archives

some very old photos i took...........
portraits of people doing what they do, much more my thing. I think it's pretty obvious.

Extreme sports festival - BCN

I went to the Extreme sports festival in Barcelona yesterday.

Taking photos with my D700 I learnt two things:

1. That f/5 is too high for sports photography....the background needs to be totally blurred when there is so much going on in the shot.

2. I definitely needed a speedlite flash (which was unfortunately stolen at a music festival last year).

not exactly my favourite type of photography, but loads of fun.

Here are a few of the shots. More on flickr too.

sweaty city/cold county

So every year at about this time (usually in May, June) I always feel a strong yearning for cold winter days: snow, wide-open spaces, gloves, vodka, solitude. I think it's my final clutching for calm when I'm already unable to sleep because the humidity is closing in and Barcelona is fast becoming a loud, sweaty, seething mass of bodies. So i'm just enjoying it for now......then when the heat becomes unbearable i'll spend most of the summer splishing about in the water with all the other sardines :D

I'm reading the most beautiful book about ordinary people in a stunningly beautiful, cold place. The language they use is just perfect.....it's the essence of everything I'm craving. I'm going to finish it tonight, so i wanted to write this now while there are still some words left for me to enjoy that I haven't read yet.

David Vann - Caribou Island (Penguin Books)

"Early winter, the temperature minus fifteen. The mountains would be white, the lake and glacier. Only the sky a new colour, rare winter sun, rare midwinter blue. The sun above the peaks moving sideways, unable to rise any higher."

"...She walked towards the glacier, towards the mountains, away from the island. Walked slowly. Then stopped and looked around. Without her footsteps, no sound. No wind, no moving water, no bird, no other human. This bright world. The sound of her heart, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her own blood in her temples, those were all she would hear. If she could make those stop, she could hear the world".

Holga - on the swings

foliage joy with a HOLGA

I went back to the UK for a few days last weekend and re-discovered some medium format negatives that I developed years ago but had never even looked at...i scanned them in and found some really beautiful images. 

taken with an old plastic holga, some of the frames are layered atop each other. am so excited about them, wish i could have stayed longer to scan every single one - there were HUNDREDS! 

Crystal Fighters gig

Crystal Fighters 
@KGB, 7th April

When one young woman was clearing through the rubble of her deceased Granddad in their Basque family home, she stumbled across pages of scrawled opera lyrics; endless ramblings penned during the final throes of dementia. Joining forces with friends, they set to decipher his musical ramblings into something more palatable while preserving the name of her Grandfather’s piece in reverence. The Crystal Fighters were born.

This five-piece band knits together folkloric Basque instruments with bright, thumping Carnival beats, feathery vocals and plummeting, dubby grime. The results are startlingly organic and loose-limbed with some undeniable Boney M references that are infectiously cheerful.

If you’re still not sure, just imagine teleporting the locals of one small Basque village into a sweaty underground club in East London, feeding them some of Grandma’s finest acid-laced Victoria Sponge before projecting cloudscapes onto their bare genitalia…well, they're a little like that (if you’re into that sort of thing). I’ll be there laying down some bold shapes and moves at the back, head skyward bound. 

See you at KGB.

Copyright Natasha Drewnicki 2011. All rights reserved.

Address: KGB, C/ CA L'alegre de Dalt, 55 BIS

08024 Barcelona

Metro: Joanic

Price: 12€ in advance, 15€ on the door

Opening Hours: 7^th April at 9pm.

Contact: www.entradas.com, www.crystalfighters.com

TEOTIHUACAN: City of the Gods

A little preview I did for la-boca. can't wait to go.

Teotihuacan: City of the Gods @ LaCaixa Forum

1^st April – 19^th July 11

Summer may still be a few months away but if you’re feeling impatient already, this exhibition will certainly saturate you with a few bright and heady tones to blow away those winter cobwebs and put a spring back into your step.

CaixaForum is giving us an insight into Teotihuacan – the first metropolis ever constructed on the entire American continent with Teotihuacan: City of the Gods.

Tonight (31^st March) the action will begin at 19:00 with an Inaugural Conference - a hands-on introduction into the lifestyle, philosophy and architecture of this tantalisingly mysterious pre-Hispanic culture. 

