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The Walker Evans Exhibition
Walker Evans: I think I was photographing against the style of the time, against salon photography, against beauty photography, against art photography. A photographer friend invited me to join her at the Walker Evans Exhibition in Berlin last week. I had never heard of him but apparently he is extremely famous. The website is confusing and I ended up going to the wrong place. When I finally got to the right place, the queue was enormous! Luckily, they were all waiting for the David Bowie Exhibition… Eeep! Right, so let me tell you all about it. Walker Evans (1903 – 1975) was one of the biggest photographers in the 20th…
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Purikura
Papa-papa-razzi… This is one of my most favourite inventions ever. It’s like the old passport photo booths you can find all over Berlin, but a million times better. When I first lived in Japan, I was 18 years old and attending a girl’s high school. My classmates were obsessed with Purikura (comes from shortening the words Print Club which are written as Purinto Kurabu in Japanese). We would spend all our money in these booths taking photos of ourselves smiling. Then we discovered making silly faces was also lots of fun. And as there were basically no other foreigners where I was based, random people constantly came up to me…
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Japanese toilets
Where is the smallest room in the house? Okay, so I know I’m meant to be an English lady and we don’t talk about toilets, the loo, the lavatory, the bog or the bathroom. In fact, I only go and powder my nose. But I am going to have to go there. My dad is a urologist, so I’ve heard every joke in the book and more. And if you are going to Japan, you need to be made aware of the smallest rooms in the house. I remember as a young teenager travelling to Malaysia with my father. We were in the car and we stopped off on our…