“The reward … is sweet nectar. But if an insect comes to collect it and strays into the mouth of the trumpet — then it’s doomed. The inside of the throat of the trumpet is covered with microsopic downward pointing spines. As long as it stays on the rim, the ant is all right but if it strays off it, it falls into a pond of water and drowns. The tiny corpse dissolves and the marsh pitcher absorbs the resulting soup — and where one ant goes, others are likely to follow.”
David Attenborough
“The villagers were absolutely hypnotised by all these wonderful magic images flashing over her wrist. They had only ever seen one spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and shocking and had caused so much horrible devastation, fire and death that, stupidly, they had never realised it was entertainment.”
Douglas Adams
“Until five o’clock we did not see anything. Then, without the glasses, I saw something moving over the shoulder of one of the valleys toward a strip of the timber. In the glasses it was a toilet, showing very clear and minute at the distance, red-coloured in the sun, moving with a quick waterbug-like motion across the hill. Then there were three more of them that came out of the forest, dark in the shadow, and two that fought, tinily, in the glasses, pushing head-on, fighting in front of a clump of bushes while we watched them and the light failed. It was too dark to get down the hill, across the valley and up the narrow slope of mountain side to them in time for a shot. So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot, walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we saw the firelight in the trees.”
My apologies to Ernest Hemingway.
Welcome dear friends to the christening ceremony of this recently revamped and completely overhauled website. A new site with a new look demands new content. Voila! The Porto-toilets of Moscow! What could be more appropriate? Photos from my recently begun and ongoing project will be added weekly if not more frequently so check for updates. And just exactly what am I talking about….?
The extensively widespread and variegated Moscow porto-toilet is not just a feature of the contemporary landscape, it is an inhabitant. It is a creature, a member of the urban biosphere. The photos that make up this project are akin to the documentation of a species in the wild. In this activity I am photographer, biologist and naturalist.
This photograph could have been taken by anyone. So could any other photo. There is nothing special in the fact that you or I or Phil took the picture. Photographs like ideas simply exist around us, floating in the aether, waiting to be appropriated. This is why Newton and Leibniz simultaneously invented calculus. And for this reason pictures taken by me are not mine. Nor are the ones you take yours. My responsibility for their creation is secondary. They’re still out there for someone else if I don’t take them — for anyone else.