2019 Review Part 2

So, Part 2 of my look back at how 2019 panned out.
Part 1 is HERE

Let’s get straight into it…..

July

My friend Elliot Smith and I shot an interview for DPA with someone that used to be famous and relevant. He was unpleasant.
(And before you say it, this is a shot of the B-cam and that on camera mic is there for scratch only, he was boom and lav mic-d into the A-cam)

Some days it was actually warm and sunny, on those days I went out to enjoy the flowers like some kind of hippy.

I found my brother’s old 5″ retro 80’s B/W TV whilst perusing rarely ventured into cupboards and decided that working out how to connect it to my desktop PC as a third monitor would be a good plan.
It kind of was….(blog post)

I made a little animation for Documentally who was swanning around Europe on a motorbike (I was jealous).

It was really lovely to see my cousin (Professor) Craig after 20 ish years and finally meet his wife Kizzie & Wibert of course.

August

I was at Storm HD in London with Martin Cooper to watch Paul Ingvarsson grade eL Seed‘s film “Perception” that Martin cut, and to work on the TV edit of Traces Of The Soul.

I was in a decommissioned USAF hanger. It was pretty cool.

Oops, I bought another Russian lens…….

Chiharu Gotoh and I visited Kew Gardens, it was bloody wonderful

Perhaps related, my houseplant obsession was also getting a bit out of hand

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In triplicate. #stopsign

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Some things needed repeating

September

I was in Lviv, Ukraine with the lovely Ben from Duckrabbit shooting a film for World Jewish Relief.
I have a ton of photos but I’m not allowed to publish them or write about the trip until the film comes out next year. Watch this space.
If I’m asked about it I use the word “Harrowing”. It’s not often an interview makes me cry.
200,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv during World War II.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from whose name the word Masochism was derived was born in Lviv. Make of that what you will.

Thanks to Copytrack I won a £3000 copyright infringement case against GQ Taiwan and Conde Nast for stealing photos from my Let The Poets…. series.
It wouldn’t be the only case I’d win for copyright infringement this year.
Just the photos from that series alone have been stolen 1770 times (!!!!) according to Copytracks reverse image search and more turn up on a weekly basis.
I really should write a blog post just about that.

Other stuff happened too but it all seemed a bit vacuous after the Lviv trip.

October

Girton College Garden

I was filming with the fabulous Ben from Duckrabbit again ( It was less harrowing this time ), at Cambridge University (again) for the Women At Cambridge exhibition.

A flight in a 2 seater plane made in 1951 to check an engine repair with a pilot in his late 70’s and no parachute? Er…….
Well, when the pilot is Dave Fradley an ex RAF flight trainer (amongst other things) with over 17,000 flight hours (about 2 years!) and it’s a lovely sunny day autumn day in Cambridgeshire, hell yes!!!

I finally got round to the terrarium build I’d been planning for months, I think it turned out damn cool.
I have to thank SerpaDesign on youtube without whom the build would not have been possible.

I got some nerdy new RGB and CMYK Reutersvard Triangle tattoos.

November

I was shooting with that legendary rock photographer and one of my favorite drinking pals Steve Gullick for something I don’t want to talk about…. yet.

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In the woods….. #Helios40 #autumn

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I still wasn’t bored of THAT lens.

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November

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The weather could fuck off tho

There was plenty else that could fuck off too

December

I started shooting a project that will last into next year at Somerset House in London for Thomann Hanry and This Is Crowd

Had a tattoo I’d been meaning to get for a while, based on a drawing from 1910

Dec 12th Election……FFS :(
13.8 million people voted for the most right-wing government I’ve ever seen in the UK (and I grew up in the Thatcher years) and arguably the greatest threat to our public services and ability to restrain the capitalist death machine since World War II.
10.2 million voted for Labour,
Yet we still end up with a parliamentary majority for the Eton fucktards that mocks those figures and tells us (if we were in any doubt) that the first past the post system of what we laughably still dare call “democracy” is fundamentally and irreparably broken.
I’m as scared as I’ve ever been for what this means for the UK, 9 years of Austerity has been bad for so many in this society, I dread to think what it’s going to look like after 5 more years of Tory rule.

It was the Middle Eastern Carpenters’ birthday which was nice.
I forgot to message some people I should have, sorry about that.

And that ladies and gentlemen (Who am I kidding, no one made it this far) was a selective recap of my 2019.

Thank you to all the clients who trusted me to make the best work I could for them this year.
Thanks to all my friends for tempering my madness and being (for the most part) lovely.
Thanks to my wife for putting up with me.
Thanks to my Dad, still a better man than me.

See you all in 2020.

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