Dear All, Friday was the funeral of an uncle of mine and later in the day I went along to the Rush Hour Blues in the foyer of Symphony Hall. Uncle Les was a very charismatic type of person to me and my brothers - in some ways he seemed much larger than life. My parents had interests, but they didn't seem quite so colourful or expressive as the things that Les seemed to get up to. He had quite a noticable sense of humour and watching him crack jokes at his wifes' expense (my dads' sister) did seem to be a bit of a family event, some form of pressure-valve for all of us.
I was thinking about Les when I was taking the shots of the band playing away. He took some nice shots of me and my brothers when we were kids that are in a different class to those that my mother took with her kodak. There was an element of wanting to have a blast, photographically at least, for Les. In what I class as quite difficult circumstances to photograph the bands, with no extra light on them, it can be quite a difficult space to photograph and do a subject justice. I have dedicated the slide show that's on my flickr page to Les and I hope some of the other relatives get a chance to check this type of thing out.
Les has made some impact upon me as a photographer, and while I don't think I'll become a popular mainstream photographer, nor necessarily progress that far technically, I do get quite a lot out of the experience and I do feel pleased with what I can do. For that alone, I'm kind of grateful to Les. I did mention to his son, a shot that Les had inspired me to take of the summer palace in Beijing, Chinas' capital. Similar to the historic forbidden city, it is a major landmark and of cultural importance as an indicator of past dynasties. I was there on quite a dreary day unfortunately, perhaps unlikely to bring the best of the scene but still worth being there. I tried to use the willows to continue the curve of the building, something that Les has discussed with me as a child when we looked through some of his most prized photographs - how important the shapes of figures and objects sometimes in the background are to the composition of a shot. I guess there was an element of that in the way I was taking shots of the boys on Friday afternoon - difficult circumstances: far from ideal, activity and events that I couldn't control and a scene in front of us all (the band) that looked generally the same to everyone present but somehow would look different - in a million different ways to a million different people. Though this may seem a little sermon-like, as I sit writing about it on a Sunday morning, there is an element of what life's been like in the Woodward family about it - circumstance doesn't tend to go our way and there's a need to try and make awkward circumstances work in our direction - as I tried to do with the reflective background of the mirror-like plate glass in the shot above that's in the slideshow of the ben markland quintet. Somehow, despite confronting circumstance, things just don't seem to work but there's some pleasure in trying. Friday was to me, a goodbye to Les first and foremost - I wonder if there's much influence in the shots.....
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