LET YOUR PICTURES TELL THE STORY
Join Suzanna Clarke for a day as we take some intriguing images of the picturesque region we live in. Learn how to create images that are both works of art and communicate the spirit of place. Our aim is to take a series of wonderful shots that may be exhibited in a group art show.
Programme:This one day workshop will cover:
-- Composition: ways of seeing beyond the obvious. Breaking down a scene into details and framing it in interesting ways.
--- Light: creating atmosphere by using different types of light. How to both plan for effect and also make the best of existing lighting conditions.
-- Portraiture: Candids and posed portraits that help to reveal the character of the subject.
-- Movement: learn the tricky skill of panning to give an added sense of excitement and how to create unusual pictures using time exposure.
You will need: --a digital camera that has manual settings;
--beg or borrow (but don't steal) a small tripod if you don't have
one;
--to download pictures, a laptop would be handy if you have one.
--comfortable clothing and walking shoes
--The day will start at 07:30am at the Chateau Lalinde and include a coffee and croissant breakfast
--a working lunch will be served on the Chateau terrace
--and at the end of the day everyone will convene to study the day's work, get feedback and enjoy a glass of wine.
--There will be theory as well as field work done during the day -- and the group will be doing some walking as well as going out (transport provided) on location shooting
Each participant will also have one enlarged and framed photograph, chosen from their work by Suzanna and yourself, displayed at a small exhibition in Lalinde (venue to be announced) -- whether you want this photograph made available to be sold, or keep it for yourself, will be up to you!
Clarke's photographic work has been the subject of major government touring exhibitions and has been used to promote Australia at World Expos. Previously as a freelancer she has worked for Travel and Life magazine (now Conde Nast Traveler), New Scientist, Illustrated Science (Scandinavia), The Bulletin/Newsweek, Time Magazine, WWF, numerous tourism commissions and interior design magazines. She holds a Bachelors Degree in Communication, a Masters degree in Creative Writing and has also worked part-time as a university lecturer. Clarke is skilled and enthusiastic teacher who thoroughly enjoys sharing her love of photography.It's been a while since our last update and so we have lots to catch up on. This is what we've been up to since September last year, when we were still in the UK, enjoying the touring and another Summer full of sunshine.
After a run of folk clubs throughout September, we really settled into the rhythm of travel in October (One four day jaunt saw us in York, Southampton, Birmingham and South Shields on consecutive nights!). Along the way, we encountered even more of Nicole's seemingly endless supply of relatives, caught up with a lot of old friends, and played at some beautiful clubs (One of our favourites being The Sutton Folk Club in Bedfordshire). This tour saw us travelling to a lot of clubs where we had not previously played, as well as a fair few return visits to places we'd been in 2004. It was a real treat having Jacey Bedford looking after the organisational side of the tour, making it possible for us to concentrate our energies on our performances.
We did manage to find time to be tourists as well as playing, even making it to Stonehenge between two gigs. John was happy that there was no repeat of his first visit, when he emerged from the tunnel to see the ancient stones among the mist, only to hear a loud, harsh voice from behind him (you guess the accent), "IT'S NOT AS BIG AS I THOUGHT IT'D BE". To balance things up, on the right you'll find a photo of John appearing to be much larger than you thought he'd be.
Towards the end of the tour, we managed a few days of down-time at Birdsedge and for Nicole's birthday, celebrated with Canadian band Tanglefoot who were staying with Jacey and playing at the beautifully restored local village hall. A great night.
We finished the month off with the Sheffield Folk Festival. Once again, we had the pleasure of teaming up with Vicki Swan and Jonny Dyer to play our final performance as a four-piece. (Plans are afoot to get these guys to Australia, so we can repeat the experience on our home turf - we have a dream to meet up with them at Woodford, but we're not sure that small-pipes like the heat - more on that later).
As well as Jacey, our friends at Music In Hospitals were looking after us well on this trip, and so after we'd finished off the folk clubs and festivals, we were off to Jersey for a leisurely 29 performances in 11 days. Fortunately, Jersey isn't all that big a place (about 8 miles by 5 miles), but they have managed to cram 400 miles of road onto the island. Astonishing how many times you can become lost in so small a place. We had a great time on Jersey, finding it a land rich in aged-care facilities, amazing sunsets and ever-flowing Harvey's Bristol Cream.
The hospital performances are necessarily different to our normal folk-club repertoire, with lots of opportunities for singing along, and trips down memory lane. We are also always open to requests, occasionally being thrown completely (We even managed to rise to the occasion when someone wanted an Elvis cover).
We were well looked after on Jersey, and after three gigs a day, we left exhausted but happy (and we've said "yes" to Guernsey for 2006).
After a hectic tour in the UK and a madly busy time on Jersey, we were ready for a break. Our friend Wilna (of Christmas generosity and Wilna's Dance fame) found herself in the beautiful French town of Lalinde, with an all-but-empty chateau, and so we leapt to her assistance. We were very tired and didn't know what to expect (we are desperately short in the chateau department in Australia). WOW!
