Ever since doing this posting, I have had that photo up on my computer screen, and I remain very fond of it.
Here are two more photos of that same piece of art/signage, photoed around the same time, although on two different days. Slightly more creatively photoed in that there are other things going on also:
I look forward to getting back to the top of the Tate Modern Extension, which is where this is. It’s one of my favourite spots in all of London.
Today I paid an actual face-to-face visit to the Royal Marsden. The Verdict was: I keep on with the magic pills, which will keep on doing me good. So: good.
Here is a photo I photoed today while I was there and just before I left:
This is my favourite place in the Marsden, because it is the one place, aside from the main entrance, where I know where I am. There is a lot of equipment in the Marsden, but I am fairly sure that they only have one grand piano. And when I see this piano, I know that I am in a particular spot very near to the main entrance.
In all other inside parts of the Marsden, the style is interior modernist vernacular. In other words, everywhere looks the same and strangers (that’s me) get totally lost. Architectural modernism has triumphed indoors. Out of doors, in London, architectural modernism is a major force, but it has not totally triumphed, and in many parts of London has not triumphed at all. But inside something like a big hospital, it’s all modern, and all modern in the same way.
Except when they have a grand piano to show off. When that happens, you know where you are.
I photoed the above photo with my mobile phone rather than with my regular camera, to check out if interior and rather badly lit scenes do better on my mobile than on my camera (as operated by me). And guess what, they do. I know I know, if I knew how to operate my camera properly it would do better. But I don’t and therefore it doesn’t. My camera is set on automatic. And my camera’s automatic is much, much worse than my mobile’s automatic, in other words than my mobile.
This is actually quite a big moment in my personal photoing history.
Quotulatiousness has the story.
I “follow” all sorts of people on Twitter, but if they haven’t recently posted at just the moment when I look at my Twitter feed, I am liable to miss things.
Things like this photo, by Andrew Sharpe, of a “moonset” behind his beloved Ely Cathedral, which he posted on December 30th:
Outstanding.
If Sharpe hadn’t posted something about vaccines, just when I happened to be doing a little lurking on Twitter, I might never have bothered looking at his latest stuff, and I might have missed this completely.
At first the only one I was going to stick up here was photo number 15, the one with the bloke holding his glasses in his mouth, because I just liked it. But then, I thought, some of these others are not too bad as well, and one photo led to another … and:
All photoed by me in the space of less than one hour, outside Westminster Abbey.
I love the old little cameras, now all gobbled up by the Mighty Mobile. But most of all I love how much fun we were all having, them photoing and me photoing them photoing.
Also: lots of maps. Also now swallowed up by the Mighty Mobile.
As I have said here many time before, I love the Tate Modern Extension that they recently stuck behind the original power station. The Extension is the Thing you can see here, centre left, at the back:
It’s not that it is especially beautiful to look at, although liking the Thing itself so much, I have myself come to like how it looks. And I like the Thing itself because of all the fun things I can photo in it and from it.
For instance, I can photo crowd scenes in it and from it, or I could once upon a time. Like this crowd, photoed a bit nearer to it, after I’d gone under the bridge with the railway station on it (Blackfriars):
And here is part of that same crowd, photoed once I was up and in among that crowd myself:
So much for the crowd in the Tate Modern Extension. Now for four more crowd scenes, all photoed in one photo, from the Tate Modern Extension:
Three crowds in three boats there, and another crowd on a bridge, the Millennium Footbridge, another recent favourite addition to the London bridge collection.
Those were the days. May they soon return, which I will believe if and when I ever see it and no sooner.
The day when I photoed all of the above photos was in August 2016.
I’ve never been much cop at photoing snow, or rain come to that. But, trust me, this is snow:
Photoed minutes ago, at about 11am, from out my kitchen window, looking across the courtyard, to some windows.
The reason we Brits talk about the weather so much is that people always talk about anything if it is unusual. And British weather doesn’t do usual. It does nothing but unusual.
The photo with the ingredients of the Photo:
The actual Photo:
What we have here, photoed five years and a day ago, is one of those window cleaning cranes, and the Moon. In the first photo there, we see all the ingredients, but this is not the Photo itself. It is merely the photo with the ingredients that went into the actual Photo.
Very little is said about window cleaning cranes, and the aesthetics of window cleaning cranes. Yet they often become the biggest feature in a particular scene.
I just wrote the sentence: “There is nothing temporary about them”, concerning these window cranes, but that’s not right. Sometimes they reach up out of their buildings, spread themselves, and dominate the scene. But somethings they fold themselves up into almost nothing. Or, they literally hide themselves inside their buildings, and become nothing.
They are invisible to some, because if you pick the right moment, they are invisible, nearly so or completely so.
They are not invisible to me.
Back in October 2017, I was at the top of Westminster Cathedral. I was also there in even further back, January 2016, when I photoed this photo, of Nova, while it was under construction:
I had photoed Nova quite a few times before then, and have photoed it many times since, especially since they awarded it the Carbuncle Cup. This being a fairly typical example of the genre:
What do you reckon on this photo?:
Photoed by me later on the very same day, in August 2016. Not good? Well, I was about fifteen miles away, so I reckon it’s not bad either.
I mean, here’s the place I was photoing from:
That stuff in between and above the trees is … central London. Nova is to be seen in among that, if you have a zoom lens. What you see there is a walk up from Epsom Race Course.
But you’re right, we probably need something in between close-up and too far. Like this:
That was photoed just before I came across these silly signs. From the same direction, but a bit nearer.
I like Nova. Not least because it adds a dash of colour to the London Skyline. Not many Big Things do that.
In March of 2020, I journeyed to Battersea, to check out progress in all the new Machines For Living In that they were building in those parts. Frank Gehry, who specialises in the architecturally strange, is building his first London building there, and I had in mind to be checking that out in particular.
But I saw something which I personally reckon to be even stranger than that.
These signs:
As so often, I only really took in how very odd these signs were when I got home. But no matter, I said to myself, I’d go back and really check these signs out, make sure I knew who had put them up, and so on and so forth. Surprise surprise, I have yet go back. All I have by way of context is this photo, that I photoed by way of a farewell-I’ll-be-back, on the same day and just after I’d photoed all the other photos:
It would appear that the workforce of one of the many enterprises toiling away in that part of London had to run a gauntlet of uplifting propaganda whenever they clocked on and clocked off.
I still don’t know what I think about that. I do know that I was intrigued, and that I still am. Certainly management is setting itself up for one hell of a pratfall, if it fails in any way to live up to these standards itself. And I now reckon that one of these signs is itself a very public error of judgement, namely the one that says: “Quiet the mind and the soul will speak”. Do you want people putting up a building with mush like that slurping around in their heads? I definitely do not. “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work”. says another of the signs. It failed to put very much perfection into that “Quiet the mind” sign. “Be PROUD of what you have done today”. Not that day.
Hey, I think I convinced myself what I think of these signs. A badly thought-through mistake. Only one big thing had to go wrong, and it did. Just as soon as the signs went up.
On April 1st, according to this, all work stopped in that particular part of Battersea, the bit where they were building stuff. I wonder if those signs were there when work restarted. If it even has.
“You’re never a loser until you quit.” I reckon they rather boxed themselves in.