I think of you in motion and just how close you are getting
And how every little thing anticipates you
All down my veins my heart-strings call
Are you the one that I've been waiting for?

                              Nick Cave

Another image made during the London rush-hour.  As usual, I am wandering and wondering, avoiding the tube and taxis - roaming the streets as I make my way back to a hotel or station. 

Just people-watching, really.. and bemused by the urgency of the walkers striding out, rushing to get somewhere.

But I like Nick Cave's reframe... that the walkers are being anticipated and called by strangers...

More interesting, I reckon, than just a commute home.

The Edge of Chaos, the aptly named bar at Schumacher College in Devon.

A place where, according to the complexity scientists, phase transition is liable to take place.  I've got to say, I've transited through the odd phase in there myself...

This is Sky, one of the participants on last month's Artful Organisation course.

Sky had travelled over from the States where he helps run Perque, an company attempting to transform healthcare 'speeding the transition from sickness care to healthful caring' by addressing the root causes of sickness rather than simply fixing the symptoms.  He was there to join with artists and policymakers to think about how to respond artfully, aesthetically to the economic and ecological challenges we will be facing over the next decade.

And so that's part of the Schumacher story really; bringing interesting people together in a curious, mostly slightly chaotic, but always very creative way.  

What's not to like...?

Fox Games © 1989 Sandy Skoglund

Please Note: "Fox Games": This work has been published with the permission of the artist and copyright holder Sandy Skoglund. 

I was really delighted when Sandy Skoglund gave me permission to use a copy of 'Fox Games' on Photo-Dialogue.  

I'm always keen to feel my way into a New Year with a reflection on how things are changing for me, whether as a consultant, photographer or academic and towards the end of last year it felt like some seismic shifts were in play as I defined how I intend to work with Photo-Dialogue in 2012.  So, perhaps that's why it felt important to get back to 'Fox Games'.

Back in 2003, I worked with Ashridge colleague and author John Higgins as he guided me through a visual exercise using postcards that we had purchased from the shop at the Tate Modern.  As we spread the cards on the floor of the gallery, John asked me to describe my practice as a coach and consultant through the images.

'Fox Games' was particularly significant for me - I felt it showed how I saw organisations: grey, dull places where commerce took place but where the red foxes of emotion and feeling ran wild while remaining apparently unseen and ignored. The image told me of things that I intuitively knew but had, at that time, been unable (or unwilling) to clearly articulate.  In fact, as the product of a good deal of 'formal management training' and an MBA graduate, perhaps I had been 'educated' out of taking my own experience seriously.

Following my epiphanic moment in the Tate Modern, 'Fox Games' became the cornerstone of my Master's dissertation and then continued to set the tone and agenda throughout my PhD.  It has been a remarkable and significant image for me and continues to both provoke and inform.  Now, as I use imagery of various kinds to help articulate some of the unseen dynamics within organisations or to provide the basis for coaching inerventions, the Fox Games postcard travels with me to remind me of where my personal journey into imagery and vision began.

So, you might like to attempt your own piece of art-shop photo-dialogue.

Here is a simple process:

• Immerse yourself in a problem, issue or dilemma.
• Take some time out, relax, grab a coffee and visit your local art gallery.
• Buy a few art cards, 8-10 will do. Buy anything that engages you - act intuitively - don't overthink your purchase.
• Lay out the cards in a pattern that resonates - again - don't overthink the process.
• Take a few minutes - what are the images telling you about you, your approach, how you are seeing the issue, what is the 'story' you are telling yourself?
• What other perspectives become available to you? What insights do the cards offer?
• Take a photo of your collection and the layout - on your phone will do.
• Show the images to a friend (set them up as in your previous layout)
• What do they see?  What do the images and the layout mean to them?
• Take a longer break - a few days or so - then review the images and layout again. What is significant to you now?

Good luck! Have some fun and enjoy yourself.  And be careful, an image might emerge that begins to set an amazing, compelling vision for your life and career...!

Let me know how you get on!

OK. Entirely unneccesary.... Gratuitous... I know...

But, hey, gimme a break...Indulge me... Season of goodwill and all...;-)))

Here's a Christmas picture of my girl in her new hat... (Thanks, Auntie Kath...;-)

Hope you are all still chilling after the festivities!

Steve

xx

I'm still continuing my inquiry into the curious nature of our local hunt.

Here is an image of the hunters gathering in a local town square on Boxing Day.  They pull a good crowd; it really is quite a celebration.  Before they go off for the day the riders, horses and hounds spend an hour or so standing in the square and folk come along to see the spectacle, pet the animals and say hello.

Over 300,000 people took part in the Boxing Day hunts across the country. The occasion feels both gloriously anachronistic and a signifier of tradition and community - there is a sense of heritage and lineage in all of this. In this image I notice that the town square hasn't changed much in a few hundred years and it seems like this sport hasn't either. There will continue to be more riders literally taking up the reins...

And... I always feel a little edgy with this stuff.  OK, I know I'm carrying big cameras and I'm not just part of the crowd.  And I do feel that a sport like this is probably inappropriate these days (but, hey, I think the same about football ;-).  

And then a picture like this presents itself....

This is my Ashridge colleague and Artful Practitioner, Chris Seeley, leading a morning exercise at Schumacher College in Devon. 

