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Showing posts from 2014

Two days in Brussels

Impressions. My pictures of Brussels can be found on flickr  here . Due to a some problem when coming back from a trip to Paris on the Eurostar, I had been given 50% off on another trip and rather than returning to Paris, I thought I would use it to go to Brussels where I had never been. I had been warned that Brussels is not a particularly pretty city. My expectations were therefore not very high, further dampened by the forecast of rain. Thankfully that rain never materialised and I was lucky to have very sunny, unseasonably hot, weather. It seems however true that Bruxelles is not the best looking of cities. The commentary on the bus tours I took extolled the merits of the city as the once capital of the second richest empire on earth, now the modern international centre of the economic and political union of over 500 million people. But, with the exceptions of a few pockets dispersed throughout the city centre, it lacks the grandeur you would expect from such a place

Women Who Eat on the Tube and street photography

I started writing this a question on the Facebook group of my photography group and it seemed to turned into something much longer, so I decided to post it here too.  Those of you based in the UK will probably have heard of the Women Who Eat on the Tube furore that's slowly leaked from social media into the mainstream news cycle. I think this raises some questions for those of us with an interest in street photography (whether just passing or more serious).  This morning the guy behind the idea was on Today defending his actions as an innocuous personal art project victim of its own success. The consensus among the critics seems to be that the whole thing is sexist and just another way for chauvinists to shame women.  Although I can see that specifically "targeting" women can be seen as a little suspicious, my understanding is that it was mostly the later (once the thing (started in 2011) got some traction) comments on those pictures that did the shaming.