Major Project Planning

I have some very loose ideas of what my major project will be so this is really just throwing some thoughts in the air and most of them are quite unrealistic. What I have been thinking and reading a lot about is the Arctic. I am fascinated by the concept of the north and the idea it seems to hold in the collective imagination as a hostile and much uninhabited place. I'm interested in the settlements/towns - the people who inhabit these places as well as the landscape that surrounds them. The idea is off course very wide and the area massive so it has to be defined in some way.
There is the white nights (24 hour light) as well as 24 hour darkness in winter (which will be hard to include in the time frame of the project).
Global warming is affecting these areas - in Alaska a whole village was moved due to erosion, seal hunters fall through the ice.
Then it is the quest for the Arctic(oil & natural gas), what some call 'the new great game'.

Some good books:
The Arctic - An Anthology (Granta)
Running with Reindeer - Encounters in Russian Lapland, Roger Took
True North, Gavin Francis

Other ideas is to expand on my coastal erosion project and maybe look at other areas in Europe or continue to photograph the Thames Estuary.

Selsey

I went down to Selsey in West Sussex just before Christmas and met with Richard Dearsley who started the action group Save our Selsey. The sea is moving in closer and closer in this area. Richard and his wife recently moved from their house on the seafront to a house further inland because it became unbearable to stay on. The sea kept crashing in to the garden and things needed constant repair.

Beautiful story on Turkey

British Journal of Photography (BJP) published a really amazing set of images about Turkey this week by photographer George Georgiou . The work is called 'Happy is he who calls himself a Turk'. The images are so layered with past and future, ideology and transition and incredibly beautiful. I just can't stop looking at them!

Hard drive failure

On New Years Day my hard drive went bust, a pretty aggravating start to 2009. Fortunately all my images were backed up so no real disaster. But I lost almost all research (my bookmarks) for this project and what I have been researching for the potential final project, emails etc, aggghhhr.... It was just one of those things I never thought of saving somewhere else. So it has been a lot of loading programs and collecting information but I'm almost back on track and ready to crack on. I had a really nice and relaxing Christmas back in Sweden and now I'm back in chaos land.