this was ages ago now...

My posting has gone  a bit out of sync so I feel these next few posts are a bit of a catch up on my last few weeks. Enticed by what I guessed would be "a thing to see" I took a friend to see "Speed the Plough" at London's Old Vic theatre, which happens to star Jeff Goldblum and Kevin Spacey the theatre's artistic director. The other actor is Laura Michelle Kelly who I feel obliged to mention... although whether down to the part or her performance I still had to look up her name three times before typing this. I tend not to be a fan of the theatre as it played quite a big part in my childhood, but I do like "the spectacle" and really enjoyed the quickfire interaction of two main characters who played off each other brilliantly. That said, it was a really short play and not that involved a story so after a day spent street watching (more of which in another post) I found myself looking at the spaces between the actors and the shapes they made as the moved around the area, making my own crops and compositions... which I suppose was quite useful in its own way.

I do feel that the theatre's onstage photography is a bit uninspiring, maybe there are rules as to the eyeline the photographer must use, or it would seem obvious to me to have a bit of height and to look down a bit more to create a more three dimensional image rather than these flat ones. I do like the gloss of the main promotional shot though, so much so that I even wrote to the press office to see if it would be possible to arrange a portrait session with Kevin Spacey. Well nothing ventured nothing gained... I have been looking for themes to link my portrait assignments and had remembered a documentary that came out last year on foreign workers in Britain showing that contrary to popular opinion, Americans were the largest group of foreign workers in Britain, and I thought he would be a suitable candidate to challenge people's perception of the "foreign" worker. I'm still waiting for a reply...