12:26 PM
#STPAULI: touring the local playgrounds and football pitches. #streetphotography
SCHILLEROPER | Thursday, May 18, 2023
1:02 PM
#SCHILLEROPER: a surprise view as you walk out of the park, initially looks like an old gas works, but surrounded closely by flats, and then you realize it is nothing of the sort. It’s the steel skeletal remains of the Schiller Opera house, perhaps for Friedrich Schiller as the Globe was to Shakespeare. Bombed in WW2 but seemingly still in service, a fire pulled the curtains down for good. It could well be the only remaining structure of its kind left in Germany but there are no plans to return it to active duty. Hampered by paperwork, permits and property rights, the plans are to create a social housing project with a rotunda in the courtyard. A significant part of St Pauli deserves better than this. #hamburg #stpauli #schilleroperhamburg
Fox Talbot, Nelson's Column under construction, Trafalgar Square c. 1844
Willian Henry Fox Talbot’s photographic rival, Louis Daguerre, made beautiful artifacts that shimmer and come alive in the hand, but are a complete dead-end, for they cannot be duplicated or reproduced, shared or distributed. Fox Talbot’s genius, quite apart from developing the chemistry, was in understanding that the negative image was far from being a problem, and actually the solution to further reproductions.
The image above was taken in late March or early April 1844, dated by the advert for the Theatre Royal Lyceum, for the show “Open Sesame”. This poster can be seen on the hoardings just before the “NO” for “No bills to be stuck to this hoarding” - that has clearly been an issue for longer than I thought.
A fabulous time machine of a picture and I beseech you to click on it to enlarge or head over to Getty to see even larger versions so you can zoom right in - their copy is in particularly fine condition. The version at SFMOMA is considerably faded.
For the non-technical:
DNS is an address book that is used every time you visit a website or your computer needs to get some data from somewhere on the internet.
You can improve your security/life by having the address book simply not have entries for the dodgy websites, advertisers, trackers, so that information never gets to your machine.
You can use any DNS address book you like, and this is a new public address book that claims to do so.
The founders of this founded a paid-for address book called nextdns.io and I personally subscribe to this and use it on all my devices to make my life better.
You don’t have to turn on all the filters - there are separate address books for adults and kids’ versions.
Watch repairer, Kensington Market, approx 1994
I’d been going to Kensington Market since I was a teenager, like everyone else, picking up cheap clothes and having terrible fashion sense, but it was a fun place to wander around with your mates on a Saturday. As I got older and picked up a camera when I was eighteen, my bubble extended another metre and I started to notice the world.
Rummaging through my negatives, I found this picture, one of two, taken in approximately 1994 of a stall-holder with his fascinating stall who was just inside the market, very close to one of the entrances. I have no idea of his name or stall’s name, and of course, the market closed exactly twenty-three years ago today on 29 January 2000. Stupid owners. There was no reprieve and the place was demolished a year later. A PC World opened up instead. Honestly, the worst kind of know-nothing overpriced box-pushers, a war crime. Some stalls apparently moved to a new location on Queensway, but that place was filled with junk and tat and I remain heartbroken for the Kensington Market workers, shoppers and future kids that would never be able to go there. Markets are so fundamental to a society that they should have special protection.
