Tag Archives: fallen empire

The ballad of a fallen empire

 

It is more likely undertake a reluctantly walk, someone holds your hand and you deny the other for the law of retaliation, keeping it clenched in the pocket.
Your eyes are dazed and you hide them behind sunglasses, even if it is dark around you. The light teases you, is because of the neon and the blinking, and of all the passengers eyes which are kicking your attention. They look like to move inside your mind and they cannot fit all. The place is shapeless, so much crowded the outline is not to be seen.
London.
You can barely think what you want to say  that a overhanging thought ends up getting off your mind.
You would stop the speed, shift the scene to fit yourself on a more comfortable stage – close your eyes, there’s always something above the level of the floor- but you cannot. This city is a trap, it is a circle of pleasant pity, loyalty to automation you cannot escape from. It might transform you in what She wants you to be. You dare to afford a scale of values no other cities will offer you.
Well, London, here we are.

Dalston back alley

Dalston back alley

A police car is passing by. It slows down the sound effect, split in the space of its presence. A police car is passing by, from the wrong side of the street.
The street is silent. Flighty. Swarmed about lights switched off and bodies, laid down on wooden plank to sleep. The street is empty.
The street is free of green, filled with yellow of the lamps. Where am I going, across this made-up enclosure, white tidy fences, where am I going?
London has a queasy taste. Mannerism and pose. It is complex and tragic. It has been pull-over during the night. The street is really silent, sometimes.
Nobody is walking, if someone is walking does he look for anything?

A city is almost the same of any other city.
Get off popular historical sites. Erase unknown languages tunes. Take off of your sight any memories reference.
A city is almost the same of any other relatively large and permanent settlement. It is a place to fit in all the contemporary human skills.  Well, any place to be settled in.
Is it that realistic? Have you ever found a place where everything would pretend to belong to you?
A city is a inner place to be. Everything around you is just the well-known way to reach a place, the time spent together, the privileged level of society, where you live, what you are.
How do you do that?

Olga lives in London

Olga lives in London

An old fat woman dressing in bright red is holding her shoulders. From the edge of the road her legs are more likely erotic signals, the fences of an old trap, the unseen black lace covered streets where you’ve always dreamt to be.
London is full of people that love each other without even ever met. London is crying upon the time used to be loved.

People make the city’s adornment.
Running the city, occupying the space, managing the society or maybe let the society fit the life into the well made box. Your city, London. Lights and dark, lack of time and time to be spent, your daily way to get to work is the space between what you are and what the city wants you to be.
Sometimes you can stop yourself assisting a building demolition and feel guilty towards the future. While the whole world is moving, just try to realize how much of life you have left before an empty gloomy field would be occupy by the progress. You just keeps going. Forget about the past with some little things to keep your memories up.

Life and death, epidemic revolution of feelings, you open up your eyes in a nursery room and someone has already put you in a dream or a nightmare, the fixed place for you.

London. What you can change about it.
Where the money run. Where you’re a pawn. Where the appearances can be deceptive. Where you can find a small dream to live in, you’ve got a job, a house, some rights, many places to be, fun opportunities success.

Is that the life you want to have?

Gay laid back

Gay laid back

You decide to show in public your inner trend. Your unwanted hair on the legs get out from the fishnet tights holes and they’re scratchy. It makes you feel pleasure and unease, it looks like you live forced in a box. It looks like you’re so depressing and contemporary.

Baby Madonna of the buildings

Baby Madonna of the buildings

This is a profanation of the city planning. This is a concrete wall made by God.
Look at the heavenly blu soutanes and the inside legs blood, a saint and dirty conception, a evil intention of getting closer to the sky and guess now how many drugs the baby Madonna would take to keep both feet on the ground and not let the life carry herself in lost highways.

This is London.
Tell me a story, tell me another story, because you London are so fake and violent while you’re so tidy.

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DOWN BY LAW

The Down By Law analogue studio blog
Photographic experiments, coarse grain, Do it youself tips and the discovery of a city.

 

punk photography

This is a public service announcement with camera

Punk bands didn’t really know how to play, nevertheless they were just doing it. They didn’t care about perfect tuning or perfect instrument.

Ba-ba-banana, this ain’t Havana

Punks were misfits with wrong outfits

I am an orgasm addict

Punks took the Do It Yourself to the extremes, using it to get back the productive process, from the recording to the instrument construction to the distribution.

It’s purple psychology, Not just an old lady’s.

Punks claimed the lens of subjectivity is the only way to  see the world,

I did it my way

Punks were not tryin to give a lesson

Livin in a jungle it ain’t so hard, living in a city, it will eat out, eat out your hearth

Punks couldn’t care less

Listen to this, run

Punks were often lonesome wanderers of run-down areas

Yeah, Yeah, Industrial Estate and the crap in the air will fuck up your face

Punks thought that doin it was better than talk about it. Go out and get it.