A short drive from the Bergerac airport, the chateau seemed like a magic place to us. Turrets! The Dordogne flowing outside the windows! It was almost impossible to believe, but there it was. Once again, Wilna made us welcome and we had time, space and the perfect surroundings in which to relax. Four days later, we flew back to Stansted, our hearts full of our wonderful time in France.
The first of September was a special day for schoolchildren in Beslan, traditionally celebrated as the ‘Day of Knowledge’. But after September 2004 the day would be remembered for all the wrong reasons, when a group of terrorists took hostages at Beslan’s School Number One …Scribe Publishers
Real-life headlines have given Sandy McCutcheon the substance of a plot that wrestles with information and disinformation in a masterful telling of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict.
Six teachers of children killed in the school siege - Fatima, Tatyana, Madina, Zoia, Katya, and Alina – have come together to plan a unique memorial for the dead hostages. In a gripping role-reversal, they have become the hostage-takers, and a group of the terrorists are at their mercy. But, as they come face to face with their arch enemies, each ‘black widow’ is forced to confront her own demons. What is justice? What price revenge? What price truth? Black Widow ratchets up the unbearable tension for an explosive showdown.
A taut and compelling psychological thriller, Black Widow is an astonishing achievement.
Fes, which duelled with Marrakech for centuries for primacy in the Arabic Morocco state, is less comfortable than its rival, which is not to say that our stay there was bereft of modest luxury. We put up in a splendid riad called La Maison Bleue in rooms hardly changed since the owner’s grandmother lived in them.
Dinner was served in the covered courtyard to the accompaniment of live Moroccan music. A dozen dishes of delicious cooked vegetables were typically followed by pastilla (the fish one even better than the pigeon) or couscous and then the ubiquitous tajine.
The local Moroccan wines were part of the deal: a drinkable Semillon and a better Cabernet du President; which president I never discovered.
In hotter weather this riad’s sister establishment, Maison Bleue Le Riad, may be a better bet; it has a spa and swimming pool and a great view over the walls of the old city up to the Merenid Tombs.
It is worth scrambling up to this landmark, or taking a taxi, to get a clear idea of the lie of the land in Fes. The medieval “citadel of fanaticism” (as it was called) is in front of you in the pear-shaped bowl of the Sebou valley; off to the right is the new quarter built by the French and beyond that the road to Casablanca where the young Arab Amar in Bowles’s novel is finally abandoned by the Americans who had discovered him with all his quaint and savage cultural traits.
Much of The Spider’s House follows Amar through the labyrinthine Fes as he hunts and is, in his turn, hunted.
That the city has been preserved owes much to the French resident- general Louis-Hurbert Lyautey in the last days of colonial rule there and subsequently to Unesco. Fes was saved from the fate of so many cities in developing countries where, in a paradoxical gesture of national independence, so much local architecture is demolished to be replaced by pastiche Western.
Exploring the narrow streets of Fes leaves lingering memories – the stink of horse and donkey piss, the perfect pyramids of ground spices (yellow, red, orange and blue), the butchers’ shops with lines of sheep heads giving you an understandably doleful look, the tanneries and leather shops with piles of yellow babouches, the occasional visit to a medersa – the colleges of the ancient university – with their intricate wood carvings and blue tiles, and the evening roost of storks and alpine swifts on their rooftops.
Fes is not dangerous but it does seem alien, and in January the cultural difference is enhanced by the sheep being led into the city to have their throats cut by every family that can afford to buy one for the feast of Aid El Kabir, commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac.
Bowles captures all this in a novel set in the dying days of French colonialism. Gertrude Stein described him as “a manufactured savage”.
Dwelling himself on the frontier between sophistication and barbarism, Bowles is the perfect eye-witness to the Hobbesian world that he believes we all inhabit whatever our imagined civilised superiority. As Francine Prose observes in her excellent introduction to the edition of The Spider’s House published by Ecco, Bowles’s fiction is “the last place you would go for hope, or even for faint reassurance that the world is anything but a horror show, a barbaric Darwinian battlefield.”
Bowles is far more relevant to today’s discussions about clashing civilisations and the roots of terrorism than others regularly cited, such as Joseph Conrad. One activist in the novel notes the efficiency of violence in gaining American attention. Amar himself contemplates the difference between political Islam and jihadism – “they saw . . . factories and power plants rising from the fields . . . he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction”.
He understands the terrorist’s grim compensations not of accomplishing a specific political aim but “of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying . . . If you could not have freedom, you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone really wanted now”.
Bowles clearly believed that we all – not just non-Moslems – live in the frail surroundings of a spider’s house and what others may take as his great insights into different cultures he clearly regards as so much nothingness. He presages the first part of his novel with the ‘Song of the Owl’ from The Thousand and One Nights: “I have understood that the world is a vast emptiness built upon emptiness . . . And so they call me the master of wisdom. Alas! Does anyone know what wisdom is?”
