I am thinking of writing a book. It would have a pithy title like “A Deconstruction of the world in 29 chapters”. One chapter for each letter of the alphabet. Yeah, yeah, I know the English alphabet has only 26 letters, but the Danish one has 29, so why not use it 
A would be for Alienation. Which is often how I feel in relation to the world in general. Maybe it’s just a habit I’ve fallen into. I know there are many different types of people in the world, but watching the news, going shopping in the mall, people seem all to focussed on shallow things, on clothes and looks and material possessions. Not that I don’t also focus on those things, but I feel as if this is all many people have in their lives. That they don’t think about and discuss more important things. Like ethics, love, compassion, good communication, forbearance and the like. I don’t get it when people say that they are not interested in politics for example. Sure, it’s a grubby realm to be sure, but politics is about the structure of our life. How can you not be interested in the structure we live our lives in? Maybe thinking I was different all my life has been a real negative, because it has certainly made me less socially adept than I would like. But if I had to quickly name two albums that represented what I felt about this issue, I’d choose Roger Waters’ Amused To Death, and The Cure’s Head on The Door. Go figure…
Archive for the 'Personal' Category
Sometimes words tell the truth. Remember this.
*Before I go any further, I would like to point out that I understand the irony of writing about how boring backpackers are in a blog called “The Backpacker”. After all, travel blogs are a modern-day curse for friends of travellers everywhere - not content to send letters, postcards, or even emails anymore, we now feel compelled to commit our every long bus trip and dodgy meal to the public domain of cyberspace, and expect our friends to pore over them as obsessively as we write them.
Just as Coco warned me, no one cares much about your adventures unless they’ve been to wherever it is you’re wanking on about, or they know the people you were travelling with. Sure, your relatives might put up with looking at a few photos, but everyone else will be bored witless, and the less subtle will let you know all about it. (”Wow, you took 400 photos of African landscapes? They’re all crap.”
Coming to Denmark is never a holiday for me. Rather, it’s an experience best described as an existential crisis. You might think there’s more than a little bit of exaggeration there, but to tell the truth, I’m deadly serious.
The decision we made nearly 10 years ago to leave Denmark, where I had then lived for nearly six years, to return to Australia to live, was a decision that has never sat completely comfortably for either my wife or myself. That’s not to say a decision to return to Denmark was ever on the cards either. Reality settled somewhere in between, with neither option entirely satisfying and the winner being the status quo.
That’s why it’s so hard to come back. All the doubts return in glorious technicolour. All the things we miss are magnified a thousandfold, and even if the weather is crap at the time (which it often is in Denmark), the grass seems very much greener nonetheless. And of course the grass is very much greener over here, because it actually rains, unlike drought stricken Australia 
But it’s never quite enough anyway. For all the multitude of reasons we think we would be better off coming back, we never seem to have enough positives to make that unthinkable decision. Maybe it’s also in the nature of the actual decision. It would be a monstrously huge thing to uproot our family and transplant it into Danish soil. It’s crazy. We couldn’t afford a shed to live in and the government would probably not even allow me to migrate anyway, due to their very strict immigration policy.
So why can’t we let it lie? I have no answer at all. It’s one of life’s baffling mysteries. My fate is inextricably linked to Denmark, but on what terms I can’t decide. It’s one of those days where I wished I could toss a coin and accept the outcome.
Sigh….
Copenhagen is a fabulous city. I sometimes can’t remember why I ever left the place. Particularly in summer. In winter though, it comes back to me all too quickly.
But now it’s spring. Late spring. The sun is warm, and high and bright in the sky (when it’s not raining that is), and the trees are all proudly wearing a thick coat of brilliantly green leaves. The Danes themselves are out in their thousands, soaking up the sun wherever they can find it. I went out for a few hours today around Frederiksberg Park, and I have to say how stunned I am about the Danes as a people. They are just so beautiful. Women, men and children alike. The general homogenity of the nation strengthens their look I suppose, but they are a very handsome race, that’s for sure. And my God, talk about stylish. They probably go a bit overboard there (well at least that five year old girl with the matching gumboots and jacket was a bit much) but in general they are just so damn attractive. It’s nice to watch, but as a not quite so handsome and definately not so well dressed visitor, I feel like I stick out like a newly arrived Pom on Bondi Beach on New Years Day. Especially with a camera around my neck. It’s days like these I want a 400mm lens, and a specially built hide right in the middle of Strøget so I can happily snap away at the Danish beauties without feeling exposed.
It’s all so voyeuristic photography isn’t it. I love shooting social street documentary type stuff, but that’s one of the really voyeuristic aspects. Stick a camera up in a bunch of strangers and take photos of them. I sometimes wonder if I’d be better off exclusively shooting inanimate objects so hard is it to overcome my inclination to shyness.
Oh well, I suppose there’s nothing for it but to get back out there amongst them all. Thank goodness it’s not high summer, when all the girls strip off and lie in the sun in nothing but their knickers in the parks in their lunchbreaks…
There was a death in my wife’s family, and we had to suddenly return to Denmark. Pernille’s beloved grandfather, Karl, died last week at the age of 90, and one of his dying wishes was that we all returned for the funeral. There are not many people I would travel halfway around the world for in circumstances such as these, but he was definately one of them. The world is a lesser place with his passing.
