070 - Flag Loss

070 - Flag Loss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

What makes me sad about this event, other than the loss itself, is the sheer lack of love behind the whole affair. It is 70 years since Katyn, so how can anyone who calls themself a Christian not be looking to forgive?

There are always excuses.

There are always new people to die.

Instead of excuses, I want to see the same amount of effort put into caring for the people and the problems of today. Luckily, this will increase Poland's exposure internationally, and I hope that it does encourage more people to come here in the future.

094 - Man in a Box (or 'Lublin Shroud')

094 - Man in a Box (or 'Lublin Shroud'), originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

One of the problems Poland suffers from is the general inability of priests to accept their responsibility in the present day; they want to live in a past where their parishioners came to them for help, or so they would want you to believe. This would not matter, if it were not for the effect on society.

Back during the communist era the church felt it could justifiably oppose the sate by selling the 'family values' line to counter the community level action they felt that the communists where pushing. After all, if everyone figured out what to do at the community level, what would have been left to the priests? Gladly or sadly, the communists in power had no real desire for community action, it would have undermined their own, so people were left with two hierarchies above them, one with control over the body and the other with control over the soul. These days the threat of direct government control in one's daily life has largely receded, but the Roman Catholic church with its 'family values' line has become largely resplendent in its power, or would be if it were not for the actions of a few pesky priests and a slight but general drift away from the church.

The family value principal is based on getting people to care for their own family, but without much guidance in how to achieve this. The result is instead of a vibrant church where people in a community are aware of their neighbours, everyone stands or sits together in the church, eyes to the front, and no help if you are in difficulty. No welcome, no goodbye, just programmed responses and a loos of attention 5 minutes into the sermon.

I have a friend who is not Polish, and in his time here has become completely alienated from the RC church - who ignores him as the basic principal is that priests do not come to you without your express begging - you go to them for help. Priests have no real idea what people feel or if they are in distress, they only come around to your door but once a year to sit for a few minutes and, generally, take an envelope of money away with them.

This friend twice in December responded to separate incidents where an old person in a flat elsewhere in the block had fallen and was trying to get help by banging on the floor. This was ignored by everyone but this foreigner, even though one incident occurred on Christmas Eve when other people were still up and celebrating.

The RC church here teaches that 'bad things come from the West' and that they should call back their children who have gone to the West to find work because their souls are at risk in the West. If you were not born to a Polish family, let me tell you that the values, if any, that you learnt from your family are not values at all, only the Polish family is a true family. Poland is the Christ of all nations.

Poland needs help, but the priesthood is by and large making sure that it does not get that help. They could learn from the mistakes other nations have made, but they would rather just make the people feel guilty if they wander away from the family table, unless it is to visit the Church.

Three definitions one can apply from society here are:

Leadership: You do what you're told.
Responsibility: Why does not someone else fix this?
Freedom of Speech: Don't you dare make anyone outside aware that there is a problem.

061 - D--n your Age Appropriate

061 - D--n your Age Appropriate, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We watch a lot of programs that deal with fashion, it is an interest that we can share and do on a wet day. One of the things that annoys us is the concept of 'age appropriate', not in itself but the implication that one should dress age appropriate.

First, it means that people will recognise you by age at 500m, and your actual qualities will be less apparent, just another 50-something irrelevant. Don't believe me - how many people do not employ people over the age of 50? Now go take a look down your street and judge how old each person you see is. What chance have the older ones of competing with younger people based on our practiced perception of people?

Second, what about freedom of choice. This is not just about not criticising other people for their choices but accepting them for their choices.

Third, what about trust? You think my wife is going to knife someone because she is wearing a leather jacket or that she cannot be trusted with a class full of students? Trust her, then, to make decisions on what she would like to wear.

Fourth, take a look at what you wear and decide how acceptable your clothes would be a century or two ago. Someone was first to wear the types of clothes you wear and it does not make you a mass murderer or other delinquent because your clothing choices are different to members of other societies or societies from the past, does it.. Unless you are, of course.

In this time of recession, decisions are still being made by people who cannot accept change and who will hold on to how it was in the past. If you want a better future, start paying attention to those who understand change.

