Thursday 16 December 2010

Look11 Website Launched



At last, after two-and-a-half years of thinking, dreaming, organising and unstinting effort, Look11, Liverpool's first international photography festival is born. On the web at least.

The launch of the festival's superb new interactive website took place last night at a packed 3345, one of the city's coolest bars. The website will be the platform and forum in the lead up to the festival's opening on 12th May next year. Look11 will feature exhibitions, workshops, mass-participation events, community engagement projects and much, much more. It will also play host to the third National Photography Symposium, run by Redeye, the photography network in the North West of England.

The programme for the festival is being finalised by the staff, led by Artistic Director Stephen Snoddy, supported by Festival Manager Daniel Cutmore and a host of volunteers and interested people. We have been engaged with key partners for over two years to get to the point where all the major city institutions are behind the festival and will contribute to what will - hopefully - be a successful first festival.

If you are wondering why I am standing in the middle of the photograph grinning, it's not because I have just won first prize in the raffle, but as Chair of the Board of Directors of Look11 I was obliged to say a few words. Thankfully for the assembled crowd (which numbered over 100) I kept it brief. Just time to say a big thank you to everyone involved in the festival, including Loaf Creative who developed the branding and website, Stephen, Daniel and the team at Look11 and my fellow Board members whose unstinting hard work, support and belief in the project has carried us forward to this point. And to thank the major funders who have allowed us the opportunity to take the project on.

Our hope and aspiration is that the photographic community of the Liverpool city region and beyond will embrace the festival and its theme: asking whether photography is a call to action and engage in a debate around themes of social justice and whether photography can and should make a difference in changing our world for the better.

Whatever your relationship to photography the festival would love to hear from you. It's your festival, not ours and as I said last night: Liverpool used to do three things really well: photography, festivals and football. At least we still do two things well. Shame about the football!

See you all in May!

Sunday 12 December 2010

Death of a Friend


It is with great sadness that I heard this morning of the death of Walter Davidson, salmon net fisherman from the south-west of Scotland and chairman of the Salmon Net Fishing Association of Scotland which represents the small band of men who still fish for salmon using traditional methods in the rivers and estuaries around the country.

I first encountered Walter in 2003 when I spent time with him at his fishing station at Creetown on the Solway Firth. He was warm and open and generous with his time. I made a series of images of Walter which were subsequently published in the first edition of Coast magazine. Walter would liken my visit to one he received from the legendary photographer Werner Kissling, who had encountered Walter in the early 1960s when travelling around Scotland gathering material for the School of Scottish Studies.

Walter was steeped in the history of salmon netting: his great-grandfather had introduced the practice of using stake nets on the Solway when he relocated from Montrose in the mid-19th century.

I last saw Walter only a month ago in Portsoy at the Association's annual gathering (see previous post). He was full of the gentle, understated humour which was his trademark. In his distinctive Galloway accent he gently chided me about the inclusion on the Association's new website of a photograph I took of the interior of his bothy, where he lived during the week in the fishing season and which showed his washing strung up to dry. I think his slight embarrassment at the scene was tinged with a pride that his life was being documented by someone with an interest in salmon fishing.

Walter's untimely death will leave a void in his family, his local community around Dalbeattie and will be a blow to the Association. My thoughts are with them all.

To see more images from Walter Davidson's fishery, please visit http://colinmcpherson.photoshelter.com/gallery/Scotlands-Salmon-Netsmen-mono/G0000IFcgnV925os/P0000QI4jtfd31nE

Thursday 9 December 2010

Buy this for Christmas!


Never mind Shane MacGowan and three Irish priests. Never mind dreary re-runs of previous Christmas number ones. Who wants more Merry-bloody-Christmas Everybody screaming at you when we can have... 'Silent Night" by Caroline England and Marcus Alman?

Buy it for yourself, buy it for a relative, buy it for a friend and enjoy a soft and sympathetic rendition of a timeless classic that will truly put you in the Yuletide spirit.

Available from all good downloads sites, especially iTunes.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/silent-night-single/id409044660

Wednesday 17 November 2010

Hoylake Handover


Yesterday evening I was delighted to be able to drop into the Wednesday Special Needs Club at the Hoylake Community Centre and present organisers Carla Williams and Pete Drew with a cheque for £310 - the money I raised by competing in the Hoylake 10k in September.

The club is going from strength-to-strength and has record 68 members at present. The centrepiece of the club is the wonderful sensory play area and Carla explained that they have done much to improve the environment for the members in the last year, such as installing new windows in the Victorian-era building and putting in an air-conditioning system, very necessary for the Summer months.

The money donated to the WSNC amounts to half the total raised doing the race. The other half is earmarked for a project to do with Musa's family in Swaziland. I hope to be able to report on an exciting development shortly....

