One of the perennial struggles of being a self-employed photographer and artist is trying to balance artwork with earning regular income (and as you can probably tell from the frequency of updates so far this year, I’ve had a little bother with this balance). Earlier in the year I saw an Open Call which called for an ‘artistic intervention in your workspace’ which would have neatly allowed me to combine the two. As it happened, I sacrificed one of my days-off from said day job to go into work anyway and shoot the pics, but still felt guilty that I should have been in there working instead (because another of my perrenial difficulties is leaving the job at the door when I go home, even on my days off). As if to make up for this personal angst and possible deep-seated psychological problems though, I ended up missing the open call because I spent so long trying to find time to combine editing the pics with the day job, I thusly missed the deadline.
For the sake therefore of having something to post on this blog then, and to make sure it wasn’t entirely wasted effort, here are the pics from the project which was provisionally titled “Café Culture” (because I couldnt think of anything less cliche when I was typing up the blog)
The Concept
As can be seen, this was an attempt to find something to do with some of the old Britannia Model Village figures which had been gathering dust for some time (pretty much everything else from the project is gone now). In recent years a lot of photographers seem to have done projects using little figures, usually shop-bought ones in HO scale which are bought ready painted, and they pose them out in streets, with food, etc. In this case, I thought there would be opportunity for doing something with the larger (1/32nd) figures from the BMV, and slightly Project Britannia in tone too. A selection of figures were chosen, repainted or repaired where required, and then the shoot was undertaken one sunny morning...
Ironically, about a week after this shot was taken, we really did manage to set off the smoke alarms with the toaster, resulting in the arrival of the fire brigade. Still, at least we know the smoke alarms still work…
Yes, horses do not belong in cafes, and this was taken about 2 days before the horse-meat scandal broke, lending this shot a certain irony.
A couple of shots which are rather more “Britannia” in tone…
In related news, a couple of pics from the “Intercity” series will be on display in Sheffield soon, at Cupola Contemporary Art. More in a future blog entry…
