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Yes, I just came back from our own Carnival here in Leeds, tired and smiling… As a friend says, it’s like Notting Hill just better!.. And of course I came back with few photographs to show you as well (please ask written permission for any use)

The history of Leeds West Indian Carnival goes quite back, first initiated in 1967 by a Leeds University student from St Kitts. It was the first Carnival of its kind in Britain.

The Carnival takes places in Chapeltown, a Leeds suburb and centre of the British Afro-Caribbean community, which during the years has experienced a range of social problems and stigma.

It’s probably worth noting here, that until the end of the 60’s racial discrimination in England was institutional and non-white immigrant populations were not allowed to freely participate in the house market.

This was the second time that I visited the Carnival. My pictures and comments from the first time, back in 2001, can be found here in this photo-essay. Back then, I had found it the Carnival of no fun, of hardly anyone smiling… such an ironic contradiction. I was really sceptical, after all, if all this was anything more than a consumerist one-day firework without any real effect in understanding difference and emphasise commonality. I’m not sure how much things have changed. I did feel though that things were more relaxed this time, but maybe for real change we need more time and more work from all of us.

But there was one more reason for my good mood. I found out that ‘Honeydrum’ the music band of some old friends were playing their samba there. Well.. I honestly think that it was one of their best performances including some great dance improvisations!… I do recommend to catch up with them in another festival, you can find more details in their website here.

All images by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved (written permission is required before any use)

I emailed this simple question to an old friend of mine in Athens. With some degree of black humor and mostly silent unuttered pain, I have become witness during the last days -through the media- of the ongoing apocalyptic devastation by fires of my other home-country Greece.

Satellite picture by NASA showing the fires in south Greece © Assoc.Press

The extreme heatwave, strong winds and arsonists are blamed. Over fifty people have died, several villages were burnt or keep burning, many other ones are evacuated. Some of the rarest virgin forests in Europe have disappeared for ever and even the ancient city of Olympia, the world’s cultural heritage, is threatened. The Olympia Museum is on fire at this moment, though other updated news say it was finally saved…

Multiple fire fronts across the country, over 100 at some point, have stretched the ability of the authorities to react effectively, whereas many blame it for a spasmodic and delayed reaction. A nationalwide state of emergency is declared. Help from other EU countries, such as France and Italy, is arriving. Anger, fear and tears. Nothing will be the same when this summer and the thick black smoke is gone.

The unprecedented ecological, cultural and economic devastation might be captured in the photos by the Athens News Agency and the Associated Press, such as this above with Athens’s red smoky sky, or the dramatic pictures which follow below. But how can you capture the effect on people who lost their own people, or all of their livelihood, the consequences for all of us in general? Do we really understand what all this means… My thoughts slowly travel not only to those who were tragically trapped by the fire, but also to some of the perished victims, who as it is said, they had refused to move and abandon their beloved houses, their gardens and animals…

And the battle goes on…

Paris details by Omi Mai © 2007 All rights reserved

© 2007 Christos Stavrou. All rights reserved

em·pa·thy /ˈɛmpəθi/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[em-puh-thee]

–noun

[Origin: 1900–05; < Greek empátheia affection, equiv. to em + path- (base of páschein to suffer)]

<Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/empathy>

What defines our individuality? Should people try to define their difference, an effort that can last a life and more, or copy and paste to survive… So many behaviours promise freedom and a firmly unique personality but do we really enter this social game of life as new players?

Everyone wants a little something.. everyone wants to be liked and loved. It’s so ironical that if you try to be loved in the face of your difference, most possible you’ll end up with a scared face…

I can imagine myself reading by accident all the books found in the living room of my new home and die.

All images © 2007 Christos Stavrou

One of the most interesting links found lately has to be this: DeletedImages: the Junkyard of Art

As it says (in slow and heavy male american movie-screen voice please): “DeletedImages.com brings unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures back to life. So before you delete you [sic] images on your camera. Have another look and start sharing what you would have deleted with the rest of the world.”

Give it a go, how does it feel?

The metaphysical connotations and the contradictory essence of immortalising the ‘already gone’ (how come are these images still called deleted) has its own pleasures. I thought, though, that deleted images accommodate more than “unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures.” So, I do feel that there’s a kind of crypto-fetishism existing there, lying under the ‘bedshits’ of the same, and not a different, mainstream ‘bed of art’. It is, perhaps, somewhere in the sense of creating by investing on destruction, and/or, of creating by admitting, maybe imitating, awe and meaning when these are officially absent…

Talking about beds and fetishism, provides the opportunity for introducing the link to another interesting discussion going on in Alec Soth’s blog and his latest entry: Jump the sandwich, which follows his public assignment calling people to produce photos of women with a sandwich jumping in a bed.. Hmm!?… Explore the comments for some interesting remarks about photography… you won’t be disappointed -I found my deletedimages link there too :)

And for the not so grand-finale.. here’s my latest ‘deleted’ image.. almost a beauty.

If now I had, let’s say, 986 more single pictures of the instances before and after.. and they were all polaroids.. and knew how to manipulate them without computer compositing.. well, then something really cool could have emerged, something like the following video from youtube by Jordan C.Greenhalgh. It was found in another very interesting blog called.. ‘think in pictures‘! Yes same name, but no, no.. we’re not the same.. and I think he writes from the other side of the ocean :)

I could hear music far off and blurry talks of people gathering through my open window. The wind has been so warm these days and brings with it all the sounds from places that I can’t see. They bounce and echo in the empty walls of my room, I’m packing to move.