Despite the circumstances though, it’s always nice to return to DK. So greetings from lovely Copenhagen. Unfortunately when I arrived the other day, I found out that someone had hacked into my server and so the last few posts I had written were deleted as the server was restored from a previous day. Bloody hackers. I will never understand their motivation. Anyway, I won’t be blogging much in the next few weeks as my computer access is limited, and I have a large family of in-laws to re-acquaint myself with.
Despite that statement, I have been thinking a lot lately about the value of photography in an artistic sense, and the differences between “pretty pictures” and more conceptual images that arouse strong feelings in people. I love pictures that are confronting and challenging, but I equally love a beautiful landscape that speaks of not much more than beauty and peace (as if we’d need more). I suppose it’s all about what turns you on. If I get more time in the next few days I might ruminate on that idea further.
For some reason I’ve been thinking about my missing brother today. His name was Greg, and he disappeared while traveling in India in 1995. He was 36 at the time. And so I thought I’d link to a hypertext I made a few years back when I was in university. There is a bit of a sound intro, which is of course not licensed, so if you want Peter Gabriel to sue me, let him know won’t you. I did actually email him asking for permission, but of course nobody never bothered to reply. And so I haven’t bothered to take the music off.. Seems fair to me.
Anyway, for all those people who are missing relatives, this is Greg’s story. MissingMissed.
Me and my son Eddie, and a shot entitled Sit Still.
I can only speak for myself of course, but for me parenting is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Not that it’s all bad. Actually, it’s mostly really, really good. But it’s damn hard, and there are a few very tough moments, where you wonder how you ever got yourself into this position. Anyone with a kid can probably relate to that.
And of course, some kids are harder than others. And some partners are trickier to deal with than others. Actually, I think the thing I find most difficult about parenting is not even the kids. It’s the partner. It’s the difficulty of needing to come to some form of agreement on a whole raft of necessary structures, rules and responses to a virtually unlimited number of scenarios.
My wife and I work well together a lot of the time. We agree on a whole lot of things which makes it a fair bit easier. But we also come from very different backgrounds (actually we come from the other side of the world to each other), and we also have been brought up with very different attitudes. She’s very thoughtful about children and upbringing, and so I mostly defer to her, as she has spent a whole lot more time thinking things through than I have. In fact, I can honestly say that I have never in my life met a person with more respect for children than she has. I admire her for that immensely.
But that doesn’t make parenting with her easy. She can be a real pain in the proverbial. Very stubborn & very idealistic, which is a killer combination. I can be a pain in the ass as well of course, and I’m just as stubborn, but I can’t measure up to her in idealism, and so she always seems to have the upper hand somehow. It’s a done deal that a frazzled pragmatist can never trump a just-as-frazzled idealist. The cards are skewed.
I love my kids. Way beyond words. But putting the family thing together on a daily basis and treating your little darlings with love, respect and patience can be the work of a saint. And that is clearly something I’m not. Nor am I ever likely to attain beatification in this lifetime. I just hope they’ll all be able to put up with me, and that I will continue to grow into the job.
Being a parent is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Joyfully, it’s also where I’ve done my best work.
Welcome to Photografica Weblog. This is my third blog. The first was a blogger blog, and while it worked OK, I was never enamored by the administration side of it. I found I hardly ever posted and so eventually I thought I’d abandon it to the mercies of cyberspace. I imagined it to be a little like real space. My poor blog, alone in the cold emptiness of nowhere, in a purgatory of abandoned web sites, waiting for google to put it out of its misery, or waiting forlornly for its owner to come back and reclaim it. But sometimes things don’t quite work out the way you expected. People keep visiting the bloody thing. I don’t have any idea how they find it. But I know they visit, because I get referrals to my photoblog from it. Hmmm… maybe I should go and give it a little hug, a few lines to let it know that even though I’ve found another, it will always have a special place in my heart - my first ever blog…
Then again, maybe I should just get on with life eh?
My second blog, the aforementioned photoblog shares its name with this blog. Photografica. It is I. My business name, and my blogs’ names. I am the parent, they are my children. Well, to be accurate, photografica creative solutions is the parent, and photografica and photografica weblog its children. OK, is that clear? The sad lonely orphaned castoff, whose name I have almost forgotten, is djaef’s verbiage. Please don’t visit him - you’ll only give him false hope (yes I know I was calling him it before, but I’m feeling a bit guilty all of a sudden).
OK, I assume the history and heirachy of my blogs are now clear. But it’s only part of the story. My online tag is djaef. I have been online since 1994 when I bought a computer that had 4MB of ram, and a whopping 20MB hard disk. I think I installed Windows 3.11 about 3 times in the next few years. In any case, I was online a fair while ago, back when many companies had no presence on the web and things like blogs were not even thought about. Search Google for djaef, and you’ll find a sordid history of interests, primarily in photography and natural parenting. But I have nothing to hide. It’s actually nice to leave a mark.
When I figure out how to edit the template, I’ll probably put up a much nicer shop front, but for now I have a lot to do in the real world, so this blog might be a slow starter.
Anyway, finally, welcome to my blog. You’ll find I’m a little verbose at times, but hopefully not too boring.
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