Pop Will Eat Itself

Following on from his appearance in I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, John Lydon continues to run his reputation further and further into the ground in a manic grasp for money and fame. Or should that be more money – after all he was the singer for the most notorious band of the seventies and a successful businessman in his post-music business dealings. The voice of EMI, Public Image, Holidays In The Sun and many more.

Lydon was reportedly paid £5m for the advert at a time Dairy Crest are looking to cut jobs from its factories. This advert has left a bitter taste in my mouth. Punk rock.

In more joyful news: The Hungry Saw, the new album by Tindersticks, is a delight and should be bought as soon as possible.

Katrín Elvarsdóttir

On a recent trip to Iceland I visited the Reykjavik Museum Of Photography. As well as the image archives of the city, fitting as it is in the same building as the library, it had an exhibition by the photographer Katrín Elvarsdóttir with associated texts by the writer Sigrún Sigurðardóttir.

The exhibition was focusing on the problems of immigration with Iceland. In a nutshell Iceland has only accepted asylum requests from three refugees, including Bobby Fischer, which is a contentious point for many liberal Icelanders. At the time of my visit there was growing unrest at the treatment of 42 asylum seekers who looked unlikely to be granted asylum no matter how bad their circumstances.

Elvarsdóttir photographed several immigrants to the country (not all were asylum seekers, not all had been granted asylum by this point) along with an item belonging to them when they came to the country. As tends to be the way, the simpler items tended to be the most poignant. Each was accompanied by some text about the subject by Sigurðardóttir.

© Sylvianne Kithole Moudi, Katrín Elvarsdóttir

© Mikael Fransson, Katrín Elvarsdóttir

The portraits were powerful, especially ones where the sitter made eye-contact with the camera. The stories were often touching, emphasised by the relatively humble – hand-made puppet, prayer books – items that were rightly shown to have real significance by their part in the diptych. I found that when the subject looked away from the camera the connection between the sitter and the viewer was lost. Definitely a sobering collection of work from a photographer whose work I like a lot made all the more powerful by seeing it the country where the issues are happening.

Picture Categories

I began to make a list of all the things I photograph. I was rereading the passage in The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer about Walker Evans categorising his subjects and decided to write a list of my own. An interesting exercise.

Abandoned tyres
Stacked pallets
Empty car parks
Walls in the centre of the frame
Drunk old men leaving pubs midday
Stairs (but only going up)
Pools/puddles
Building materials
Square buildings
Geese
Flat, low landscapes
Layers
Peeling paint
Tyre tracks in snow

I would probably be happy photographing nothing but the first three. What does this say about me?