Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

..finally, some good news! (bada bing)

To see the full gallery “Chipwrappers” please click here

This week’s theme is the humble newspaper who’s dominance as the go-to format for current affairs is dwindling massively as its digital counterpart flourishes. This is due to accessibility and ease and the fact that its basically free. The other difference between the two is that whereas in the past “yesterday’s news was tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper” the headlines of the internet remain for ever. It used to be that crimes and scandals soon drifted from the public consciousness as the papers they were printed on were thrown out to degrade and disintegrate, never to be seen again.

Nowadays, if you are involved in anything insidious your reputation will be tarnished forever. Just try and google “julian assange” and not come up with “rape”. The irony is that  digital news that never disappears actually feels like it has less impact than its paper predecessor as it is digested in a relentless non-stop current affairs feed. People tend to move on from one catastrophic event to the next without even reducing the flick speed of their fingers across their heavily stroked touch screens. The thumbprints might remain but the information has been lost.

Why is it the more we try to consume the less we seem to be able to retain? In trying to keep up we are actually grinding to a halt. The weight of the world is dragging us down as we attempt to absorb everything that is going on. Despite reading about disasters and atrocities it feels like the greatest calamity would be if we might miss a hashtag moment. There might be an argument to suggest that genuinely taking on board the impact of a single event and the lives it affects would be somehow better than skim-reading everything…time to stop flicking and start feeling.

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

To see full gallery “Coverage” please click here. The aim of this gallery is to show muslim women in London as individuals in normal, everyday situations, devoid of any political context.

Since the horrific events in France, Nigeria and the Middle East everyone on all sides seem to be baying for blood but I don’t really feel like getting on the hate train…its not a forwards journey and it sure as shit doesn’t lead to solution city.

In London every culture,race and religion are here and everyone brushes shoulders with everyone and just gets on with it…in  London you hate people because they are in your way, not cos of where they are from.  London is the perfect antidote to racism as we are all on top of one another and you see that everyone is the same, just trying to get on with their own shit and get through the day with as minimum aggravation as possible.  Come at me with a smile, you are my friend, come at me with hostility and that makes you a problem, not the colour of your skin or who you pray to.  Who gives a shit? Are you a nice human being or not? That is all that matters.

So it seems like hostile hatred of “those who are not us” is back with a vengeance…mass bigotry returns with fervour..isn’t it all soooo 20th century? Didn’t we just do this?? Jews are leaving Europe in droves in fear for their lives, Germans marching against a religious ethnic minority… This time  its the Muslims but “plus ca change” as the French would say and they should know.  Have we really forgotten so much in so little time? Its barely history and already its repeating itself. Are we really going back to all that crap? As one of the holocaust survivors said in the commeroration of the 75th anniversary: “we do not want our past to become our children’s future”. The dehumanising and demonisation of an entire culture/race/religion is never a good idea as that is always the stepping stone to atrocities. History is there for a reason, lets use it.

Its not really a massive surprise, in-groups and out-groups have formed the basis for all human interaction since the beginning of mankind and can even be traced back to our primate ancestors but you would have thought after 2 million plus years we might have evolved a tiny little bit…but no, it would appear not. We seemingly must despise the different and attack the alien. They actually say if aliens did ever arrive it would be the only thing that could galvanise the populations of the world…if they were looking down at us they wouldn’t see the borders as they actually exist, maybe its worth us all trying to remember that occasionally as we cling so desperately to the way we have been compartmentalised…

We are 97.3% identical to chimpanzees so imagine how similar we all are to each other. Isn’t it time we started seeing the similarities rather than the differences? If this sounds a bit like an airhead Miss World candidate I apologise but I think having beef with entire populations for the actions of a few is way dumber. I mean, do people really believe that there are races  who are genuinely more evil than others? Isn’t it pretty apparent from events that every society has its fair share of psychos?

This should be a war on violent extremists not a specific culture. Do you want to be held accountable for the atrocities committed by people just because you share the same nationality or religion?  There are people who want to kill people and there is everyone else…both parties are present in every population but there are a shitload more of the latter.

Its a shame we can’t put all those wishing to kill in the name of whatever together and just  let them duke it out while the rest of us moderate masses just let them pulverise each other…we need to stop being pulled by the extremes of society who just want to watch the world burn…I made a  (rather rough) film a while back called ‘The General” using a schnauzer to show how we could possibly re-organise the world with this kind of thing in mind, putting all those who are similar together rather than grouping people by race. Please watch here if you want…http://youtu.be/nFpl7Xuuvm0

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

As Ja’mie, star of Summer Heights High would say…”Oh my god, that is soooo random!”

This week’s theme is actually an anti-theme as the selection of photographs have nothing in common other than they are all part of the weird sightings I experience wandering around London. It is these anomalies that make life worth living and this city is full of ’em..our brains scour the world around us looking for anything that stands out, something that feels strange, odd, disconcerting…this is our survival instinct kicking in as noticing things that were out of the ordinary would have kept you alive back  in the jungle.

Now that we are predator free we don’t really have to worry quite so much but we still, and will always, be on the alert…Look! Some thing’s trying to kill you..oh, no, its ok, its just a giant Simpsons family sitting in someone’s living room staring at me…nothing to worry about…panic over…right? 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Winter sunshine is nature’s HD – it makes everything pop out…the light, the shadows, the colours…everything is as crisp as the cold air around you, which is a small consolation as its fookin freezing!

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london