Cost vs Equipment vs Opportunity

EDGY06 zuk, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The Żuk is a van made in Lublin, the city where I live, and this early version probably dates from the 1960s. I have a fond spot for these and have even had a website devoted to them, and this early type is so rare now that over the past decade I have only found five examples. As you can imagine, that does limit their photographic opportunities.
I often see people on photo website talking about their equipment, which I and many other people cannot afford either in time, storage space or cash, so does this limit our potential as photographers? One answer is to expand our photographic range by taking advantage of image editing software, which can be downloaded for free if we cannot afford the marketed equivalents. The problem here is that there is a marked coldness on the side of some 'equipment' people because we are not catching the image in the camera. This is an old question, and one with no resolution to some people.
More interesting is the opportunity question - what if there is no time to deploy all the equipment necessary? The amount of time I have had to photograph the five Żuks was between 15 seconds and 5 minutes, which is not a lot of time to deploy an array of equipment especially since the meetings were unplanned. I was simply lucky that each time I had some form of camera, often just a compact and only once my SLR. One shot was taken in the street as the van passed, the image above was made over a fence in someone's field.
With such fleeting contacts woefully short of equipment and access, how could I have arranged the above image? If I were a painter, would it be bad if I made a quick sketch and then made the 'proper' painting later in my studio? Paintings of fleeting events cannot possibly be completed during the event, so why do people apply such restrictions to photography?
The idea for this image occurred some two and a half years after I took the photograph, and I have no idea how I could arrange access to an equivalent van. The answer could be to choose a different van, but the intended use of the image required this early type of Żuk. For me to create a fresh image I need a good idea, and here the coincidence of idea and access time were a long way apart.
Let us assume instead, that I am able to organise an opportunity to create this image as a photograph. By preparing myself to take the photograph, I am influencing the photograph. The very act of preparing means I have already made some of the decisions: I am no longer going to respond to the situation but instead take control of the situation.
Control is artifice, and whether we control the players in the image or the pixels on the screen, it is all artifice. One type of event has no better intrinsic quality than the other.
Ultimately we only sense the world through our bodily organs, the best we can do for ourselves is to be interested in the quality of what we choose to sense rather than trying to establish if equipment X is better than equipment Y. If you can apply X better than Y, use X - but if you can apply Y better than X, use Y.

EDGY Poland - the concept

EDGY05 car, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We have a new long term project to produce a new book about Poland, based on a set of images we are going to take. Having spent years editing websites and books about Poland written in Poland by Poles, we feel it is time that Poland had a chance of being what it could be. We are going to reject the old 'can't do, won't do' attitude, and show the Poland that 'they' prefer to remain hidden - that Poland can be FUN.

Bye bye stodgy tradition!
Bye bye lonely images of objects without humanity!
Bye bye monument counts pretending to be tourist guides!
Bye bye histories ending in 1945!
Bye bye 'the people are grateful for the beneficent government'!

An Hello Fun!

This is going to be a Poland of which my Polish wife can be proud.

Most of all, we want to turn our city of Lublin from the city of the dead into the city of the living - so no more grateful acknowledgments to small men in big hats, no more having to be serious, and no more 'if you do that you won't be Polish'. History is history, but this is our world now.

056 - AI is for Avoiding the Issue

056 - AI is for Avoiding the Issue, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Marches and rallies are exciting things to do, but what is the point if people in your own community are still scared to say what they need to say? The problem is that the community is full of real people with real problems, while abstract people conveniently do not actually exist.

People often pretend that the abstract problems are more important because they are 'what God wants.' However, what God wants is for people to care about the local things first. That, though, is an unpopular view, but it would be.

055 - What Men (are told to) Want

055 - What Men (are told to) Want, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The suit - the uniform for those not in the military.

Wear a suit enough and one day you will discover that you have forgotten what it is to wear something different. Ever seen those sad individuals with three button tee shirts, socks with sandals, socks with shorts, or, perhaps worst of all, the man on the beach wearing a short sleeve shirt obviously designed to be worn in the office.

The suit - one more nail in man's coffin of confidence.

The suit, like any uniform, is a way of showing that you belong to a group; however, it is also a means of defence. Any external means of defence used over a long period time erodes the mind's or the body's ability to defend itself, even drinking coffee to boost awareness soon replaces the body's natural equivalent. Carry a gun in public to defend yourself and evenetually you will fear to go out without one - even if a gun is one of the quickest ways to escalate a bad situation and another way to avoid learning other effective eans of defence that support the mind and body.

A family vacation for the long-term suit user can be a confusing affair, and an easy way of embarrasing one's own offspring. A short-sleeved shirt is many suit wearers limit of variation from the mean - the suit. A short sleeved shirt is not beach wear, it's not cool and, most importantly, it marks you from a distance as someone with narrow views on the world.

