Aye up

Hello and welcome to my photography blog.
I’m a documentary photographer from Manchester  in the UK.
You can see my work at my website: www.dunni.co.uk
There’s a short film or three here on vimeo, or see my project about cctv on it’s shiny new ddcc.tv web site.

Salford, so much to thank for

Thanks to Salford University who let me in this afternoon to photograph their CCTV control room. The morning had been spent over the road at The Working Class Movement Library and thanks are due to the volunteers and staff who found me the original 1949 reviews of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four, from The Daily Worker, New Statesman, Socialist Leader and Daily Herald. Both of these labours were for my forthcoming exhibition, next door at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, which at the moment is showing a retrospective of Shirley Baker’s excellent photographs.

Suffering for one’s art

The police started taking surveillance photos of dodgy types 100 years ago, when in 1912 Scotland Yard got their first camera. Like many keen amateurs, they turned their attentions straight to the ladies and started compiling suspect sheets of Suffragettes. This pose by Manchester’s Evelyn Manesta looks a little forced until you realise the Special Branch camera club had already started ‘touching up’ their work. Manesta declined the offer of a free portrait session, so was held around the neck by a prison guard. With a keen eye to public relations, photo-plod removed the offending arm in the finished product.
More of this Suffragette surveillance  can be found here.

My website

Back on-line is my regular photography website. This includes a selection of my published work. I don’t really intend to update it much and it’s not representative of the kind of photography I do now, but here it is.

There will be mud

My annual trip to Todmorden today – to watch cyclocross racing round the park – the conditions were ideal for this strangest of sports. Mud and plenty of it. Even though it is part of a league, anyone can turn up to race, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you mind falling off or getting your bike dirty. Like most cycling though, you can get close enough to the action to get splatted in mud or run over if you get in the way.

Waving not drowning

Had enough festive telly? Here’s a little remedy I’ve put together for your delight: Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji is series of large, colour woodblock prints by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). These show different views of Mount Fuji and include the Great Wave, probably the most famous Japanese image of all.  Like any modern artist with an eye to milking a good thing, Hokusai added another ten pictures to the series, which was created between 1826 and 1833 and went on to produce a further series One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. Mind you they were all at it – Hiroshige (1797–1859) who also did a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. French dauber Henri-Riviere took up the idea and produced his 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower. Nearer to home, our very own Mark Page added a Mancunian twist with his 36 Views of the Beetham Tower.

 

Santa’s little helpers

Ta

Ta if you sponsored me on the Manchester to Blackpool bike ride in the summer. Just got the final total of £272.45 (takes a while for them to sort out Gift Aid for the on-line donations) which goes to The Christie cancer hospital which is a couple of streets away from where I live.

All out

Today saw the biggest strike of public sector workers since 1979. Hundreds of thousands of workers (including me) took to the street in hundreds of demos against attacks on pensions and cuts in services. I took these pictures on the Manchester march.

It pays to advertise

It used to be said when watching ITV, that the adverts were better than the programmes – Now the same can be said of Googleville. Searching for a nice American prison to spend my retirement in, I came across the Eastern State Penitentiary. Helpfully, Google Earth let me look at some interior photos, gave me the full address and a link to their website. Then their advert algorithm cleverly matched what would be most likely to get the inmates to part with their cash and up popped: “VIDEO YOUR NIGHT OUT”. Puts you in mind of Johnny Cash singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. I will add this advert to my Google picture of the Eiffel Tower featuring the suggestion I holiday in Blackpool and see their tower.

Without Sanctuary

Now this video does not make for easy viewing, featuring as it does postcards of lynchings. These were openly sold in the USA well into the 20th Century. So if you do watch – I’ll be offended if it doesn’t upset you. But I think the video also shows that photography as a social document can still be a powerful force. The commentary also asks difficult questions about the role of the photographer as an observer or participant in such events. Further, it takes an item (lynching postcards) that were meant for the amusement of racists and uses it against them. I think the Guantanamo Bay torture photographs are an obvious recent example of a similar process. The video itself also confirms my belief that documentary photographers should look seriously at the value of changing their role to one of being a curator of other people’s evidence, rather than producing their own original work, to tell a story more effectively.
Thanks to Steve Schofield for telling me about this video.