the cycle of everything, I see dignity, I see that all things must pass and I could go on here for a very long time but I hope you get my point. This is what sets the very best photography apart for me, rather than close you down into what the photographer wants you to see in the frame, the truly great photographer bursts you out of the frame into a world of imagination. That is why this photograph is so special to me.

Lastly this week, thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond to me on these musings, I am delighted if only even one or two people take something from one of these articles, that is success for me.

Colin Steel, Sunday 31st August, Singapore