i found this photograph at my parents house the other day and realised it was probably the first time i ever used a proper film camera. i picked up my dad’s canon T70 to take this shot of my family on holiday in LA in 1998. i would later take that camera around the world. and inevitably, break it.
there is definitely a good book to be written about airport life. not airbabylon, or confessions of slutty stewardess, but a novel that can convey the convoluted processes, the chaos, the silliness, the politics, the terror, the helplessness, the heartlessness and the humanity within a place like heathrow. i wish i could be it’s author but i know i can’t. i still write the stories down though, even the days i’d rather forget. i certainly will never regret taking this job, with it’s 4am starts and nightstops and concessions and violence and heartbreak. i have to get out soon, get a proper job, more money, more sleep, all those normal and greedy things. so i write the stories down, even the days i’d rather forget.
california was a good place for us to be. san francisco was always going to have us straight from the airport with it’s bay views and bookshops, but we also fell surprisingly hard and fast for orange county, wild beaches and dolphins being hard not to adore. L.A was as sprawling and incomprehensible as i remembered it but it’s also a hard place to leave. you keep looking back.
Flight number: BA0285
From: Heathrow Terminal 5 (LHR)
To: San Francisco International (SFO)
Depart: 3 Jun 2008 11:25
Arrive: 3 Jun 2008 14:15
———-
Flight number: BA0282
From: Los Angeles Terminal B (LAX)
To: Heathrow Terminal 5 (LHR)
Depart: 11 Jun 2008 17:45
Arrive: 12 Jun 2008 12:00
i’ve never been so happy about being awarded second place. it’s a silly thing, an amateur photographer competition in the guardian’s weekend magazine, but still, yay.
now we are going here
california
(photo taken by my dad, 1999. hotel roosevelt, los angeles)
this is the most arresting collection of portraits i have ever seen.
george plemper was a science teacher at a secondary school in outer london for five years in the 1970s. his black and white photographs of the classroom and the characters within it are stunning and worthy of hanging on the walls of the greatest photography galleries in the world. they are tender portraits that tell you as much about the young, idealistic new teacher behind the lens as the charming children in front of it. it was, as he says, “a more innocent world back then”.
i just got a phone call from a picture editor at the guardian telling me that this photograph i submitted for the ‘in pictures’ feature has been shortlisted. it probably won’t be published now i’ve gone and written a blog entry about, but it still made my day.
change of plan, we are going here now:
and if i can take one photograph of hong kong as good as this by justin lim, i’ll be more than pleased.
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