Anna Fox – ‘Cockroach Diary’

To whoever alerted me to Anna Fox’s work, thank you thank you thank you! And if this is the first you’ve heard of Fox’s work, you’re welcome!

You may know that I have a love for the so-called onnanoko shashin era of Japanese photography. The diaristic work of Yurie Nagashima and Hiromix is the sort of work I wish I could make and when I need some inspiration, I grab one of their books first. Well, at about the same time Hiromix was blowing up, Anna Fox was living in a flat on the other side of the world, making what amounts to, in my imagination, a British version of pretty much the same sort of work. Her rather rare Cockroach Diary is a sort of zine/book facsimile of a diary she kept between 1996 and 1999, when she lived in a roach infested squat flat with a shifting group of friends, and it’s really incredible.

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Scenes from the Garden

I’ve been in something of a photographic funk lately. As of 18 September, 2021, I had 4 cameras with film in and three rolls awaiting development, and had no interest in doing anything with any of them.

I pulled myself out of this funk long enough to develop the three rolls—*yawn—and here are some scenes from the garden.

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The Curious Society No. 1

I first heard about The Curious Society is a nonprofit organization created to support and promote photojournalism and documentary photography. To this end, they publish a large, rather lavish quarterly magazine, provide education and training opportunities, and offer a small grant to college students, among other things. I first heard about the Society maybe a year ago. I was intrigued by their mission and purpose, but was in debt reduction mode and balked at the membership price. Despite following them on Instagram, I forgot all about the group until a couple of weeks ago and, feeling flush for a brief moment, I went ahead and joined.

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Wide Angle Battle – The Final Round

To be honest, I just wanted an excuse to shoot the Wai Wai. I loaded it up and had it sitting when the trip to Mom’s came up, and spur-of-the-moment decided to see if it could be bested by any of the other wide angle cameras in my stable. I was biased, and strongly so. I love the Wai Wai.

And then I started scanning…

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Wide Angle Battle – the Consolation round

Really, it was close… sorta. I knew headed in that the plastic cameras would win over the LC-W, and the inclusion of the super-fancy FM3a/17-35mm f/2.8 was so spur-of-the-moment that I didn’t even really consider it. But here we are.

After those few days at Mom’s and a week of round-robins, the LC-W and FM3a did objectively better, in every way, than the all plastic Konica Wai Wai and Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim… every way, that is, than producing photographs that I wanted to look at.

So which did better at making “bad” pictures?

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Wide Angle Battle, Round 4: Driving and the River

The mid-summer 2021 trip to Mom’s was short, and after only 3 days, I headed back home. The drive home from Mom’s taught me a good lesson over the years: I’m one who almost always eats my spinach before I have my dessert. That is, I save the best for last. It’s an ok policy, though it means I eat loads of spinach and sometimes—sometimes too often—have no dessert at all. When driving from the lovely Ozark mountains down to the Metroplex, one can’t really save the best for last… The twisty mountain roads too-quickly give way to flat, straight superhighway.

These days, I often stop at the public boat launch on the White River that I pass on my way out of the mountains. For Round 4 of the Wide Angle Battle, let’s see how three 17mms—the LC-W, FM3a & 17-35D, and the WaiWai—handle things.

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