I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it

 

 

from “Photography: an allegoric manifesto”

 

 

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about Fallen Empire

Pictures scanned, check. Website on, check. Images uploaded, check. Ok and now rip it up and start again. Yes, when you start a trip with an idea, usually you end up with something else, we’re not here to respect the schedule. This project is a trip, where you get lost in places you wouldn’t want to be, where behind the corner there’s some unexpected beauty, where you find the way out from the maze.

brutalist Holborn with father and daughter

brutalist Holborn with father and daughter

The first idea was to make pictures about the London area to be redeveloped for the 2012 olympics, showing how the image that this city try (successfully I guess) to cast to the world through the media is different from the real life. We were tryin to dig under the weight of thousands of thousands postcards and stereotypes, the Queen’s yellows outfits, the tea time, the London eye, the O2 dome, Regent and Oxford street, artificial stages, olympic cathedrals in the desert (why the Stratford park appear as a blank space on the London map ?) all mixed in a pre-recorded tape for tourism and customer’s consumption. We are tryin to see what’s under the curtain of stale images about Camden town, Portobello road, the swinging 60s, 1o Downing street and all the London’s modern mythology and cliches.

Then we had a selection of fiftish pictures, with a beginning and an end, showing a thesis in a documentary kind of style. A complete sequence, organic and nice. And then we realized that London as we see it is not like this, doesn’t have a defined beginning and an end, and try to attach them in a story-like frame was like the kind of media mystification of reality : from an infinite reality extract a couple of things you think are important to build up a story and support one or another point of view. Fallen Empire is still about the Olympics, just because it’s about here and now in London, and the olympic’s madness is an unavoidable part of the city. We’ve switched from an inductive to a deductive way of seeing: instead of going around knowing already what to look for, we were examining what we found  without any preconceived idea about how to introduce our city.

Of course the map is not the territory and you can’t show 100% of your perception, but we tried not to sticking to an already written screenplay.

We don’t want a pamphlet, we want a city.

Stratford, not Nevada

Working with a preconcept idea we were missing lots of the accident and casual encounter that at first sight don’t make sense at all. Now we’re tryin to include them in the wave a city is, like a rollercoaster: up and down. With the new selection (90 pics and counting) we are breaking free from the screenplay. A friend of mine once told about London, “if you are high this city lift you higher, but if you are down on your luck you’re going to scrap the bottom”. There’s space for the beautiful and the dreadful, sometimes in one square mile you can travel through the world and social classes.

This is what people do when they write or shot a book, they’re building a city, and now Fallen Empire is a city, real and imaginary at the same time. I hope in this city you’ll enjoy to get lost.

 

 

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I fought the law and the law won (Dalston theatre blues)

up the junction

A Kingsland road of my mind, Dalston lane, Ball’s Pond, 98 p poundland Dalston discount Aujila pound city Family discount shop,  pawnbrokers and solicitors, Ladbrokes, afro hairdressers 24/7, Flowers Forever. Vanished foundation of farms Deorlaf’s tun, shadow of the Dalston theatre, Robert Fossett’s Circus watching the elephants from the smoking room, than the Dalston theatre of varieties, dames with flamboyant hats on carriages and sunday evenings laughs, than the magic of the black and white in black and gold halls “the greatest cinema in the British Empire if not the world”, than television killed the big screen’s stars, the 60s were swinging and the black music thriving: Desmond Decker, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley at The Macador, the Rambling Rose and The Four Aces clubs, rocksteady and R&B, than the Labyrinth, “happy hardcore club” the honeymoon with the extacy,  90s drum & bass, strobo light and the last summer of love and hate, debauchery down the corridors.

Now the Dalston theatre is gone for flats. From soulful to soulless thanks to Hackney Council that made the deal, grey burocrats in navy suits offshore companies and digits on screens. The building was to be listed, so they removed the roof, heritage left to soake in rain. Then the building was too damaged to be listed. Flattered to create 300 flats too expensive to live in, wallet’s progress, same old story. And to match them, a brand new shopping centre, anonymous and unavoidable.

BEFORE 

AFTER  

choice is yours (?)

 

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kkDrRJEVk7o

this was the Labrynth

 

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tV8YwGTug4M

“Legacy in the dust” This is the trailer of a documentary about the Four Aces, too bad it is almost impossible to find

Thanks to OPeNdalston for all the efforts made trying to save the Dalston theatre

http://opendalston.blogspot.com/

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tri-x + c-41 and the image that’s not supposed to be there

Another casual experiment, this time I’ve mixed all the rolls of film and while I was cooking the C-41 to 100 F my wife loaded the reel with a tri-x instead of a fuji CN 400. We realized it only when the film came out from the reel almost transparent. My first thought: never use C-41 dev for 20+ rolls of expired film. Then I checked the strip: Tri-x.

Oops

I still cannot understand how an image is actually there, the Blix should have washed all the silverand since there should’nt be any dye in the film the strip should be blank. Instead I have this image almost transparent but still visible, the frames have bad scratches ( B/w film is supposed to be dev at 20 C, not 40 C with the wrong chems, shacked, bleached and handled with rage ) but I suppose we’ve been lucky.

I think that the bleaching process was just not strong enough to remove all the silver from the film

and Don’t try this at home

Some work on photoshop levels was asking to be done

 

Jesus in the rain, Italian parade Holborn 2011

last days of summer in London, fashion shootingno work done on levels
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