The WI

Simultaneously to my Gaia project, I have been working on one about community. I originally wanted to do a Donovan Wylie style project on travellers and gypsies, but they were against me photographing them unless I was going to live with them for a while. I would love to do that one day but I had a deadline for this project and there is no way I would be able to complete it in time. I made the decision to go in a completely different direction and photograph the Women's Institute. I was interested in whether they would live up to the stereotype of women in their late 70's and 80's drinking tea, eating cake and knitting tea cozies. I also thought they would be more cooperative and easier to photograph. I wasted quite a lot of time waiting for the Dorset Federation to get back to me about which meetings I could attend, so just decided to turn up to a few. This week I went to Throop and Highcliffe.

The Last Mud Horse Fisherman

After my disappointment with the nuclear power station, I racked my brain and exercised my research skills and found an excellent story. I knew of a man who fished with a mud horse on the mud flats near the power station and thought this would relate to Gaia well but I wasn't sure what the documentary would be about. I found an article about him and it turns out that he is the last mud horse fisherman in the world. There used to be hundreds but now he's the only one left, which is sad, but great for me because now I have a documentary story! I went to visit him and do a shoot and he told me that the power plant is planning for an extension, and if they get it he won't be able to fish shrimp anymore. At the moment they are working side by side but our need for electricity is wiping out an ancient tradition.

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.

Week 13

Laura Pannack graduated from Brighton university in 2008 with a BA Hons in Editorial Photography. Since then she has won and been shortlisted for 15 awards, and just a couple of weeks ago won a World Press Photo Award for her image of Graham, an annorexic teenager.

Laura has been through what I will have to go through in two years - a 'grey' patch. When you've finnished uni but you haven't made it as a professional photographer yet. Her advice is to prepare financially, contact people early, stay in touch, support each other, keep shooting, look backwards, remember why you're a photographer, stay connected, help others, treat people with respect, stay open minded and stay positive. There's no way I'll be able to prepare financially, but I'll definately stay open minded and positive!

Week 12

I just remembered why I'm a photographer. Lately I've been feeling really deflated and wondering what I'm doing studying photography at all, but today I picked up my favorite book - Photo's That Changed The World and everything seems right again. There are photo's that we appreciate for their beauty. And there are photographs that shake us, disquiet, and distress us so deeply that they are etched into our memories forever. This book is about those photo's.