053 - Rock Chick

053 - Rock Chick, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania's favourite jacket at the moment, so I decided to use a picture of her in it to make her a new screen image for her computer at work.

I still want to investigate more people's fears and feelings about dressing in ways that surprise. If I had told you that I had the great luck to run into some noteable rock star from the 1980's. and she allowed me to take this picture of her in some cool cafe I happened to be hanging out in, then the classes in your mind would probably have said 'lucky guy!' where4as if I said that I had run into some politician who usually dressed conservatively, you kight have said 'well, well!'. However, if I said that this was your mum or someone else you expect to be common, grandmother material as found on any street, you might be feeling some resentment, shock.

Whatever your actual feelings, the chances are you have seen the reactions I describe here many times over, there are even special words and phrases to describe women over about 50 who 'dress young' without being famous, including but not exclusively 'mutton dressed as lamb'. In society, the cost of being an individual is ridicule or complete rejection. How mature is it to make someone else unhappy because you cannot accept them when they have had to spend their life learning to accept you and your values? How intelligent is it to attack the only people who bring colour and depth into our world, if these people left today the conformists would have nothing new again, ever. No new music, no new videos, no new books, no new humour, no new fashion, no new electronics, nothing, but endless repeats of what has been seen a thousand times before.

Life would be a dead soap.

052 - NO is for National-ist Education

052 - NO is for National-ist Education, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There is so much to do, and so few people prepared to do anything, which makes me wonder why.

Here in Poland we have friends who, like us, one partner is Polish and the other from some other nation. Either you live apart each in your native countries or together with one having to live in a foreign country.

Such is the price of love.

However, as a foreigner here you have no rights over any children you may have - they have to be put into some international school or force fed Polish culture in a social and education system that cares more about reinforcing Polishness, and force feeding the Polish view of the world than in creating understanding of the knowledge learnt.

Such is the price of love.

Humanity? Love? Respect? Understanding? If your nation sings the national anthem at school, flies the national flag at school and you do nothing then you are part of the process of allowing hate through differences to continue.

Free education of its national chains!

Say NO to Church and State in schools!

092 - Red

092 - Red, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

After attempting to encapsulate various ideas into pictures, here is one I took for fun for Flikr Group Roulette. The theme was 'red mania', and since those red trousers had already done stirling service this weekend, out they came again. Or down they came again.

As a bonus, because my wife is away on business in New York, I was able to send her the link to my photostream so she could enjoy what I have been up to this weekend.

Note the boots, they were hard to find here in Poland, but they are fun.

091 - Moptown Classic

091 - Moptown, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I didn't notice today's Flikr Group Roulette task until I had already finished my other pictures, but I decided to get dressed up again and, with my theory that given infinite choice anything can appear to be adapted to any other use. The task was to take picture with a mop and bucket, as an aisle cleaning whore, so here is mop-rock!

Who said work can't be beautiful!

My wife has lost a lot of weight this year, and that has meant we have spent a lot of tie buying new clothes for her, only to have her grow too small for them. However, it has also been a lot of fun, and I have had the opportunity to show her why I am so dissatisfied with the narrow choice available to men. Our confidence in what we can wear and what we like to wear has grown, and our understanding of each others needs and desires have grown too.

In this picture my hat, scarf, shirt, tee-shirt and trousers all come from women's clothes shops, which has meant some fun as I try out clothes in their changing rooms. Here in Poland the choice of men's clothes is worse than it is in western Europe or the States. Walking out in this kind of gear gets me some strange looks, the other day a young couple in a shop couldn't do their shopping for looking at me, which was rather nice for an arthritic codger who's gone grey early like me.

What is annoying, though, is that if we were some well known rockers, no one would think it odd for us to dress like this, they would actually expect it, so why can't society in general accept middle aged people of no stage experience to dress like this?

048 - Rocker Grainy

048 - Rocker Grainy, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

If I was a rock star I could walk down the street in the clothes I want to wear and no one would mind.

Sometimes I consider buying a guitar to sling over my shoulder so that in their eyes I become a rock god they merely don't recognise.

Society - it's killing me in stages.

People often ask me where I get my ideas from, and the answer is through taking action. My wife was reading about a Polish woman who went to visit her American friends, who owned a beautiful apartment in Rome, right in the centre. She said to her hosts "I have always dreamed of having such an apartment here, in Rome." They replied "So why didn't you do it?"

