A little light on the subject

Well, whattaya know? I've finally crawled my way to 500 blips!

It's been a rather more sedate journey since I completed my 365 but I got here in the end and I'm still enjoying the whole blip experience very much even though I'm not quite as 'present' as I once was...

Life is likely to stay fairly crowded over the coming months and there are lots of aspects of it that I want to focus on - in addition to the photographic ones - and changes that I want to make.

However, rest assured that I'll continue to follow your blip lives with interest and enthusiasm even if my available 'comment time' becomes further reduced, as I fear it will. This is a wonderful community to be part of and my fellow blippers remain a source of inspiration and support to me in many, many ways.

Oh, and I also intend to keep posting pictures in my current 'as and when' style!

So... Today I had a visit from Notebooker who accompanied me to the Glam! exhibition at Tate Liverpool. But not before stopping for refreshments at The Bluecoat, where she assisted with this photo session under my Prima Donna-ish art direction... "Make me laugh! Make me laugh again!" etc etc. No pressure!

I'd heard mixed reviews of the exhibition but I enjoyed it despite thinking that the title was a bit of a misrepresentation. To me it was less about the glam rock era of the early 70s and more of an exploration of how various art scenes and 'underground' lifestyles of the 60s had become co-opted/adopted by the pop mainstream in time to brighten up my youth! And how, in turn, the baton had been passed to subsequent scenes... Particularly punk, post-punk and New Romanticism.

Notebooker and I had some interesting conversations about gender and sexuality in all of this and noted how (largely) exclusive of women the whole glam scene had been - despite its emphasis on (apparently male-defined) androgyny. I did spot a solitary reference to feminism in the exhibition... Not much really, given that the years it was covering were essentially the mid 60s to mid 70s!

Anyway, I'm glad I went! One of the high points for me was looking at some photos by Pennie Smith (yes, a woman!) from a 1974 issue of the NME and realising how big an influence she was on my understanding of what portrait photography is all about. I was too young to have been aware of her oeuvre in 1974 but just 3 or 4 years later her pictures of The Clash and other bands made an indelible mark on me - and her book The Clash: Before & After remains a favourite of mine.

A good day.