Barcelona in Black and White

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My film is finally processed and the results are in. Except for the roll that’s still in the camera. And I think I lost one somewhere. And some of them I shot with my phone and turned B&W later. Let’s get going.

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Yes, here we are in Barcelona at the entrance of the world-famous Sagrada Familia. Yes, I see a man murdering a baby, immortalised in stone and an underdressed chap about to enter this house of God. But that’s OK, it’s Tuesday so he needn’t need his Sunday best.

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As you can see, it’s ludicrously overdetailed. You’ve got to hand it to the Catholic Church for the predication for decoration in the teeth of taste but my personal theory is that the stonemasons must have been paid by the hour.

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See? This is on the other side and there’s a cubist motif. Clearly these masons were paid by the job.

To visit the big Gaudi church, the beating heart of Barcelona, one should book ahead. You need to book a slot on a particular time and date and not be late. I recommend paying the extra money to go up a tower as it’s the only place to escape the Instagram creators who are hogging the ground floor. We paid EUR36. Each.

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The view is pretty good though.

But, how did we get here? How do Sachie and I find ourselves overlooking the city of Barcelona, on a Tuesday? The thing is, we’d already got a good look at Barcelona’s premier tourist attraction.

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Kind of pretty, isn’t it? Here’s another look.

Lomo Earl Gray 100
Lomo Earl Gray 100

One can book a two-hour block at a hotel rooftop bar with this excellent view of the Sagrada Familiar. They’ll let you stay longer as long as you keep buying drinks. We had a wonderful sunny afternoon.

Lomo Earl Gray 100

Magnificent.

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You have to book and I can’t tell you how as our friends did it for us but the hotel is the Sercotel Rosellón. Definitely worth a visit as the view is fabulous. We could have spent hours up there, in fact, we did.

Our first view of Gaudi’s magnificent erection was from our hotel room window, not to brag, but here’s a much better view.

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If you’ve been there before you may know we are at Turó de la Rovira which Mr Google informs me translates from the Catalan for Rovira Hill. It’s otherwise known as Battery Hill because there was an anti-aircraft emplacement sited here during the civil war. A good spot as it gives commanding views of the whole city.

It’s typical for the locals to venture up with a bottle of wine to enjoy the sunset. That sounded like a terribly romantic way to enjoy our first evening in the city so we bought a bottle of cava, some plastic champagne flutes and got a taxi up the hill. First warning was a lady in a vest wouldn’t let the car go more than halfway up.

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It was a long weekend and the first nice Saturday for a month and the peak was packed with hip young people, not entirely unlike ourselves. The trouble is the fuzz turned up before we could even pop the cork on our first bottle of cava for the trip. About five rozzers turned up to tell everyone the party was over and to “Vamoose!” I thought it was pretty cool that we’d only been in the country about five hours before getting in trouble with the jacks but the old man in me thought it was a good idea as it was very crowded and only a matter of time before somebody fell over and hurt themselves.

The next morning I was up at 6am for an excursion we had arranged with Mrs Sachie’s local friends. Turns out he slept in so we went to Parc del Laberint d’Horta instead, on the subway.

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The gardens, in the English style, used to be part of the estate for a rich fellow and there’s a big house on the site that was once grand and is now a shell. It’s being restored but the gardens are in much better nick.

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The highlight was and honest-to-god hedge maze. I have never had a go at one myself and was eagerly anticipating freezing to death in it like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, even though I’m a Danny. I was crap at the maze and it looks like I wasn’t the first as there was evidence that some people had just pushed through the hedge at some points. The photograph above is at the end. Mrs Sachie was kind enough to lead us out.

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While I thought I was pretty old school for capturing the scene on classic black and white celluloid this lass was using oils. Here’s a better view of the maze.

Kodak 400 TMAX
Kodak 400 TMAX
Kodak 400 TMAX
Kodak 400 TMAX
Kodak 400 TMAX

It’s after the park that we went to the rooftop bar. The next day, a Monday and Catalonian independence day we went on our excursion to Girona. Now, if there’s one way I could describe Girona it would be ‘Fucking Awesome!’, pardon my Spanish Catalan. The walk from the train station takes one through the newer parts of town.

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Pixel 6 phone
Pixel 6 phone
Pixel 6 phone

Yep, pretty much all gross 20th-century consumerism. Tourist trash. Actually this part of town is quite charming and beloved of cyclists. Lance Armstrong used to live here and left a testicle, apparently. It has a river.

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The river has otters living in it, in town, where this photo was taken. It was very cool. Incidentally, this photograph was taken from a bridge.

