Happy New Year...introducing Hunt the Pickle

Wow. What a fantastic Christmas game this is and I'm only sorry I haven't posted it sooner. My brother's delightful American paramour Jess joined us for Christmas week, and introduced this tradition to us. You pin a pickle-shaped ornament somewhere in the branches of your tree. Then you all look for it. The first one to find the pickle gets a special prize. Apparently it's a tradition of German-Americans but Jess does admit that she hasn't met any actual Germans who know anything about it. Well folks, lucky me - I was the winner of the 2010 Leedale Pickle Hunt. I think that actually it's fair enough that I won since the prize was some glittery, kitsch-beyond-kitsch Christmas decorations in the shape of American junk food. Hurray! 

Top-bottom, l-r: milkshake, hamburger, hotdog, Philly cheese steak [? not sure about this one],  pretzel,  French fries, pizza, popcorn. God Bless America.

The pickle! 

I hope you've all had a wonderful 2010 and that 2011 proves to be happy, healthy, and productive!

Y Only Life Line

Queen Anne's Lace and signs by the river at Marlow.

Walking in a winter wonderland...

Christmas Day in Berkshire rose sunny and white, crisp, clear and beautiful. We walked along the river and fed the ducks while I forced everyone to pose for me so I could try out the new lens Father Christmas brought for me...

Josh gives it his best Blue Steel.

Birthday lights

Happy Christmas everyone!

Villains

This weekend I shot publicity photos for the Italian run of a cabaret show called 'Villains' - at the Teatro Palladium in Rome, running the 1st and 2nd of February. The two 'gentiluomini' in question are Mr Pustra and Joe Black - you may recognise both likely lads from a previous shoot I did with them for The Cabaret Project. Sadly I'm once again under embargo, but I'll share with you a couple of shots from around the studio.

Part of the incredible costumes created by Lenka Padysokova.

Vernon God Little at the Young Vic

This morning I hauled a full lighting kit over to the Young Vic theatre, near Waterloo. I was asked to shoot some images of the newly-cast Joe Drake, who'll be playing the protagonist in the theatre's revival of their smash-hit adaptation of DBC Pierre's novel Vernon God Little. It was a super-small time frame, and Joe was a lovely chap and a trouper. We whipped through a few set-ups in no time at all. They'll be used for press and publicity for the show as it gets nearer the run (opening end of January). Unfortunately, because they're for press I can't share the pictures of Joe's lovely face with you just yet. To whet your appetite, though, here's the Young Vic's lovely Press and PR Manager, Laura, who was acting as my lighting test bunny!

Laura's one of the most stylish people I know...

A very pretty Christmas!

I love Christmas and it's mostly because of the sparkling decorations helping keep the dark and cold at bay. We were decorating the flat this evening, and I'm sure I documented more of the pretty lights than I helped hang baubles! Lisa (my crafty flatmate and the author of the Hawk and Fallow blog) and I have done a splendid job I think and there'll be more photos to come over the days. (Thanks for the lovely bokeh, Canon!)

Village East

Eating dinner at Village East with my mum, my aunt, and my boyfriend. I was recovering from a stomach bug so no steak bearnaise for me but did find the strength to lift my camera.

Yellow Earth theatre

Yellow Earth are a company making work based on East Asian traditions of theatre. They're producing a show that will tour early next year around the celebrations for Chinese New Year. The show is called 'Why the Lion Danced' and features a fantastic traditional Chinese lion costume. This thing was incredible - glitter, rabbit fur, neon paint, foiling, and best of all, little slippers with red lame 'claws'. On Tuesday I headed over to Chinatown to take some photos for press and publicity. 

Details from the Yellow Earth offices - I love those waving cats.

Director Kimiko Mendl in conversation with performer Olly (aka the front end!) 

Detail of the head part of the costume

One of the really interesting things was the way that passersby interacted with the whole thing: they stopped to take photos and have photos of themselves taken with the lion, and one man who was delivering boxes of supplies to the restaurants kept shouting out the music which is traditionally played as part of the Lion Dance and shouting 'get moving, get moving'.

My favourite shot - the background is desaturated so that the lion really 'pops'.

Walking

can be meditative. Patterns appear and disappear throughout the landscape. Snow becomes a medium for messages. 

A bower-bird, bric-a-brac nest

I love the poetry of Marianne Moore - acerbic and erudite, she connects the minutiae of everyday life with swooping tides of human history and experience. A recurring theme is her punctuation of that unending ocean with objects both familiar and elevated to pure symbol. Glass bottles, vases, train tracks, palomino ponies, pine cones...somehow the lives of emperors are contained in these dusty poetic antiques.


Nowhere is this more obvious than in her poem 'No Swan So Fine...' in which the swan in question is both the iconoclastic king-slaying power of the common man, but also, literally 'the chintz china one with fawn-/brown eyes and toothed gold/collar on...'


Ted Hughes wrote of visiting Moore in her New York apartment,'her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest'. Ever since reading Moore's poems I cannot pass a junk shop or antiques market in quite the same way. All the objects there seem laden with significance, reverberating with their own and others' stories.


In light of that here are some other images taken at Bermondsey Antiques Market.