2024: pffft
Actually, for me, 2024 has been quite boring, which is probably rather a good thing. Despite the locals having insisted I retire, I’ve kept working, and my contract has been renewed. Ok, so the arrangements are changing, but that’s not exactly exciting news.
On the other hand, the world is going to pot. The corrupt fascist leadership in Russia continues to fuck everyone else up. Israel, with fascists in the government, having been the victim of Hamas’s appalling terrorist crime, continues to reap an even worse revenge: war crime begetting war crimes. I refuse to take sides there; Hamas caused the current conflict with their murderous ideology, innovative tactics, dreadful strategy, and self–insulting politics.
Elon Musk is trying to buy fascism across the world: clearly, the guy wants to emulate the great rocketeer Werner Von Braun, but has got the order wrong: von Braun started as a nazi. Given history shows fascism is about robbing the poor to pay the rich, suppressing competition (by making the poor too poor to create it), and often ends up in war, you can understand my overall pessimism. And I haven’t even mentioned Russia’s greatest agent ever, the reëlected Trump. War is coming, and Musk is the horseman.
Artistically, the one clear artistic change for me is that I’ve started experimenting with portraits. Now, compared to the great portrait photographers and artists, what I’m doing is entirely nothing, but I’m getting something out of it. I’m targetting jumble sales and related sales, giving me an instant association between the subject/s and something significant in their lives, something they sell. I always ask if I can take a portrait of the people in question, and usually immediately leave those who say no in peace, with the exception of those people I really do want to photo who seem to want to be pursuaded—but I prefer to be disapointed that to annoy someone by overdoing the attempted pursuasion. I use a relatively humungous camera, either an F5 or a D810, so it’s blatent that I want to take photos.
Two reactions from potential subjects are memorable. One chap was strongly negative, as though I was committing a great sin by asking to take his photo, as though he didn’t realise that the world is full of hidden cameras that have almost certainly photographed him scratching his arse a gadzillion times: not just CCTVs, but mobiles—to be honest, I got the impression the poor man had psychological issues. On the other hand, a lanky teenager looked so hungrily at my camera that I felt obliged to photograph her family and stall: I’d guess she really really wanted to become a model (she had the potential).
So, 2024: pffft.