Hayward Gallery. London.

Organic and tactile. It was all around. Above, below, underfoot, inside and out. Clean and dirty. Dry and wet (there was a swimming pool).  Quiet and noisy. Signs and inexplicable. Tiny and huge.

It’s quite hard to describe in fact. Immersive and encompassing are key elements I think.  And contemplative.

So we all went in and had a play. Took our shoes off and relaxed. We were in it for hours. It wasn’t something you looked t, it was something to be in. To surround yourself with. To remember.

Too many snaps to show here. You can see the full set as a gorgeous flickr slideshow.

These are just a few pics from a set that I used back in 1984 of Mark shaving.  I stuck the set, one per page, into a notebook.  You see the cover of the book here.

Basically, it’s the entire shaving process from start to finish – the last shot here is the last shot in the book.  It’s a whole roll of film.  So that’s 36 35mm prints.  It wasn’t staged. I was just there and he was having a shave.

The book is Mark’s but I borrowed it over 20 years ago.

I just scanned a few pages of the book.

Need to see this.  Woman flying a spaceship in her underwear.

Money doesn’t buy photography. Doesn’t buy images.

What comes out of any (digital) camera is just plain rubbish. I don’t fully understand why this is (not quite the same / true for analogue). What you see here is before and after from a Canon 5D. You also see the wild vignetting from the lens.

The ‘processing’ here is crude ‘auto levelling’ in Photoshop, but you get the idea. It might be crude, but you can see that it’s better than what comes out of the camera.

There is a chance however, that you disagree. Tell me.

JG Ballard. Gagosian. London.

I took quite a few from-the-hip pics trying to get told off and thrown out before I saw several people just taking pics. No fun.

So, there’s no accidentalism here. Ah, but some of these are from-the-hip.

Anyway, this was an essential exhibition for me – I grew up in Ballard. The metalness. The mixing of people and machines (flesh and metal). Industrial when I was industrial too. When beauty was in urban and industrial decay.

It’s because of Ballard that chicken and mayo sandwiches make me heave. Why driving down a motorway makes we very conscious aas to what’s on the edge of the motorway. Why I have always wanted to live at the top of a concrete tower block. And drive fast. And walk around deserted industrial estates. Insulated and immersed. Edge.

There’s a nice cafe next door.

Novotel. All in one moulding.