#MerryMYLDNXmas!

Me and my camera wishing you all a very Merry Xmas and a happy New Year!

And so we come to the end of the year and all there is to say is..thank fuck that’s over! 2o17 started with such doom and gloom and it never really abated. The world went to the dark side and rarely emerged out of it. The future looked so unbright it made me switch to black and white photography. Everything just seemed greyer, no colour & no glimmer of hope. Black and white also felt like the perfect way to mirror the stark polarisation of societies around the world as everyone got into their own respective and opposing camps. Everything went very black and white with the disappearance of the middle ground in favour of major lunges towards  hostile extremities.

The misery inducing forces of Brexit and Trump and the sense of global meltdown driven by the refugee crisis and the continued and worsening climate chaos got so bad it actually made me switch off the news completely for the first  time in my adult life. Consequently I didn’t look at a single piece of news anywhere for the first six months of this year as it felt over-powering and this combined with a feeling of utter powerlessness made it too much to bear.

The only reason I got dragged back was Maybot calling the snap election and then it felt impossible to ignore the relentless self-destruction of this country. And so it continued. Hope gave way to horror and common sense got annihilated by populist opinion riddled with bullshit and lies. The fact this year gave birth to the concept of fake news shows just how far from the truth we have strayed. And we had also clearly veered off the path of morality and decency into an uncaring world where the plight of the needy and the desperate, both abroad and at home, were no longer a concern for western democracies.

And yet, having said all that, I’m kinda done dwelling on the shite. Regardless of what is happening we still have a choice what we choose to focus on which is why this week I have shown a series of photographs all taken during the last few days showing people having a good time, united by music and showing that humans can be brilliant together, full of love and togetherness and joy. And all in colour! I had a great time at lots of different nights out with lots of different groups of people but what they all had in common was a demonstration that hate and division is definitely NOT a requisite of human interaction. It can be so very very different. Enjoying life might not seem very productive in the scheme of things but it is way more constructive than being destructive. We can all sit at home and bemoan the plight of the planet and its population or we can just go out and rinse existence for all its worth…

The last few weeks has been a  fairly non-stop party fest for me and it really showed me that even when everything goes to crap and things look grimmer than they ever have the human spirit cannot be extinguished. We forge on no matter what always in the hope that things will improve. And hope might be a misguided delusional notion but its all we have and it might just be enough. So let’s leave the shit to the shits and the rest of us can do what humans do best – hang out, be good to each other and have fun…all in favour..raise your hands!

See you in 2018!

P.s This photograph was taken at the Soulwax gig at the roundhouse at the weekend. If you want to see the full gallery please click here