Over the last year and a half I have been taking photographs around the East End of London. During this time I have been attempting to make interesting photographs of the everyday and unremarkable in the tradition of what is often referred to as “deadpan” photography. Initially inspired by William Eggleston’s ability of finding drama in the everyday, my intentions can best be summed up by Andreas Mass as he talks about his own work and that of Levi Wedel;

“I love the bright light of the banal that is often not seen or crowded out. My wish is to capture daily life with a sense of aesthetics without making the aesthetics appear constructed or even visible at all…”

This is a selection from this series of photographs which I have now put together in a book which is hopefully making its way to me at this very moment. I will also at some stage get round to showcasing this stuff more comprehensively online.

Over the past year and a half I have been working at Ogilvy in the Docklands in East London. As I live in the Eastend this puts me in the enviable position of being able to walk to work. Half this journey is along the Thames and often during the winter months I am greated by the sun rising behind Canary Wharf. A very nice way to start the day.

Not strictly a new post but some work I’ve moved over from what was the ‘work’ section, which has now become the ‘sculpture’ section (I’m having a bit of a tidy up). These were some early experiments with photoshop way back in 1999 when I was living in a flat on commercial road (since demolished) with amazing views of the city. They combine twin obsessions of mine; photos of the city of London skyline and skies of classical paintings.

I recently read about Sarah Morris the artist who is currently “facing accusations of plagiarism and a multimillion-pound claim for compensation from six artists who argue that she has stolen their work… The six allege that Morris’s set of abstract paintings entitled “Origami” – a series of at least 37 works – are merely coloured-in copies of their intricate origami representations of hummingbirds, grasshoppers and other animals, birds and insects, produced using the centuries-old Japanese craft of paper-folding.”

I bought “Grid Systems” by Kimberly Elam some time ago drawn to page upon page of line diagrams in grids with the very intention of committing the exact same crime of “colouring-them-in”. Weather I have done enough to make these my own is debatable. Maybe not yet, though I don’t anticipate the Tate buying them for large sums of money but I may be tempted if they came knocking.

One of the favorite things I made last year but never got round to posting.

On Returning to my blog at the end of last week, as I do periodically to delete all the spam posts, I was confronted by a very scary militant looking homepage not of my making. Creative Debra had been hacked. Why anyone would do such a thing to such an inoffensive blog that no one actually looks at was beyond me until I was told, well they did it because they could, and they could because I hadn’t been installing the most recent wordpress updates. So if there is a lesson to be learnt from this sorry episode it is to keep up to date with the latest version of wordpress or have your blog hacked.

Now to reinstall a sense of calm I’ve posted some classic grid systems re-imagined as modernist masterpieces.

Our last assignment for photo club was possibly our hardest, five portraits, at least one of someone we didn’t know (with the subjects consent). As it turned out I was traveling alone in Greece during the course of the assignment which meant approaching numerous strangers and asking if I could take their photo. Not all agreed, but from those that did I selected the above 5 images.

I have thoroughly enjoyed photo club and would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in taking pictures.

A lovely huge dollop of cheese, well I can’t be impossibly high brow all the time. My annual family holiday all filmed on my trustee old mobile.

Our last assignment for photo club was the very open subject of landscape. For reference we looked at a selection of very different photographers, from Joe Cornish to Jem Southam and Stephen Shore.

My take on the aforementioned Neo-Geo; Nou Geo, sure to be the next big cultural thing, or maybe the next big thing after that, or possibly the one after that, anyway you heard it here first.