Chris was at Schumacher working with Chris Nichols, an Ashridge consultant with a long track record in strategy and sustainability, to deliver 'Artful Organisation'; a 4 day inquiry into the question: 

"How can organisations cultivate artful and creative ways to help re-imagine their role, relationships and themselves for a sustainable future?"

One of the key assumptions of the inquiry was that the world has now become too complex, too interconnected for us to apply logic and rationality and expect to get any sensible answers. In fact, the opposite; if we continue to think about the economic and ecological issues using the same old ways we will get the same old stuff. And with that comes the risk that we will continue along a path towards irrevocable damage of our planet...

By bringing our full 'artful' selves to our work we can creatively engage with these issues in a way that will offer new ways of thinking and being.  

So, what does artful creativity require? Courage, guts, edginess, putting yourself out there, risk, resilience... 

So this kind of work is not for the faint-hearted but one of the most matter-of-fact gutsy exponents I know is Dr. Seeley herself.  Here she is leading a 'hand dance' where participants closely mirror each other's hand movements.  

If intimacy and connectivity might set the conditions for different ways of 'being in the world' this a surprisingly interesting exercise... give it a go....

One of the enduring questions in any kind of dialogue work is how to hold a sense of the 'whole'; a view of the wider context that doesn't fragment, categorise or label parts at the expense of the bigger picture.

As photographers, we often tend to direct and confine attention - looking perhaps at our subject matter in extreme close-up, seizing a split second of the action, lifting the detail away from its background through differential focus and narrow depth of field. In fact, this tends to be a bit of a reflex action for me - portraits shot with 85mm lens at f1.4 - you know kind of thing...

Back in NYC, I felt really compelled to not separate... To tell stories in a way that held as much of the context as I could.  As I look back, I'm getting more attached to the pictures. Sure they are chaotic at first sight... but then seem to reward the extra attention...

I like the way this image holds the madness of the city while also letting us into a little moment... and lets me build my own narrative of family, intimacy, and conversation within a broader story.

I'm enjoying the freedom to roam in these shots.

f1.4 will never be the same again.

I had a somewhat magical time in Scotland at my good friend Amanda Ridings' birthday party (you might have seen Amanda here on meusblog.).

I started to take some pictures of the party as we prepared and sat down for dinner.  Nothing too special but just trying to capture... something... well, magical...  With the benefit of a few glasses of red wine and some incredible conversation I found myself pondering what exacty goes on when we 'see' someone...

I was in my car on the LONG way home when my phone pinged with this brilliant piece of work (I Saw Your Soul) from Hugh McLeod (@gapingvoid).  I've been a follower of Hugh's work at gapingvoid for ages and couldn't believe my luck.  As one of the party-goers, J, said, "You gotta love synchronicity..."

So perhaps this is the key to great photo-portraits.  This is what Hugh said:

"Intimacy isn’t strictly about romantic relationships, or even relations with family--sometimes it happens quickly, and often times in ways we hardly notice.

I’m talking about that moment when someone allows the world to see what’s inside...what they are really about. It’s about seeing someone for who and what they are and that the glimpse was offered either voluntarily or without the person’s knowledge. This is an incredible moment where our existence suddenly makes sense and all comes together in a singular place.

For those of who have experienced this, it’s something that never gets lost in memory or time. It’s like a little mirror we take out every now and then to remember a time when something so complex became so inconceivably simple. It’s pretty incredible."

So, I think that's about it. For great photo-portraits, the starting point is that you gotta see someone's soul.

It's that simple... and that difficult.

Btw - a massive thanks goes to Jason at gapingvoid ltd for giving permission to use this work.

OK, it's getting late and I should be getting ready to roll up to Scotland tomorrow... but I've been playing Alicia Keys' version of 'Empire York State of Mind' as I tap away at the computer - and suddenly remembered this kid.

I had been photographing at a New York street market (OK - not quite following the WPO 'Diner on the edge...' brief) and stopped to hang out for a coffee in a streetside deli. This young guy came up and was looking at my cameras and I took a couple of pictures of him before he wandered off.

He left me sitting by the window watching the night shoppers go by... then suddenly he reappeared walking past the shop - I instinctively raised the camera and....

"Grew up in a town,
That is famous as a place of movie scenes
Noise is always loud
There are sirens all around
And the streets are mean
If I could make it here
I could make it anywhere..."

And I wonder what story Geoff could tell about this moment...

Tomorrow is the first day of this year's fox hunting season. I live out in the sticks and it's a prettty big deal here.

So, last night, as I was reading about the Banyan Deer in Geoff Mead's new book, "Coming Home to Story" a sharp juxtaposition began to strike me. The Banyan Deer is a Buddhist parable of courage and respect; you can find a shortened version of the story here.

Today, the news is about possible amendments to the fox-hunting bill. It is, it seems, a badly written, almost unenforceable piece of law.  Commentators are saying that we shouldn't waste Parliamentary time on the debate. I remember back to the days when fox hunting was configured along battle-lines of social class and privilege...

And so the debate is shifted from how we conduct ourselves in the world - within both human and 'other-than-human' relationships - to questions of technicality. The last time I used this image on P-D a commentator noted that the conversation, at that time, had simply become one of people telling others what was right or wrong. It seems to me that, dialogically, this kind of advocacy pattern is an easy 'let-off' for all of us.

As long as we can distract ourselves from the fundamental issues all is fine...

But the lesson of The Banyan Deer is to walk straight into the heart of the matter and then stand by your principles.

However, difficult that might be.