These pictures were taken the day after the storm. I documented most of the destruction that the storm left along the seafront on film, so these are mostly just my usual kind of ordinary street shots after I had seen enough.

All pictures taken with: Olympus Pen E-PL3 and Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 ASPH.

There had been some flooding in the parte vieja.

Nice glasses … not.

Look at that!

You will notice a disproportionally large number of bums in this set. They seemed to be everywhere.

Yep, here too.

It looks like the three of them are going for a walk together.

Umbrellas for the weather up there.

A shot across the bay from near the harbour. I was hoping to see some sunken boats, but I guess they got them to float again the day before.

Disproportionate number of helmets as well.

Looks heavy.

Two helmets for one person?!

Corporate Doppelgänger.

I like the dust in the background. Nice on the picture, but it wasn’t too pleasant to walk through it.

There was a bit of police tape left over from the day before.

Not sure who’s more likely to bite.

Yep, I agree. Too damn cold these days.

Waiting for the bus. Not me obviously, I was just walking past there.

More bums …

Dog in training?

Gesturing while talking on the phone is pretty useless. I admit that I do it as well at times.

 

Great news, I’ve finally finished editing all the pictures from last year! What a chore! Remind me never to get this behind in my editing again. I only have a couple days of recent pictures left and those are easy to manage on the side. Right now I’m listening to John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire while editing and I’m almost through with it as well. With an hour here or there spent on editing, getting through audiobooks is actually quite fast. Normally I need something to do with my hands while listening to audiobooks. Editing is perfect for it, since most of it doesn’t need a great deal of attention.

These next few days I will try to finish my Memory project. I will attempt to get the selection down to 100 pictures – at the moment I have around 150, so it will be tough. There is also a bit of text that needs to be written and then I’m actually done with it apart from a few shots that might need re-scanning. I’m quite pleased with the results, I have to say. The pictures seem to reflect the atmosphere that I had in mind. For it to become the book I imagine though it will still need some more work though. 

The next project I want to finish is my Down Below project – another book project by the way. At the moment I’m entirely unsure how much progress I’ve made on it, since I haven’t collected the pictures in one place yet. Will it be enough for a book yet or do I need to shoot more? Of course, if you look at my blog there are tons and tons of subway pictures, but of course not all of them reach the standard I have in mind for the book. Here the next step in the process is to collect and select.

Apart from all these efforts I’m again in a sort of reading frenzy. They occasionally overcome me without warning, so that I become obsessed with one writer or another. Sometime last year I spent a couple of months reading a lot of Michel Foucault’s writing until I became distracted again. Similar phases have involved W.G. Sebald, Paul Auster, Isaac Asimov and actually quite a number of serious Science Fiction writers. That said, occasionally when I believe myself to be “on holiday” I also indulge in rather silly popular entertainment like Harry Potter or the Game of Thrones, but rarely actually. The earliest such obsessions with (serious) writing I remember was one with Hermann Hesse by the way. I believe that I read most of his works when I was a teenager. This time I have picked Walter Benjamin. Or maybe Benjamin picked me, it’s never quite clear. I have read his most famous works before – they are relatively short and accessible -, but I have never studied his writing in detail. Considering how popular he is with the Media and Cultural Studies crowd – my old field of study – this is actually somewhat surprising. Time to close a gap in my education. (My education on the cultural side of things seems to consist mainly of gaps to be honest. This is due to the terrible practice of universities nowadays to only give students the time to read excerpts of major works rather than the entirety of them. Well, time is money and universities, especially the Humanities have become quite poor.)