Quis Est Iste Qui Venit

June 25, 2017

‘I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over, Professor,’ said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography… This is the first sentence of the story ‘O whistle and I’ll come to you my lad‘, if you don’t know it, I cannot recommend it too highly. Though it is somewhere in the murky area of ghost and horror fiction, not of the grand guignol school, but of the creepy unnerving type that lurks about in the dark corners of your room after you have read the final word, so forewarned is …

The Indefinitive Moment

June 20, 2017

Much of the vocabulary around photography is about stopping time for us to examine it, that decisive moment notion that the purpose of photography is to capture the fleeting and from that flows the idea that there is some ownership of what is in essence a coincidence. This is further compounded by the notion that there are some special photographers whose shutterclicks are some how more precise, more intelligent, more special than those of mere mortals and with that magical gesture they are better at seeing than the rest of us. Well permit me to say, that is just bollocks. …

This isn’t a suntan and I haven’t been on holiday

June 2, 2017

So I got my first “You’ve got a lovely suntan” of June yesterday. The person who asked me realised half way through that she was asking a potentially problematic question and veered off into the world of holidays and sunshine, but the damage was done. It didn’t help that I was at an opening and the people I was with had been at the sauce for a while so their I’m going to pretend I don’t know how much that pisses Tina off faces didn’t quite coalesce fast enough for my new friend to not catch it and start looking …

Gas and Garbage

May 19, 2017

In July 1991 I arrived at Gdynia, the Polish seaport where the cracks in communism had not long since opened up into crevasses and swallowed a 70 year old ideology. I arrived on a boat from Tilbury because I had thought it would be a really cool way to arrive in Poland. We had sailed up the River Tees for some reason on our journey and I’d witnessed the last gasps of the heavy industry that had informed Ridley Scott’s landscape in Blade Runner. Then we’d sailed over Denmark and into the Baltic finally stopping at the green and rusty …

An Elizabethan Poem in an Unexpected Place

January 8, 2017

So I am sitting next to my semi-conscious mother on the medical assessment ward and I suddenly find Thomas Wyatt’s “they flee from me that sometime did me seek” sloshing about in my head. Until now I had always thought it the self dramatising lament of a roué in his cups having just been knocked back by a teenage waitress. But right now it seems entirely appropriate. Most of the patients on the medical assessment unit are old. Properly old. My mother will be 90 on Wednesday if she survives, and I am not sure she is the oldest. Everyone is …

I am not an atheist, however…

January 6, 2017

I just had a ‘discussion’ with an american christian on twitter. He ended up asking me if I was a liberal theologian. I have never been asked that before. I’m liberal, I’m educated and particularly interested in history and religion because they are so intertwined, but the very idea that I would have to be a theologian to think the way I do about faith and god and all of he other stuff was kind of shocking and completely hilarious if you know anything about the way i was bought up, which was as an atheist, not a ranty dawkins …

Surface and Light

November 9, 2016

We put up our first e5Process Exhibition in the Archive Gallery at the Rose Lipman Library, ex-home of my old alma mater Open School East in mid November. An exhibition of experimental photography practice from the E5 Process Darkroom Collective. Archive Gallery, Mill Co Project, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London N1 5SQ. Artists: Guy Paterson Tina Rowe Ben Bradish Douglas Nicolson Sebnem Ugural Liz Loveless Adrian Ensor Pauline Morphett Rachel Thomson Balint Bolygo Event Photos on Facebook

My Mother’s House

September 9, 2016

My mother lives in a care home. She sits in a chair with her back to the window alone watching television all day. My brother recently put one of those convex blind spot mirrors so she could see out of the window like the The Lady of Shalott. Her life is arranged on two shelves and in various draws in an area of roughly 2 square meters. She refuses to go to the communal rooms because ‘it is full of dotty old people who can’t talk sense’ and that is to some degree true as there is everything in this …

My practice went to Barcelona and all I got was this tiny badge.

June 18, 2016

I have been on an artistic exchange in the Catalan village of Vilassar de Dalt as part of the Revela-t analogue photo festival with nine other artists and it was great. Well the first night when we almost had to walk 10km back to hostel wasn’t a high point and if I am honest sitting through a movie in Catalan subtitled in Spanish before that was also not a high point and I won’t bore you with the details of the full English tribute breakfast I had for dinner which to be honest was definitely not a high point, …

invective

May 19, 2016

I was angry with someone recently, not annoyed, but angry at the way they have behaved. This isn’t a person I have ever particularly liked, but I didn’t dislike them either. But now they have capped off already questionable behaviour with some low level hostility that has stuck in my craw and I had been internalising all of this into a stupid bat of paranoia with which I had been beating myself up and as a result, work came to a bit of a halt. Well not entirely as I started mulling over a project and slowly working on the constituent parts, kind of like taking …

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Tina Rowe