Perous Secret Diary - Keep Out: April 21, 2011

one of us...

over breakfast at the rough luxe, i picked up 'the times' and was surprised to see a full page picture of tim hetherington on the front cover.
the caption just mentioned who he was and about his oscar nomination for 'restrepo'.

couldn't see why he was on the cover: didn't seem to relate to the 'slaughter in misrata' headline.
wasn't until i read on that it hit me, very hard.

i didn't know tim personally, but i know people who did.
weirdly, i thought i knew him a little after watching andrew hetherington's sweet short last year, 'meet the hetheringtons'

shocking, terrible waste of life.
not to say that the libyan civilians who are dying everyday out there isn't as terrible a waste of life too.
but the reality comes home when you when you put a person to the statistic.

RIP tim

the office 9am thursday morning

it's kind of hard to get excited about doing 'another modelling, reality tv show' when you're thinking about people dying in libya and tsunamis and shit.

but life goes on, right...?

i remember returning from bosnia, back in the day (of the war there) and meeting a bosnian guy at a party in london who was talking about fleeing his country dressed as a woman to get through checkpoints.
his whole family had been killed.

i felt SO embarrassed because i wasn't someone like tim hetherington doing something worthy photographing the suffering and genocide in bosnia: i'd been out there for Q magazine with the USSO, where 'hootie and the (fucking) blowfish' were playing to the marines.
how pathetic.

but this guy was saying that it was actually really important for the people in such terrible places to be able to read about music and fashion: frivial things to take their minds off the horror of their existence.
maybe he was being unecessarily kind

i still feel embarrassed about this.
even if the band had been better: HA!

i think documentary photography and film is the most worthy, pure form of what we can do.

all the rest is fluff and nonsense.
welcome to my life

super pro

i've renamed this model.

when people phone her agent to book her, i want them to have to say,  'can i get a first option on 'super pro' please?'

sunset over camp basildon

i surprised everyone, including myself, by being able to hold my breath for a fair long while (20-30secs?) under 20ft of water all afternoon.
(one cannot operate a camera on oxygen tanks until you hold a grade 4 commercial diver's cert)

deep breath

sink/ pull myself down 20ft, equalising my ear pressures on the way.

get passed 5d in an underwater housing and shoot like a bunny (rabbit fish) till i can hold the breath no longer and jettison myself back to the surface for another lungful of air.

repeat for 5hrs

so truly fucked by the end of the day it was unfunny.

RTF feeling sick and shaking with a bad headache.

what i do for a living IS silly but i still have to work hard at it.

aqua boy out