In the meantime, Carla asked me to express her gratitude, as I do, to all of you who supported me in this year's 10k, and she also informed me that next year's race will be on September 18th, so I'd better dig out my trainers soon!

For more information about the WSNC, please visit http://www.wsnc.co.uk/

Thursday 11 November 2010

Salmon Netters Annual Gathering


 A fine night last Thursday, 4th November in Portsoy, Banffshire where I met up with old friends from the Salmon Net Fishing Association of Scotland. The pre-Annual General Meeting gathering included a meal at the Station Hotel where the guest of honour was newly-elected Westminster MP, Eilidh Whiteford.

Stories were told, reminiscences were to the fore and plans were made for me to visit some of the few-remaining netting stations in Scotland to carry on my Catching the Tide project which began way back in 1995.

The following morning I photographed members of the Association before the AGM at the Salmon Bothy, a superb community facility which houses a fascinating history of netting in the tiny port.

For more information about my work with the fishermen, please visit www.theformancollection.com

Tuesday 26 October 2010

A Game of Two Halves


This month has seen me covering two football matches for 'When Saturday Comes' and the assignments demonstrate that the saying "the haves and the have-nots" is an apt description of our national sport.

First off I travelled to the picturesque spa town of Matlock, which nestles in the Peak District in Derbyshire. The occasion was a qualifying round match for this season's English FA Cup between Matlock Town and visitors Eastwood Town from near Nottingham. The visitors won by three goals, but I was much more interested in the setting for the tie, the atmosphere generated by a small but passionate crowd and the ambiance of a Saturday afternoon in one of football's charming backwaters.

In contrast, two Saturdays later I was at a match between two sides who have both won European cup competitions but now find themselves languishing in the second tier of English football.

Notwithstanding, nearly 23,000 spectators turned up to see a spirited performance by hosts Nottingham Forest, who overcame visitors Ipswich Town by two goals to nil. To add further spice to this encounter, Ipswich are manageed by former Forest legend Roy Keane. He left disappointed and annoyed by his team's performance. I enjoyed visiting one of the country's finest stadiums which has a cracking location on the banks of the Trent and where all the staff and supporters couldn't have been more friendly and helpful as I worked around them.

Both reportages will feature in the next issue of 'When Saturday Comes', which will be out at the start of November.

To see an edited selection from the two matches, please click on the following links:

http://colinmcpherson.photoshelter.com/gallery/Matlock-Town-Football-Club/G0000AaCT1c441A4/P0000csIFjZg0OLE

http://www.photoshelter.com/mem/gallery/gallery-show?G_ID=G00008LPoOrdfMpQ

Report from Indonesia

A dear friend and colleague, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert is working on assignment in Indonesia for Greenpeace. His report makes compulsory viewing for anyone who cares about our planet.

http://blog.jeremysuttonhibbert.com/2010/10/photographing-natural-forest-deforestation-sumatra-indonesi/

Thursday 21 October 2010

Sad News



The death has been announced of punk songstress Ari Up, lead singer of The Slits.

A sad day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_Up

Thursday 14 October 2010

Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize


The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010 has been awarded to the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. In awarding the accolade, the Organising Committee noted that the award had been given to Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

I had the good fortune to photograph Mario Vargas Llosa at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2003. Llosa’s appearance at the world’s biggest literary festival coincided with the publication of his novel entitled ‘The Feast of the Goat.’

Monday 11 October 2010

The Football Business

It's a strange country we live in when the second item on the main BBC News is the sale of a football club. But then it tells you much of the slavish devotion and obsession people have with professional sport in general, and football in particular, that it doesn't seem out-of-place at the top of the news agenda.

But maybe we shouldn't be calling it football, but 'soccer' as the sale of the troubled club - a global brand, as its often referred to - will be a transfer of ownership from one set of American businessmen to another. That is, only if the High Court in London agrees to the takeover.

It all kicks off tomorrow, October, 12, and you can be sure that the result will have greater significance and be more keenly anticipated than many of Liverpool FC's dire performances this season.

Here's an image I took on commission last week outside the club's Anfield stadium. As you can see, it's not just the stadium which is about to undergo a transformation, but the whole area adjacent to the famous old ground too.

Text and image © Colin McPherson, 2010
All Rights reserved

Tuesday 5 October 2010

Welcome to my blog - or as it stands for Boring Load Of Gas. Does that sound cynical enough about blogging and the blogisphere, or does it merely describe me and what I've got to share? We'll see. We'll see how many people read and follow me, we'll see if anyone is interested enough to engage with what I have to say and we'll see if I have the staying power to blog when all else around me have given up.

We'll see......