I had an enjoyable day last Friday photographing at The Open golf tournament held at Royal Birkdale in Southport. Not being a golf player or follower, it was fascinating to witness the passion with which the sport instills in its legions of fans. Just over 50,000 had turned out to brave torrential rain and gale force winds to follow some of their favourite players around the course.

Given the popularity of the sport, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by the media centre (where I collected my accreditation), which was the size of an aircraft hanger. Along with the photographers and camera crews, there were literally hundreds of journalists sat behind computer screens tapping out up to the minute stories.

It was amusing walking around the course with my 5×4 camera and being greeted with perplexed glances by the golfing photography community. I was certainly the only one still using film.

I’ve always had a great deal of respect for sports photographers. I even spent a few days doing work experience alongside the talented Sports Illustrated photographer Bob Martin after winning a competition to spend two weeks photographing at Wimbledon.

Two of my favourite sport photographs are by another Sports Illustrated photographer, Neil Leifer. Both photographs are of Muhammad Ali from the 1960s and the first was taken during Ali’s bout against Cleveland Williams at the Houston Astrodome on November 14, 1966.

 

© Neil Leifer

 

The second was taken on May 25, 1965, when Ali stopped Sonny Liston with one punch in the first round of their heavyweight championship fight in Lewiston, Maine.

 

© Neil Leifer

 

They are both extraordinary images. One of the things that strikes me most looking at them over forty years later is the absence of any advertising branding, which gives the photographs such purity.

Here is a quote from Leifer taken from Digital Journalist where he describes both pictures-

“Part of being a great photographer is being lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time like I was, but a more important part is not missing when you’re in that spot. I got very lucky at the Ali-Liston fight, but what I’m proudest of is that I didn’t miss. It’s always assumed that the Ali-Liston picture is my favorite. Not so–I took my all-time favorite picture at another Ali fight one and a half years later. Photographers had mounted cameras on the light rigging above the ring before, only they had pointed them down, from the corners, so that they could capture the fighters’ facial expressions. Because the lighting rig was usually only about 20 feet above the canvas, even the widest of wide-angle lenses wouldn’t allow you to capture the whole ring. But the Ali-Cleveland Williams fight was in the Astrodome, where for the first time, the rig would be about 80 feet up, so it wouldn’t block the sightlines of spectators in the upper deck. I realized at that height, you could get the entire ring in the picture, and that it would be perfectly square. Ali-Williams is my personal favorite picture, but I know that 100 years from now, Ali-Liston is the one picture that everybody will remember me by.”

You can read a longer interview with Leifer written in 2002 here. 

 

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A lovely picture published in today’s Times and taken from the Times Archive.

“Daredevil boys take the plunge – Skylarking youths take advantage of hot weather on July 15, 1949, to shed their clothes and leap off Battersea Bridge into the cooling, muddy Thames at high tide.”

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On leaving our small campsite on a farm in Northumbria last week we came across a rather bizarre scene. There was a car parked on the side of the road with one door ajar and the keys left dangling in the boot lock. A pile of personal photographs and letters were lying on the ground by the open door and on the back seat were several bin bags full of clothes. There was nobody in the car and nobody to be seen in the vicinity. 

 

We alerted the owner of the farm as we departed. I can’t help wondering what the sequence of events were, that led to this strange finding and what the outcome was (it’s like the start of a movie script or crime novel).  

 

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This post comes to you from a lay-by in Bedford, where we are free camping for the night, near the Priory Marina which is also conveniently placed next to one of the town’s recycling stations. Glamorous this journey is not! As I write, I can hear the sounds of a violent disagreement between a couple who are sitting in a neighbouring car, they are swearing fulsomely and sound close to fisticuffs.

It’s surprising how few spots we’ve found where it is actually quiet.  Often the noise is obvious: boy racers burning up and down the esplanade in Ryde, police sirens in Margate, the machinations of a scrap metal plant in Oxford (cunningly hidden behind a small coppice) and the planes on the flight path into East Midlands airport from our otherwise tranquil spot on a corner of a farmers field. There’s also the two am sound of drunken voices of revelers on their way home, but most persistent of all is the constant hum of distant traffic.  It seems omnipresent, even in small villages which exude the appearance of rustic tranquility.  This strikes me not just as a terrible shame, but also as a sign of the way modern life, with its reliance on technology and convenience, continues to erode even the possibility of a calmer, more natural mode of existence.

