Gaia, druids, goddesses and nuclear power.

I've been working on a project about the Gaia theory far the last few weeks. Not wanting to take the fashion route like so many other people, I set about making a documentary. I spent some time in Glastonbury hanging out with druids and researching goddesses but that was just for fun really. I can't make a documentary about goddesses after all! After buying James Lovelock's book The Revenge of Gaia I decided to focus on nuclear power, as Lovelock says that is the future. I've spent this week trying to get access to Hinkley point nuclear power station and eventually being escorted off the premises. Because of the post 9/11 anti-terrorist movement, the security guards there aren't even allowed camera phones!

Week 15 - A New Book.

I have to admit I am a bit of a geek when it comes to photography books, and when I saw Don McCullin's Shaped by War on the shelf in the bookshop, I didn't think twice about spending a week's food money on it. Shaped by War presents the narrative of McCullin's life, a collection of photos of McCullin in the field as well as the key photographs from his career. There is an emphasis on the presentation of previously unpublished material and some rare colour work which is strange as I've only ever seen him using black and white.

I went to a Don McCullin exhibition a few months ago but it was just his new work, since he's retreated to Somerset to photograph the landscape surrounding his home. Even though landscape photography usually bores the pants off of me, the dark and dramatic skies in his high contrast images are hauntingly reminiscent of war and a saddening incite into how he has been affected by what he has seen.

Week 14 - a prize I can't prenounce.

Last weekend I went to the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in London. This prize is rewarded to a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or public format, to the medium of photography over the past year. Shortlisted this year are - Anna Fox, Zoe Leonard, Sophie Ristelhueber and Donovan Wylie. I was already a fan of Donovan Wylie for his Losing Ground series, but The Maze which was at the exhibition looked like is was by a different photographer and I wasn't very impressed by it.

Ristelhueber's work was interesting. For the last 25 years she has been investigating the impact of human conflict on architecture and landscapes. I do wonder why she chose to photograph the effects on the landscape though, rather than the effects conflict has on people.

I've never heard of Zoe Leonard before but I was intrigued by her 'anti-digital' urban landscapes. She says "I am interested in making a record of an urban landscape as a way of looking at who we are as people, who we are as a culture, understanding the city as a social space...as an economic space."

I don't have much to say about Anna Fox, except that I found Cockroach Diary & Other Stories extremely pretentious and boring.