The time has come for me to hang up the We English blog and move on to pastures new. I will periodically be updating the site with details of upcoming exhibitions, talks and events and you can follow my future projects over on my homepage here. The first of which will be The Election Project, where I will be documenting the British general election as the official Election Artist for the House of Commons. Why not get involved!
Thanks for joining me during the making of the work, I appreciate your collaboration and comments.
I’ll leave you with links to a few useful resources:
Download my commentary from We Englishhere or read an illustrated version on the blog here.
Download Professor Stephen Daniel’s essay from We English (The English Outdoors, May 2009) here.
My We English blog is coming to an end. Since its inception two years ago, and 333 posts later, the aim is that it’s become a kind of archive, a diary, tracing its own trail of ideas, debates, questions and insights. I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
I’ll leave you with links to a selection of the more informative blog entries, alongside some of my favourites, posted since April 2008 (in chronological order):
Jez Butterworth’s new play Jerusalem opens in the West End next week, after a run at the Royal Court where it scooped awards for best play and, for Mark Rylance, best actor. It’s also getting some fantastic reviews (for instance, here and here).
It is a three-hour comic play that appears to deal with small beer and wastrels, but stealthily becomes a state-of-the-nation play. As Johnny “Rooster” Byron, its hero, supposedly says at birth: “Mother, what is this dark place?” / “’Tis England, my boy, England.”
It’s showing at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue from 28 January 2010 – 4th April.
Here’s the blurb – “A comic, contemporary vision of rural life in our green and pleasant land, Jez Butterworth’s epic new play is wildly original. In part a lament about the erosion of country life, and in part a rebuff to the antiseptic modern world, it features a landmark central performance from Mark Rylance as hellraiser Johnny Byron, ‘a performance so charismatic, so mercurial, so complete and compelling that it doesn’t look like acting’ (Evening Standard), and a superb ensemble cast including Mackenzie Crook who ‘excels’ as Johnny’s sidekick Ginger. On St George’s Day, the morning of the local county fair, Johnny Byron is a wanted man. The council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his son wants his dad to take him to the fair, and a motley crew of mates want his ample supply of drugs and alcohol.”
You can read an interview with Jez Butterwroth and Mark Rylance by Kate Muir writing in The Times (Saturday 23rd January) here.
Whilst talking a Sunday stroll along the seafront last November I came across some surfers patiently waiting for some waves in Shoreham Harbour. I shot a few minutes of video and have finally gotten around to downloading it onto my computer, so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s like a little water dance….just without a soundtrack.
As part of the Livebooks crowd-sourced blog post about the future of photobooks I recently gave a video interview to Jim Casper at Lens Culture about the beauty of the photobook, which you can view here.
Here are more details from Miki Johnson over at Livebooks-
What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?
For a while now, it’s been our goal (at RESOLVE and liveBooks) to find and share new business models that will move photography and the creative industries forward in a positive way. But we’re also eager to conduct our own experiments. And what better place to start than the incredibly flexible blogging format?
Andy and I initially wondered how we could use our blogs in a new way to further illuminate the question, “What will photobooks be like in the year 2019?” We’re not psychic, but we do have a lot of faith in collective intelligence. And with all the talk these days about “crowd-sourcing,” we thought, why can’t we crowd-source a blog post?
Discussions in the blogosphere generally lead readers along trajectories of information, but all those useful ideas rarely get tied back up into a single useful post. We plan to centralize the discussion around this specific topic — photobooks — so that anyone searching for related posts can find them easily and understand the context around them.
So how does it work? Andy and I have contacted fellow bloggers and asked them to post about the most prescient innovations they’ve seen in the photobook and publishing industries. We’ll add links to those blogs within this post as they go live, so over the next few days you’ll be able to see the “research” for our final post developing in real time.
There’s quite a comprehensive review of We English by Michael Cockerham over on his blog Blue Filter.
Thanks Michael for reminding me of Kate Schermerhorn’s fantastic book America’s Idea of a Good Time (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2001), which presents an affectionate take on Americans at play to expose the surreal underbelly of the United States.
I’ve just returned from an enjoyable weekend at Paris Photo where I was amused by how many people were photographing the photographs on display. It was happening on every stand with people photographing prints with their mobile phone cameras, digital compacts and even with high-end SLR cameras. What exactly do people do with these images?
I’ve just come across this video on You Tube by Bint Photographs where for some curious reason they have produced a slideshow of photographs from We English set to All I Want Now (Rain on the Roof) by Margaret MacDonald!
For those of you that couldn’t make it to The Photographers’ Gallery last night, I’ll be giving a talk at HOST gallery on Wednesday 14 October. The evening will include a screening of We English along with a book signing.
Wednesday 14 October, from 6.30pm
Entry: £5 Foto8 Members, £8 all others
Email rsvp@hostgallery.co.uk to reserve your place at any of these events
Maidstone Young Bird National Pigeon Race, Maidstone, Kent, 13th September 2008 © Simon Roberts/We English