And as of 1^st April, the exhibition will present more than 400 masterpieces carefully selected and brought to Barcelona by one of the most important museums in Mexico today. Prepare to be hypnotised by the intricate Jade masks and intrigued by the deeply symbolic statues of Aztec gods and animals. 

The Aztecs were an incredibly sophisticated yet brutal bunch - Legend has it that the gods were assembled there in order to create the Sun and the Moon; hence their love of human sacrifices. Have you got the stomach to find out more? Not to be missed; this one’s going in the scrapbook.

If you like this, you might also like the Museum of Pre-Colombian Art in Barcelona.

Other happenings:

Monday 23^rd May - How did they live in Teotihuacan? What archeological excavations tell us.

By Natàlia Moragas Segura, Lecturing Professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology, History of America and Africa at the University of Barcelona. 

taking my feet for a walk

Over the years for some reason unbeknownst to myself i have always taken photos of my feet. Here are a few of them.

TABOO - Apolo

LATEROS - cerveza men

So April showers have arrived in Barcelona. It's been lloviendo a cantaros for almost 24 hours. An old photo taken of a cerveza/groovy disco apparatus salesman on barceloneta beach one fine evening.

GARRY WINOGRAND - Women are beautiful

Deary me. I've left it a bit long, haven't I.

Last week  I was invited to the Inauguración of Garry Winogrand's Women are Beautiful at a very pleasant, privately owned artspace called Foto Colectania in Gracia (a stone's throw, or dos manzanas from the Gracia FGC train stop).

Of course, the only reason people really go to the opening of exhibitions is to stand around looking clever in a cultured sort of way with our thick-rimmed glasses, while we coincidentally happen to be drinking our own body weight of the free booze provided. You can imagine the sort of hoo-haa caused when the barman announced to the four-deep queue at the bar that there was actually only ONE BOTTLE of wine left twenty minutes into the grand opening - It was carnage. One middle-aged woman at the front had the nerve to get a refill.....she left soon afterwards.

The idea of mustering the energy to traipse to an art exhibition in the back-end of Barcelona (ok, the Gracia district - whatever) at 8 o'clock on a Thursday evening without even one measly copa of corner-shop Rioja to reward myself for being so fina and cultured (after having soberly slogged my guts out all week, I might add), was simply too much to bear.

And of course, the Spanish, not being first in the queue (hah!) when patience and manners (or our version of manners, at least) were being handed out, were simply outraged. Especially (dare i say it?...) the catalans.

Our nonchalant attitudes soon turned sour and what could have been a pleasant hour or so of liaising and quaffing turned into a quick turnaround and a run to the nearest drinking hole.

So yeah......Winnogrand. He's alright, if you like that sort of thing.

Poor old Winnogrand, it wasn't his fault the hosts left us dry. But I suppose it wasn't their fault either.  It was our fault for all wanting to go and gawp at beautiful black and white photographs of sixties women who are now well into middle and old age at the same time as everyone else.

His photos were as aesthetically pleasing as most of the women he photographed. At the exhibition I loved him for loving women. My boyfriend said the same. But it's not the fact that he loves women - what heterosexual man doesn't love a good woman? - but the fact that he loves women in all their brilliant, gossiping, nosy, alluring, fabulous, glamorous and visceral, mental glory. It was the sixties and he was photographing the transformation of women in the flesh, on the street. His images are a testament to the ever-changing representation of beauty. Love it.

Until 4th June at Foto Colectania, C/Julián Romea 6, D2, Barcelona.

spring is in the air...

...I can feel it on my skin.

People watching by MACBA

Penguin Great Ideas and bloody great covers

So recently I've been reading and writing alot more than i had been for a long time. it's been creative and inspiring.

There's an english bookshop on the corner near my work that i've been going into every few days for the last couple of weeks...but why? i discovered they stock the Penguin Great Ideas series of books - short works by different philosophers and writers from Ancient Greece and China to Victorian Britain and pre-war Germany. The authors range from Schopenhauer to Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Kant, Freud and beyond...

Of course they're mind-bendingly and head-scratchingly brilliant reads in themselves, but the cover art elevates them to a whole new level. i spent half an hour in there just fondling and staring at the covers today. I would have bought a few, but think a whole lot of other people must have the same idea - each one had been handled to death, and i like to get crisp pages for my money when i buy a new book. ok, i bought one.

the covers literally blow me away. it's such a perfect example of how good design and the right typography can make a good thing AMAZING.

here are a few of them. lush.