When the first dark approached, later that evening, I left the tight walls behind me to search for what was going on in the park of my soon-to-be old neighborhood… Hyde Park in Leeds (Saturday 4 August 2007)

(All rights reserved © 2007 Christos Stavrou)

I woke up this morning to find a strange message… “I wish that the twang didn’t exist.. my apologies if you’re a fan!”

The Twang?.. pardon?… Oh yes, this is a new indie band from Birmingham which I had recently photographed, just few months ago, in a gig here in Leeds and then uploaded those pictures online.

It didn’t take long to find out that there’s quite an impressive polarisation going on about this band right now. On one side, raving critiques for what NME describes as “swaggering, big hearted rock’n'roll mischief from Birmingham.” They write songs, Time Out claims, “better, more exciting and fresher [...] than anyone else.” Just check their myspace profile. By the way, they were hailed by NME as Britain’s best new band And were second in BBC News website’s Sound of 2007.

On the other hand, it also seems that something in their music, or their street-smart lyrics and a reputation for rowdiness have created few.. haters for the ‘Brummie lads’ as well. Well, as frontman Phil Etheridge points out in the BBC website “I ain’t going to sing about rivers, man, I don’t live by a river - I live by a canal and there’s bikes in it” and “we just have a laugh, and obviously sometimes that might be a little bit more rowdy than you and your friends having a dinner party, but it’s only done in jest.”

I remember the gig in Leeds quite well (and that’s already a positive remark). It was fun and enjoyed it. Although, I also remember been convinced at some point that my camera and lenses will meet the end of their short life soon… getting baptised in those flying pints of beer in the air by excited party-goers!… Here’s some photos from The Twang at the Faversham, Leeds, 4 March 2007 (© Christos Stavrou. All Rights Reserved)

The passion and energy shown by frontman Phil Etheridge was captivating. I used a telephoto lens and a high 1600 ISO to capture a glimpse of it (© 2007 Christos Stavrou. All Rights Reserved)

Finally, few tips about shooting music concerts from my personal experience:

• Go early to find a suitable place and view-angle
• Use a lens hood to minimise lens flare and also help your precious glass from fingertips, liquids, etc.
• Being polite and co-operative with the stage-crew might offer you the chance to use some otherwise difficult to access spaces and viewpoints
• Use of high ISO will be essential, either in film or digital equipment. Concert pics with their many dark areas and their uneven lighting demand digital cameras with low noise in high ISOs and a rather high dynamic range. It is recommended, of course, to use fast lenses with large maximum aperture (my lenses used above had maximum aperture 2 and 2.8) to gain as much speed as possible.
• Even if, however, you are stuck with slow lenses, (such as many current zoom-lenses) or your camera’s unworkable high ISOs, you can still achieve adequate results by concentrating at your technique: Use a monopod (which is helpful in any case!) and anticipate the artist’s movement, so that you can click at the right posing moment

Hmm.. and something else which might be helpful to film users. There are many good films out there, especially 400 B&W films, which could be exposed in a higher ISO, such as 1600 giving you at least 2 extra stops of speed. Grain and contrast would be of course affected but the results could be very satisfactory. Extra time in the developing stage will be required to compensate for pushing the film. To find out the exact extra time that is to be applied, as well as appropriate agitation techniques, search the internet or ask the manufacturer for initial info. Nevertheless, practice and experimentation is essential, after which you would be able to create your own charts in order to achieve a desired aesthetic and technical result.

William Eugene Smith (1918-1978) expressed without compromise the responsibility of a photographer not to distort the truth. A strong belief that often brought strain in his relationship with editors. In the 1940s he became a war reporter and was so famous about his courage and his dramatic reports were so honest that both the US press and Japanese magazines were publishing them.

On May 22, 1945, during the invasion of Okinawa, he was hit in the face and hand by granade fragments. A fragment passed through his left hand before entering his cheek just below the eye. “I forgot to duck but I got a wonderful shot of those who did… my policy of standing up when the others are down finally caught up with me” he said later in the hospital.

Almost two years and thirty operations after that incident, it was still not certain that he could use a camera again.

“The day I again tried for the first time to make a photograph I could barely load the roll of film into the camera. Yet I was determined that the first photograph would be a contrast to the war photographs and that it would speak an affirmation of life. Thus I took a picture of two children. My children.”

W. Eugene Smith, The walk to Paradise Garden, New York 1946

This image was chosen by Edward Steichen to close the famous exhibition ‘The Family of Man‘

Hi there… again,

thanks for the lovely evening :)
I had a nice white beer (see photo) on the way home and thought that
it’s gonna be a great year

Also to let you know.. that I checked and Barry White is really dead

And you know, about saying that you don’t understand some of my pictures, it is a compliment I guess.. pictures which are easily understood, the same easily are probably erased from our memory.

Aaah.. and the pictures with the skulls.. well.. these are from a specially designed church in a village somewhere in East Europe… Sssssh.. we don’t want many people to know that!

PS: Check the attached photo, one of my favourite beers.. same as tonight.. but in another place another time.. same good.