NPMonthlyWord Image - Celebration
#NpMonthlyWord – Celebration
Here we are again at the beginning of a new month and what a month it may be, last month was a very special month in my calendar as it was my birthday month! Realise I’m very lucky to have mine in the middle of the year really separating it from other events but to be honest I’ve never really liked celebrating my birthday it’s always been a bit of a mixed blessing…Anyway enough of that, this isn’t therapy we’re here for, it’s the NathanPhoto blog and as it’s the end/beginning of the month, so we are here to discuss the #NPMonthlyWord, which for June was Celebration.
Here's my selection of images that, hopefully, form an interpretation of the word celebration, now I’ll need to put in a fair warning here that some are a little abstract and some aren’t my usual thing, as I’ve noticed recently that I’m possibly navigating away from what you may see or term the traditional NathanPhoto style. What would the traditional have been, I hear someone ask? Well it would have involved people shouting and celebrating something, probably at a sporting event, music event or socially but I’m seemingly steering away from that in my work recently so here is a new interpretation of the word celebration!
The images.
Image 1 is of a surprise happy birthday balloon that I was awarded on a recent trip, which was very lovely and a great surprise to see, it’s photographed quite darkly though, possibly as a representation of the more moodier aspects of celebrating ones birthday, so apologies for that.
Image 2 is a celebration of light something I’m really starting to appreciate more, not the landscape, painterly grand gestures of it but the simple aspects of recording it, like this one where a stained-glass window is reflecting the light via colour on to a small easily ignored step, yet when I saw it I couldn’t help to wonder at it’s past and how it came to be, that a sign of older age possibly?
Image 3 is a pure celebration of life, I couldn’t help appreciating this example of life finding a way, this cone has been there so long that the grass has actually grown through it and poked its way out the top, so lovely and even more so appreciative as this is on the way to the hospital where I’ve spent a lot of time this month.
Image 4 is always a difficult one to post, I’m wary of posting flags as people can misinterpret their meaning, I’m a simple recorder of them and where they appear, I feel nothing for them and hate their jingoistic aspects very much but as this month coincided with a period of celebration for that other person who has a birthday in June, they are very hard to ignore, so I photographed them when and where they popped up, from London to Scotland they were there.
Image 5 again is a factual image, this was made after a celebration and is representative of how I was seeing, completely abstract and possibly not fitting the brief, it could be regarded as a filler yet it has a certain quality about it that could lead to submission.
Image 6 is definitely a filler as a bit of tester to see what people think, I hate the edited version but in my other practice I’m playing around with hdrrrr-picturesque images so thought I’d include it here and see if it garnered any comments?
Image 7 is an extra one that is a celebration of the wonky nature of this beloved medium, it appeared by chance as I looked at images on contact sheet the two coupled up together and hit some nerve, be it aesthetic, symbolic, rhetorical or cultural memory. There is something there to celebrate.
There we have my submission for the #NpMonthlyWord for June which is celebration, the shortlist consists of a few but the winner is for me is number 3 for both its symbolism and meaning, which I realise that no one can see or hear but me, so for that uniqueness then it has to win.
How did you do?
Now as we’ve discussed images, I usually leave you with a quote to balance the books, this time I’ve taken from the written aspects of photography and for this I’ll leave you with this from The Photographers Eye by John Szarkowski with a slight edit for inclusivity.
“They discovered that their pictures could reveal not only the clarity but the obscurity of things, and that these mysterious and evasive images could also, in their own terms, seem ordered and meaningful.”
As ever thank you for reading and if you have any comments, feedback, thoughts or anything then please get me through the usual channels.
Thank you.