Yesterday morning I stood shivering in a Northerly breeze at Ipswich Station. I was travelling up to LCC to drop off my TW2014 entries with Keith Locke, a fellow alumni. We have done this for the last three years and make a day out of it taking in galleries, making pictures and putting the world to rights. London turned out to be baking hot and the stiff Northerly experienced in Ipswich made for a good visibility and a welcome cooling effect. Not that we spent too much time out in the sun as Tate Britain managed to keep us indoors for 4 hours. The gem of the day for me was falling into two rooms dedicated to Chris Killip. I had seen many of these images reproduced in books but it is a joy to behold, in this digital age, to cast one’s eyes over first class fibre based silver halide images with such stories to tell. I was minded of my Liverpool Echo series from 1972. I’m not placing myself in his category but the type of urban desecration especially with the nature of the buildings is something of a lost era. What was poignant was the shots of the same street at Tyneside over time as the ship building declined and the whole community dissolved with it.

The Whitechapel Gallery phased me a little with the current configuration but then it is always a challenging venue.

The dalliance in galleries during the day caused us to miss the the 1600 so we had to waste 3 hours bumming around Brick Lane soaking up the ever changing street art and then the slow train home which also meant missing out at the Freudian Sheep event but the Twitter alert on my very old Nokia 6310i had me curious enough to grab the iPad when I got in and what a lovely review it was too from Simon Robinson commenting on emerging photographers from the recent Free Range exhibitions.

All in all a grand day out and a nice little red to finish the evening off too.