I often say "If you don't do anything, nothing will happen, but if you do do something, something may happen." What this means is that I have ideas for photos because I don't just think about having ideas about photos, I take photos. But more than this, I don't just take photos, I select things, arrange them, take the picture, and then play with the picture. Every time you take an action, something happens, often more than you are aware of. Some of things you knew would happen, some of the things you thought would happen don't - but also, something always happens that you didn't expect. The more actions you take, the more chance you have of happening on the unexpected.

Take this picture: I saw that the blue LED of my phone's battery chager made a blow glow on my wardrobe door, and when I stood in front of it I could see my outline. Cool, I thought, took off my clothes and photographed th resulting shadow image. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, and because of the low light the resulting image was rather grainy.

Then I decided to take a picture of myself as a punk rocker, which I did, and then played around with that image, made it black and white and rubbed away the part of the image showing a flag motif on my tee shirt in color from the original image I had beneath it. Great, and then I realized that as a kind of 1970s rock image, the blue shadow image would go rather well with this one - so I added it as a new layer.

This was an unexpected idea, and a complex one as there was a lot of black on the shadow image while the punk rocker photo had a white background. Using a tool on my image manipulation software that allows me to delete specific colors I began to remove the shades of greyish/reddish black one by one.

Suddenly, out of the blue, as it were, I had this image, 'Rocker Grainy'. Well, I had to crop it down until it just showed my lower face, neck and shoulder.

That's what I mean about actions always result in unexpected things, this image exists because I was doing something else and this just popped out of the process.

046 - B is for Bad to be Human

046 - B is for Bad to be Human, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

During our visit to Poznan I finally realized why the shops we didn't want to enter used shop window dummies without legs, while we were much more inclined to use dummies with legs.

At first we just assumed the non-leggers wanted to sell to a clentele with aspirations, but why would aspirers prefer legless models?

Eventually it came clear that the legless represented a dehumnised aspiration, that aspiring to a class as opposed to be aspiring to be a kind of human. Weird idea? Not really, you won't have to go far to find people who value your life less than their status. OK, it is a simplifaction, what explanation isn't. Sadly, sitting in a local church yesterday, I was seriously lonely, the priests had achieved a congregation unable to enter into dialogue with others, we were a mere class of people, not human to the priests. Contrast that with a visit to another church where, as strangers, we were helped to a pew, given books to help us join in, and spoken to by the congregation and priest afterwards.

Education spends too much of its time teaching through naming classes and then assigning those classes values. This is an important thing to teach, but you also need to teach with as much vigour that these classes are simplifications for our understanding, that the class is not real, but what it attempts to classify is. This gives a duality of vision - the class in question, and the broadest, loosest class we can imagine. I might be described as being middle class, but I fit better the wider class of human or even a living being. You might be reading this on a computer screen, but it is part of a much wider class of information presentation objects, of the larger class of human constructed objects, of the much wider class of brief coming together of atoms that probably won't matter one way or another twenty trillion years - but does now.

many churches teach that sex is bad because somewhere in its history it was worried about holding society together in the face of irresponsibility, disease and other social ills. But because sex was perceived as a problem, it came to be seen as bad. And if sex is bad,l the body must be bad. And if the body is bad, Man as a species is bad. And if man is bad, why care about the individual?

I suspect God loves the good athiest better than the average church-goer, because God cares more about humans than a class called 'Church'.

045 - Band in Print

045 - Band in Print, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was more of an experiment in technique, playing around with the perspective of images so that they appear to lie in the planes of things visible in another image.

However, it also shows some development in our series of band photographs - with its new name 'Band', and doing things with the concept other than creating band images. Not sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but it is a good demonstration of the principle of 'if you do something new, something else new comes out of it that you did not expect.

I think that what we often admire in people who achieve something is not what they set out to achieve, but something unexpected that happened as a result of their effort to do something new.

090 - nOT dEAD yET

090 - nOT dEAD yET, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I really am concerned about the slow decline into death, partly because after getting arthritus in my thirties and learning how difficult it can be to simply move around when you are old, it set me to wondering what we are all doing here.

The older I get the more I become aware of people doing things because they believe that their age demands it of them. Why? Women chop their hair shorter and shorter as they get older because, they say, it makes them look younger. No, young women chop their hair short to make them look older - more to the point of women cutting their hair shorter is to help with hot flushes.