 

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The Isle of Wight has been making headlines recently with its audacious plans to become the world’s greenest Island. Under the ‘Eco Island’ banner, council leaders are hoping to harness the power of the wind and waves so that by 2013 most of its electricity will come from renewable sources. The bulk will be made up of tidal power, along with on- and perhaps off-shore wind farms. The Island’s ultimate goal is to become completely carbon neutral within a decade and then to produce an excess of renewable energy so they can sell power to the mainland.

 

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I came across this article on the web by by Jamie Doward, which featured in The Observer back in April. It’s entitled “Murder and arson mar resort’s bid to become a coastal artists’ haven”. A ‘hit’ and the torching of a roller-coaster have rekindled memories of a violent past, even as the Margate tries to become Bohemian.

 

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Here is a rather amusing story that made the front page of the Isle of Wight County Press this weekend, entitled ‘Smile at a tourist, Islanders urged’. Richard Wright writes

“PEOPLE have been urged to smile at a tourist to counter economic slowdown.

The message from the deputy leader of the Isle of Wight Council, Cllr George Brown, that Islanders should not grit their teeth but welcome tourists with open arms, came at Wednesday’s meeting of the full council.

Tory Cllr Brown’s message drew comparison with party leader David Cameron’s ‘hug a hoodie’ plea.
Cllr Brown, who is also cabinet member for the economy and leisure, presented an economic strategy for regeneration of the Island, which he said would be followed by an action plan.
‘It is important we don’t just lay down and play dead. Islanders need to smile at tourists — because we need their income,’ he said.”

We’ve been here twenty four hours and about three people have already smiled at me!

 

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I was collared by a bright and breezy charity volunteer in the foyer of a shopping centre recently. He was working on behalf of The Woodland Trust, a charity I’d never heard of. Over the past few weeks on the road I’ve been amazed at how many awful new-build housing estates seem to be encroaching on green belt (or at least wooded) land. So I was happy to listen to his two-minute pitch. And I must admit, I was won over. 

First a few facts-

• The UK is one of Europe’s least wooded countries.
• Ancient woodland is home to more threatened species than any other habitat in the UK.
• Half of ancient broadleaved woodland that had survived until the 1930s has now been lost.
• 85% of ancient woodland has no legal designation to protect it from outside threats.

And a small plug for the work they do-

• The Woodland Trust, founded in 1972, is the UK’s leading charity dedicated solely to the protection of our native woodland heritage.
• By acquiring woodland sites The Woodland Trust bring them into our care and protection. Many of our woods were previously under threat from development pressure or unsympathetic management.
• Woodland Trust woods are sympathetically managed for wildlife and public enjoyment.
• We also replace those woods that have been lost to landscape and create more new native woodland than practically anyone else in the UK.
• We have created 3,200 hectares of new native woodland.
• Our Millennium Commission backed Woods on your Doorstep project has created 200 new community woods in England and Wales and 50 more in Northern Ireland.

Find out more about The Woodland Trust on their website and why not commit a few pounds a month.

 

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Congratulations to Laura Pannack for winning the Next Perspective competition. Laura is a recent graduate of the BA Photography Course at Brighton University and has also been assisting me over the past couple of years

The Next Perspective jury panel consisted of Henry Horenstein from the Rhode Island School of Design, Dr. Juliet Hacking from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London and Clare Freestone from the National Portrait Gallery in London.

 

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Arthur Aughey reviews Real England: The Battle Against the Bland by Paul Kingsnorth over on Open Democracy.

“The bulk of Paul Kingsnorth’s book is a cry for his beloved country, an England becoming ever more inauthentic (I suppose this is the correct term) because of the relentless pursuit of growth. As the ‘globalised, placeless world spreads’ and ‘the spreading plastic of the consumer machine’ grinds with homogenizing force, the people of England are being turned into ‘citizens of nowhere’.

His book tracks the struggles of those ‘fighting the cause of the real England’ – from the struggle to keep up the traditions of ‘real ale’ in the ‘traditional English pub’ (and not in the traditional English pub, which like traditional fish and chips, can often mean a corporate simulacrum) to the fight to maintain the amazing variety of English apples against the drab uniformity of Fuji and Golden Delicious, neither of which are indigenous to the country.”

Read the whole review here.

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