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It’s just a little footbridge but it was designed by our old friend Gustave Eiffel, of Budapest railway station fame. However, the real gold is in the old part of town. And when I say old, I mean medieval, or even older.

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When I say old I mean Roman times. I expect there was a settlement before that but history starts with the Roman Empire for many people so that’s good for me. There is a church that used to be a Roman temple.

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A lot of people make a fuss about the stairs.

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They are impressive but apparently they played a leading role in a Game of Thrones episode. Later, walking about, I did get the feeling that I was in some kind of fantasy film of history flic. That’s because this is where they film them.

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Looks nice.

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The basilica was very impressive but its museum was the real winner, we invested heavily in gift-shop merch of the Creation Tapestry, but more on that another day. We notice that the ticket also got us entry to the town cathedral.

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It’s pretty nice too.

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This post is about shooting on B&W film and I have a bunch of other shots, mostly of stone stairs and walls but, by Christ, my camera is heavy. It’s made of magnesium but you could hammer nails with it because in the 60s they made things properly. But it’s time for a beer and a feed.

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Not Gothic vaults but they’ll have to do for lunch. At 4pm.

That’s it for this entry. There are more photos to come but I’ll have to get them processed. Stay tuned and I’ll link a gallery of my colour shots here once I get it done.

FARANG Magazine July 2005

There is a theory in magazine sales that says that people buy them more if there is an attractive woman on the cover. So you could be publishing a model train magazine, a botany newsletter or a car-trader’s quarterly but you’d better put a lady with big boobs in a swimsuit on the cover or you’re not going to shift them and your distributor will want to kill you.

FARANG Magazine Master Post

Not many people know this but I once rose to become Managing Editor of FARANG Untamed Travel Magazine and steered that noble ship right onto the rocks of bankruptcy in 2007, helped along by founders Cameron Cooper and Jim Algie.

In many ways those years were the best of my life and I will write some recollections someday but for now, as Head Archivist, I want to present some PDFs of the mag as it was more than 15 years ago.

On this post you’ll find an index to FARANG-related works organised in a pleasing and easy to access manner. Sorry there’s a bunch missing and some of the PDF renders aren’t tip-top but we were not very good at keeping digital copies organised back then. I’ll try to fill in the blanks so check back if you’re missing something.

FARANG Magazine August 2005

Here’s another cover from me. Ice-T was performing at Q-Bar and we had special access. Earlier in the week Jim Algie and I went to interview the chap for the story you’ll find inside. On the night of his performance we’d hired a famous rock’n’roll photographer from London whose model-1 digital SLR didn’t get a single good shot. I took this one with Jim’s Fuji digital, which was terrible. Deadline night had me downloading the CCD profile and discovering new ways to de-fuzz digital photos, which were still fairly new.

FARANG Magazine September 2005

Well this is an important issue. This is the fourth anniversary and the last that we would see of the FARANG masthead, instead moving to Untamed Travel. It’s also the Japan special so we have Momo from local cool-band Futon. This was a well-organized effort. We did the cover shoot in Bed Supperclub, which turned out to be a fantastic studio during the day — the end wall was all frosted glass and the interior all white, giving a wonderfully diffuse, natural light. I was directing the late Dan White for the shoot, a talented Fleet Street photographer and a friend I miss very much. The shoot went very well with many candidates for the cover. More on that later.

I was to do my famous Bartripping column this month with Momo so a few days after the shoot we went to mutual friend DJ Octo’s new bar in what was then up-and-coming Thong Lo. I’ll confess I was a little excited for this assignment as it meant taking out a cool and sexy Japanese lady who is in a band and would flash her knickers at gigs. I was 31 at the time so knew to play it cool but before I could even get drunk and make a tit of myself she fucked off. Worried about some chap she was keen on or some such. Smacks of unprofessionalism but there you go.

More trouble was to come when the mag hit the shelves. At the shoot Dan and I had isolated two or three frames that we thought would make good covers and, having got the goods, went back to the office. When deadline night arrived Executive Editor Cameron Cooper made the executive decision to go with the one you see here. Not my first choice but I don’t sign the cheques.

And there I was at my desk on a late afternoon in my cubbyhole by the toilet when I got a call from our Japanese friend. She was not happy at all with the cover image and was on a roll. I tried to explain that the models don’t get to choose the cover but eventually had to put her on to Cameron where I witnessed, for the first time since or before, motormouth Cooper not being able to get a word in edgewise. The whole thing was probably worth it for that.