Most men always have a problem with clothes, and as they get older and less likely to go into the kind of store that offers something of interest, the more like a unifiorm their t-shirt+jeans or suit becomes.

I might look like a silly old fool to some people, but that is because too many silly old men wear the uniform of their age, and I am more of a surprise because I do not conform. Why should I conform here, I am not at work.

More importantly, my wife does not want an old fogey on her arm, she choses fun over conformaity.

044 - Cafe Meeting

044 - Cafe Meeting, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I watch people when they receive calls, even by landline, and I watch to see who remembers that they have chosen to be with someone physically and those who forget, those who can say no and those who don't, and those that are simply too involved in what they are doing to remember to think about why they are doing it.

What kind of person are you?

This combines two images, each one taken from the two largest malls in Poznan. I only took the overlay one because of the tiype of lights hanging from the ceiling, of a shape I and many other people really like although seemingly impossible to buy in Poland if you do not work for some large design company. We first saw them in Orsay in a delicate pink.

Here they almost form tattoos on Ania's arms.

043 - C is for Concrete for all Ages

043 - C is for Concrete for all Ages, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania in Poznan, questioning why concrete should be the foil for the youth and very old in photographs, can't we all contrast with it?

The concrete in question is part of the base for a huge war memorial in Poznan, built by the communist authorities in that inhuman stylised way that they used to pretend concern that never touched them.

Ania was born in communist Poland and had to grow up with the propoganda, so another contrast of this picture is the ugly balanced by a mind that survived the propoganda.

Interestingly enough, the ever-lasting flame has gone out, but the ever-lasting youth has taken overt the monument as skateboard park.

Ania is also wearing a top she bought from Orsay, which after we had tried it on in the changing rooms there we run into a friend and former employer who had also been on the same diet as Ania. She seemed quite surprised to see us choosing this very bustier top, but I said I was quite happy with it, and why didn't she consider something similar. As we left the shop she was examining the rack in question, but I suspect that she will remain in cream blouses for, well for a long time.

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Continuing our fun pretense at being in a band, here we are giving an impromptu performance in the hall of a three star hotel in Poznan, Poland, a city which despite its pretensions within Poland as a city of international fairs, still achieves a mere 'where?' when we mention it to most people outside of Poland.

Still, he there we were, on a voluntary 5-day trip we had organised to the city in order to learn a bit more about the other side of Poland and do some shopping.

Of interest is perhaps the fact that most of what I am wearing was purchased from shops or departments dealing in women's clothes because men's clothes are BORING!!!!

The only question left in my mind is whether Lublin is ready for a balding, greying man to wear these trousers on its streets? Are our grand nieces ready?

089-picture me

089-picture me, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

As indicated by the number of the tltle, this one was done for the fuggers group of the day - recreating a painting. We chose Adam and Eve by Tamara Lempicka, a copy of which by a local artist hangs above our bed, the latter pushed out of the way for this shot.

Of course, our recreation has a few changes - my arthritus did not allow me to bend enough, and Ania is not ready to allow her students to see too much as most of them are from places east of Poland and often from cultures too steeped in sexless, human-less traditional Christian upbringings, the basis of the former Soviet states.

The apple is somethign that Ania eats every day, she has always loved them and is quite happy they are part of the diet she has been on for the past six months to lose weight. As part of this diet is an hour's exercise three times a week, something that has done wonders for her circulation, a great boon for a frequent flyer and train taker.

041 - Skin Deep Vision

041 - Skin Deep Vision, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Living in Poland it has been interesting listening to the reaction of Poles who have gone to work in my native England. Poland has managed to convince itself that it is one nation, so what happens when comfortable middle-class well-educated people we know arrive in multi-cultural England? Often good, sadly too often 'I am not racist, but black people should stay in Africa'. Sometimes I feel I have reversed into 1950's Britain, and now I must go through the pain once more of racism, sexism, and deep and pointless nationalism.

I used to live in Birmingham, a city with a high proportion of people who could trace their roots back to the Indian subcontinent, but to me just people. What is annoying is being told by Poles returning from there that it is alright for me, I was born in the UK. Sorry, I was born in a small village surrounded completely by 'white English' people, I never saw anyone of another race until the arrival in my class at school of a girl from Jamaica. Luckily, we had had no pictures of the queen, no national flag on the wall, and no national songs to learn, so she just slotted in just fine with me, just another girl.

Am I white, am I red, or am I some kind of red and white panda? Does it matter, because under the skin my basic value is human.