MADELEINE'S HEP HERD

Smoke over Athens Originally uploaded by Ava Babili . Taken on Saturday - need I say more, after the post below...

Well, I've been rattling round the Edinburgh Festival this last three weeks and been brought up short by a phone call from my brother this morning. You see, his home is in Papagou, an eastern suburb of Athens. The news I had heard through the roar of the local arty rammy had not suggested there was any danger to them. But no! - the fires had been within 500m of the house and the family moved into the city centre for a couple of days! The phone call ended with Fergus saying "I hear sirens - we'd better go and find out what's happening!" We're a kind of "no news is good news" set of communicators in this family so I won't worry till there's something concrete to worry about. Still I can't say I'm not anxious. I've chosen this photo as symbolic of the loss of life all over Greece. It's from my last visit to Athens in 2005 and the Kaisariani Forest where it was taken is now burnt to a crisp along with so much else. What a

A Bestiary of Authors Originally uploaded by MadeleineS . A quick snap of my exhibition just before opening - not to a fanfare or a private few(view) but to the general Monday morning in July shoppers. Sunday 29 July was spent getting the final pictures into frames and breaking my nails in the process (girly boo hoo!) then getting everything hung up at Transreal. Mike was great at accurately positioning all the big framed photos like these ones and worked really hard to get it done in some awkward places. There's a real mixture of work on show - fifty two items altogether. If you need a justification for that mixture then it reflects the variety of people in the exhibition as well as the development of my practice over many years. I've been taking photos of SF & F authors for about ten years with no real plan behind it. When we decided to have the exhibition it was a big job just finding all the potential candidates in the archive and picking out a representative selec

A Bestiary of Authors Originally uploaded by MadeleineS . This is what Rex has in his mouth in the previous post.