Surveillance

My mind is still active at this hour and I'm sitting here suddenly concerned by the amount of surveillance and scrutiny of our every movement there is on the internet. I am guilty of a modest amount - I'm quite interested in where people access this page from and I guess not surprisingly the majority of logons are from the UK but some sites record logon ids, IP addresses, time of day. I suppose if I was running a business web site I would be interested to know that but otherwise it smacks a little of Big Brother in the George Orwell sense of the word.

Anyway for the record here are the usage stats for this site over the last month :

United Kingdom (70.32%)
United States (14.84%)
Unknown (not sure what this can be - maybe Internet cafes) (8.52%)
Estonia (1.46%)
Sweden (1.22%)
Canada (0.97%)
Australia (0.49%)
Israel (0.49%)
Norway (0.24%)
Portugal (0.24%)
Spain (0.24%)
Denmark (0.24%)
Turkey (0.24%)
Czech Republic (0.24%)
Belgium (0.24%)

Almost into another decade

Image : Shop Door in Mumbles on a Christmas Day 2008 Walk (c) Rhys Jones

It seems just yesterday that we were in 1999 and on the threshold of a new millennium and now already a decade has passed. Just thinking back to that period, the internet was quite new to most people and operated over a 56Kb dial up phone line and was very slow. Images and sound files took an eternity to transmit. Email was the 'new' way to communicate then. Now we have all the technology we need to set up a recording studio in our front room and take photographs, put them into an on-line album and send that album half way round the world.

The great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams was also an enthusiastic mailer - of the traditional kind - using the US Postal Service. He wrote letters to photographers, his parents, politicians, writers, artists,kids throughout the whole of his life. I wonder what he would have made of blogging -I think he probably would have been very enthusiastic about having a platform for his work and his views -although I believe his work would have spoken for him had he not chosen to engage in this medium.

I must say that I've met some very interesting people since 1999 when I first took to thecyberspace highway and I doubt if I would have encountered them otherwise. It is interesting that phones with video cameras embedded in them have not taken off as predicted in 1999 - the idea of being able to see someone at the other end of a phone does not seem to have had the same appeal - possibly because of the cost involved.

Sundsvall, Sweden from the air (c) Rhys Jones, 2005

First post for a while, so I guess I must have been keeping my visual self to myself! This week I am giving a presentation to a local exporters association - the theme of the evening is Scandinavia. I'll be talking about my experiences of going on a Trade and Cultural Mission with the Swansea Business Centre  almost exactly 3 years ago in 2005. I made some good contacts and in August 2007 I had an exhibition of my work in Sundsvall City Hall. Sundsvall is in the Swedish Midlands about 3-4 hours north of Stockholm by train. Not sure who all the other speakers will be, but it is normally a good mix of people from the media, small enterprises and experts in exporting. In these times of 'credit crunch' it is even more difficult to export services and goods.

Walestonia Exhibition

Photographers, Annika Haas, Birgit Puve and Age Peterson (c) Rhys Jones October 2008

I went to the opening of an exhibition in Cardiff by three photographers from Estonia : Annika Haas, Birgit Puve and Age Peterson (pictured above). They have spent eight years documenting the people and landscapes of communities in a region called Prichudie around the western shore of Lake Peipus which divides Estonia and Russia. The ancestors of the current communities were refugees from Russia called 'Old Believers' who resisted reforms of the Patriarch Nikon in the Russian Orthodox Church after he came to power in 1654.

A very absorbing and interesting exhibition - it reminded me of the images taken by the American photographer Paul Strand when he documunted the communities of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland back in the 1950s.

I was interviewed by an Estonian TV Arts Programme OP! which aired on 21 October. It will eventually be placed in their archive so I hope to be able to share a link to the programme about their visit to Wales.

Horizons Exhibition

Poster Design (c) Jo Mazelis

If you can make it along to the Norwegian Church Arts Centre Cardiff, Wales 10-30 November 2008 you'll be able to view a collaborative exhibition that I'm involved with. I'm working with four other artists : Dan Staveley, Gemma Copp, Jonathan Powell and Ann Jordan to produce an exhibition on the theme of Horizons. 

On Saturday 29 November 12.30 - 15.30 there will be a private view with the artists and a performance by writers and poets Susan Richardson and Emily Hinshelwood - reading poems from their collections of works.

If you can keep your head......

Market Stall Display : Calais, France August 2007 (c) Rhys Jones

.....when those around are losing theirs and meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.....words written in the 1930s by Rudyard Kipling. The last few weeks have shown that one can't take anything for granted. There's no easy answer as to how the world is going to recover from looks like an economic recession. Just an observation from me as someone who likes to keep things simple - if we concentrate on using just what we need and buying food from the locality in which we live and at the time of year that nature determines then we might put the brakes on food travelling 25,000 miles to get to our plate, lorries on the road day and night moving the food around , complicated cross-border currency transactions to pay for it and excessive profits being generated for multinational giant companies. We would perhaps return to supporting our local traders, only buying what we need. Less fuel is consumed, less vehicles could be on the road, less pollution could result and maybe over time it could really have an impact on global warming and also on our health.

Too simple ? maybe ? As an asthma sufferer I have certainly noticed a difference with less vehicles being on the road because people can't pay for the fuel and are also thinking about unnecessary journeys and alternative methods of transport.

Personality Types

Image - River Wylye, Stoford, Wiltshire (c) Rhys Jones 2008

My Swedish friend, Lina Kvist, has an interesting personality test on her blog 'Famous Last Words' http://oxycay628.blogspot.com/

I used to teach some courses a few years ago where the Carl Jung -Isabel Myers-Briggs testing methodology was used to help determine the profile of students on the course.

If you want to have a go at the test you can do it here - http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp but be as honest as you can otherwise the garbage-in garbage-out rule will apply and you won't get the most accurate assessment.

As with everything the results should be interpreted with a health-warning and ideallly should be reviewed with a trained professional but they do give an insight into the complexities of our personalities. As a photographer it can help get obtain good results to try and understand the personality of the subject as well as you can - and maybe the subject should have an insight into the personality of their photographer since it is a 50-50 partnership!

For the record my personality came out ENFJ -some anlaysis of that here

http://www.personalitypage.com/ENFJ.html