Today I was really pleased to discover some of my friends beautiful film photographs she took during a 6 week holiday travelling around Eastern Europe.
Here are some of my favourites:

Brasov III, 2007

Kiev
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Today I was really pleased to discover some of my friends beautiful film photographs she took during a 6 week holiday travelling around Eastern Europe.
Here are some of my favourites:

Brasov III, 2007

Kiev
Related articles
Filed under Uncategorized
Just another quick post with some more photographs I took today. After reading this blog post: ‘Carla’s Top Eleven Paris Photo Suppliers‘, I made it my mission to find my way to Boulevard Beaumarchais, where I’m told is a haven for photography lovers. I wasn’t disappointed! (Thanks Carla) In doing so, I found a beautiful area of Paris which is home to many lovely book shops, camera shops, film suppliers, studios etc.
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Some photographs taken on a moving train from Paris to Jouy-en-Josas this evening (8.30pm)

Chemin d’Antony

Massy-Palaiseau

Igny
It’s a long (45min) but interesting journey. I went into Paris to buy some 35mm film which I’m going to use on my next day off – i’m going to attempt to build a matchbox pinhole camera. So any links/advice would be great.
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Today I went exploring around the campus in Jouy-en-Josas and found a huge abandoned chateau which has just been left.







I love finding places like this, full of so many traces of previous lives and memories. I’m not entirely sure who it belongs to or what it used to be, but it’s shame such beautiful buildings have just been left.
I’d love to do some site specific work down here, and maybe collect some pieces or produce some work responding to the site.
This is just some preliminary research for now anyway! Let me know if you have any ideas.
Here are some more pics of the lake in Jouy, close to where I’m living at the moment:
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Today was my day off so I had the chance to go into Paris and visit the Jeu de Paume Gallery which is currently hosting two exhibitions: contemporary artist Adrian Paci’s ‘Vies en Transit’ and Laure Albin Guillot ‘L’enjeu Classique’.

Jeu de Paume Gallery, Paris.
Adrian’s work really fascinated me, particularly the video work ‘Vajtojca‘ (The Weeping), which shows a middle aged woman in a head scarf performing a ceremonial ritual for the death of her only son.
Below are some stills that I was able to capture:
“The fact of being at a crossroads, at the frontier of two separate identities, underlies all my work on film.”
(Adrian Paci)
“In 1997, Adrian Paci escaped violent riots in Albania to take refuge, with his family, in Italy. On his arrival in the country, he temporarily abandoned painting and sculpture in favour of video, thus exploring new cinematic languages and means of expression. His experience of exile, the shock of separation and adaptation to a new place define the context of his first videos, through which he attempts to discover the roots of his past.”

Vies en Transit
To watch Paci’s full video of ‘Vajtojca’, see here: http://vimeo.com/54599219
“Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, named after an Italian refugee camp, takes viewers to a runway in California where a group of people (many of them Mexican) are seen mounting an aircraft stairway. The camera pans out, however, to reveal that there is no plane and that these passengers are stranded, queued up in stunted ascension. Paci focuses on their passive faces: a woman squinting against the sun; a man’s hair blowing in the wind. Meanwhile, other planes are seen in the background, though the travelers’ flight never arrives. Paci’s work reflects his own unsettled history as a displaced person—a situation far from rare in our ever-globalizing world.” – TimeOut, Nov 27th 2007.
On Monday I intend to visit Magnum Gallery and the Howard Greenberg collection at the Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation so I’ll aim to update again then.
H.
Filed under Alternative Photography, paris 2013
To kick start my new side blog: http://thecreativediarist.com/paris/ (coming soon), I thought I’d share with you an awesome pinhole projection project I found on good old Design Collector.com
It’s a beautiful project that utilises an old apartment in Paris to turn it into a giant camera obscura. The world outside is projected onto the apartment walls through a tiny hole in an otherwise blacked out window.
Check out more of Stenops pinhole projects (@stenop_es) or via http://www.stenop.es
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Most people think that art is something premeditated and that artists spend months planning their projects. While a certain amount of structure is required for art, it is still an expressive form of output and most of it is purely inspiration. Here in the city of fashion and romance, standing out as an artist is something similar to being an actor in Hollywood. It’s so passé that sometimes people would squint in disbelief.

Jeanette Sendler – Tree Skins
While art requires some form of structure to keep things rolling and on track, the simplest moments in our daily lives can be the centrepiece of an entire collection. This is why the modern age has spawned new types of artists and a whole new genre of self expression. Photography was given an upgrade with mobile phones and it has also helped painters recapture moments that are canvass worthy. While it has spawned countless posers and wannabee artists, it only goes to show that self expression has become a very important and significant factor of any young person’s life. There’s something simplistic and pure about art that it captures the interest of people worldwide. Similarly, poker has captivated French players and artists as a perfect way to delve into the minds of other people in the interest of exploring their craft. Capturing how the mind works and expressing it in any form of art is a relatively new concept. Whether you’re playing live in a casino or on gaming sites like partypoker, understanding how people think gives us a bird’s eye view or a window to a man’s soul. Though originally made to advertised cigars, the Dogs Playing Poker painting by C.M. Coolidge has become iconic both in poker and in art advertising. This painting is a perfect representation of anthropomorphization not only because it depicts dogs playing a human game but that the art of deception for any other purpose apart from self preservation is exclusively a human trait. While others consider poker as their playground for good material, others draw inspiration from social media and networking sites. To be able to see pictures of exotic people and places is a fairly new luxury brought to us by modernization. While most artists still believe that making the journey to pristine locations like the French Riviera is part of the art process or suffering for your craft, a practical approach to things gives you more time to spend on your work and less time on your feet.
Each piece of art tells a story and regardless of how it may seem odd or visually unappealing for some, a piece of memory, a feeling or a spark of something beautiful will always come across to even the most critical of people. Thankfully, here in the most romantic place in the world, inspiration is never in short supply.
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