Tropical Goths

Photo by María Isabel Rueda. More here.

The Photographers' Gallery is hosting at the moment an exhibition called Once more, with feeling, which showcases six young photographers from Colombia. Two of them are very good. Juan Pablo Echeverri collected seven years' worth of passport photos then did a giant collage with them. You can see a tiny fraction of them here. I loved how many style changes he went through in those years, like a young, crazy-eyed Madonna. I had a similar project in mind when I moved into this tower block, only I wanted to take a daily photo of the elevator instead of myself. I'm sure someone in the arts world would have found the changing contents of the elevator's floor fascinating.

I also really loved María Isabel Rueda’s black & white photographs documenting young Colombian goths. I imagine that Colombia is very similar to Brasil in that everyone is pressured to conform in the way they dress. People will stop what they are doing if someone with green hair walks by. The goth subculture is quite big in South America because it flies against what the main cultures wish to support and emphasise (colour, body-worship, the sun, etc), but it also sticks out amidst all that tropical foliage like a crooked tomb cross. María's series is called Vampires in the Savannah and shows various goth girls posing in the woods surrounding Bogotá. They look to me like nymphs imposed on the background - an emphasis, I suppose, on how they don't belong there. They are very beautiful, achieving in the photos the otherness which they chase in their own lives through their style.

White Fluffy Clouds

When sunshine pours down on London, and it's the weekend, you can find me sprawled on Victoria Park's grass. Today was no different, though it was a special day because hester and kevin were there with me. We bought coffee at the cafe that faces Vicky Park's lake then found a spot underneath a tree, not too far away. Hester brought a book on linguistics; I brought yesterday's newspapers; but we spent hours just talking - with the occasional trip to a nearby bagel store. We talked about language, Shakespeare, experiments with monkeys, Lost, crazy cults, religion (mostly the Bible), excentric family members, high school, squirrels, dogs, Oxbridge, funny student essays and flunctuating house prices - not exactly in that order. We felt sorry for Socrates that he had to die before getting to watch Lost. I feel like it was the first time I got to properly hang out and chat with Hester, other than the occasional conversations we'd had before in bars and tea parties.

The sun was still shining when I made my way down to the Palm Tree (that pub smack in the middle of Mile End park) to meet my two brasilian friends, Ricardo and Vini. We bought our pints of lager and found a place to sit outside on the grass. An elderly couple on motorised wheelchairs were playing The Who and eating their dinner from tuperware boxes propped on the wheelchairs' consoles. A group of circus malabaristas had stretched a rope from one tree to the next and kept trying to walk the length of it without falling. Ricardo opened his shirt and showed me his trimmed chest hair. He's got a new boyfriend - an Australian boy. Vini stared at a dark and handsome boy sitting nearby with his girlfriend. I blew my hay fever into a million tissues from the Palm Tree's gents and left once my pint was over because I couldn't take the floating pollen anymore.