Neil Gaiman once said, 'Picking five favourite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.' If you replace the word ‘books’ in that quote with ‘photographs’ you will know exactly how I feel. I have a similar reaction when people ask me which are my top three / five / ten places I’ve visited.
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A good portrait photograph is shaped by the connection between two people, photographer and subject. Without that connection the image is at best less interesting, at worst lifeless. When we look at an interesting portrait we discover something about the person portrayed: their life, their character. But we only do so if the photographer has discovered this and brought it out in their image.
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I have been taking photos since I was ten years old, so for almost sixty years. As a child I photographed my family, mainly on family holidays. As I grew older I documented school trips abroad, my time at university, and of course holidays.
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The Ifugao are the indigenous people of the Banaue, the area of Luzon Island famed for its UNESCO listed rice terraces. The name means ‘people of the earth'.
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The Louvre Abu Dhabi displays art from very early civilisations up to the present day, in chronological order. And unlike many others, it presents various contemporaneous cultures alongside each other. You follow a thread from early self-contained kingdoms through conquest and expansion into empires.
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I am very definitely a 'cat person'. I admire the independent spirit of cats. They can be affectionate but always on their own terms, and unlike dogs, don’t constantly seek attention. Their behaviour can be quixotic, their thoughts hard to fathom, whereas most dogs are open books. And I find cats really beautiful to look at: elegant, with expressive eyes and distinctive colours and patterns on their fur.
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First, a disclaimer: in calling this gallery ‘colours that complement’ I don’t mean 'compliment'. They won't be telling you how great your latest blog post was or how good you look today! No, today we are looking at colour theory.
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There is little I like more than the chance to see the world, or at least a tiny part of it, from a different perspective. And that often means getting high up to look down. Whether from a plane, a hot air balloon, a tall building or a mountain (preferably reached by cable car!), things always look different from above.
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Is resilience something we are born with, or can it be developed? The answer seems to be, a bit of both. We all have an innate level of resilience, but our attitude to life and the knocks we receive along the way can strengthen or decrease it. Perhaps surprisingly, many people who have faced the toughest challenges demonstrate the highest levels of resilience; they have needed to.
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The choice between colour or monochrome for a photo is a very subjective one. Some people simply don’t like black and white photography, seeing it as old-fashioned, unnatural and unnecessary. Why remove the colour from a scene, they ask, when we see the world in colour. Why show things as less vibrant, less varied, less colourful than they really are?
