After a morning of rain, backed by a forecast of a wet weekend ahead, I was not hopeful as we took off from Bilbao in search of Gernika. But,  a couple of hours later, with the sun in the sky, we rounded the bend of the very scenic, but empty coastal road we were following and found Lekeito. Here’s the town itself -

After an hour or so here, walking along the beach, we headed off for our next destination, Donastia, or San Sebastian, which I cannot recommend enough; another beautiful, if much larger, sandy bay with blue skies, sandy beaches – and to out amazement, as we sipped a gin and tonic, dolphins, leaping in the bay.

For the last night of our trip we stayed in a small village outside San Sebastian called Getaria. The weather did turn wet at this point, unfortunately, but not before I was able to geek out down at the beach, with my tripod and a newly acquired “Big Stopper”.

If I go on any more about how wonderful I thought the Basque Country was – the coastal region we saw, at least – I’d sound as if I was in the pay of their Tourist Board. But it is awesome.

Above is Omar Zingaro Bhatia, an award-winning artist with a show of his work opening soon at the Briggait, in Glasgow. In conversation, as we made some photographs, Omar told me a little of his extraordinary life – born in East Africa, lived in Romania…the list goes on. Omar is an artist working in many media and you can find a more complete version of his life story along with much else besides, at his blog here.

Saturday afternoon was spent among straw and canvas, building the set and then lighting the shot. The lighting was relatively problem-free; the hardest challenge in fact was finding the right positioning for the shoes. We tried just about every possibility, and the shot we finally chose for the cover was just about the last shot we took. Perseverance pays off.

In our topsy turvy world the book trade is just as much in flux as anything else. The demise of the high-street bookstore and the advent of eBook technology is posing some interesting questions. Many writers get quite exercised at the way the existing publishing system is fairly solidly stacked in favour of the publisher and against the writer. And that’s without mentioning the sensitive subject of royalties.

Beatrice is a successful writer whose earlier novel The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite was a Richard and Judy book club choice. Although disappearing act was previously published in the US, Beatrice has decided to publish it in the UK as a Kindle book available on Amazon, doing everything herself, without recourse to a publisher. This is new ground. The new medium of eBooks potentially tosses all the traditional elements of publishing in the air, and it’s too early to say where they will land.

But occasionally a landscape or set of weather conditions come together in a way that makes for both good colour and good black and white images. Above and below are a couple of shots taken back in December 2010 when we had very icy and snowy conditions – and on this particular day, fog as well.

This weekend’s Guardian magazine (12/03/11) carries a ten page article on recent work by UK-based photographer Zed Nelson entitled Disappearing Britain, and from which the image above comes. Nelson, who won much acclaim for his previous books Gun Nation (a photographic essay on America’s obsession with guns) and Love Me (concerned with the beauty industry) has for some years now been photographing the traditional jobs, sports and leisure pursuits that characterize Britain, and which are passing into extinction.

The fact that the Guardian magazine is prepared to devote ten pages of its weekend magazine to the work of a single photographer is a matter for rejoicing in itself. The magazine is one of the few places in the mainstream print press where you can regularly find fantastic photographs, often by some of the best portrait photographers working – including the likes  of Nadav Kander, Stefan Vanfleteren and Matthias Braschler. Four cheers for the Guardian!!!!

Nelson’s photographs (you can find quite a few examples on Zed’s website – see link above, under Disappearing Britain)  all shot in black and white with an identical background, feature uniforms, strips and costumes as an integral part of the concept. They look fantastic. The Guardian article has an accompanying write-up by Blake Morrison, who throws in a few references to Avadon and Bert Hardy. However the comparison that came more immediately to my mind was with Irving Penn’s seminal series from 1950 and 1951, Small Trades. In these pictures, Penn – one of the great portrait photographers – captured images of a diverse range of workers in Paris, London and New York for Vogue.

I had the pleasure of photographing one of the contributors to the first edition, the writer/playwright Oliver Emanuel (above/below)

Photo: Phillip Toledano

It’s always great to come across stuff that connects with something you’ve been struggling with or thinking about yourself. I have recently been enjoying the work of  American photographer Phillip Toledano, whose work has great range but at the same time tremendous consistency of style and approach, always with a strong conceptual core. The photograph above comes from his series “A New Kind of Beauty” – photographs of people who have undergone plastic surgery. Toledano did this series at the same time as he was taking the photographs of his dying father, which were published as “Days With My Father”, and in an interview with Jonathan Blaustein reveals that the series were thematically connected: the approaching death of his father, and the death or aging-avoidance involved in plastic surgery.

One of the many interesting points in the interview, for me at least, is the importance Baustein’s ascribes to the fact that in the New Kind of Beauty series Toledano portrays his subjects without criticism and with humanity. The portrait above is beautifully lit of course – reminiscent of a Caravaggio perhaps – and this, together with the posing, allows the photograph to refer beyond itself and imply a comparison with classical portraits in that genre. Brilliantly executed, but above all, without implied sneering or condescension.

My second inspiration of the day comes from watching the short film for Andrew Zuckerman’s book project Wisdom.  In it he interviews a wide range of actors, artists, musicians and politicians on a pre-selected range of issues. The finished book is interesting. Zuckerman takes the view that the uniform lighting set-up he uses, together with the white seamless background, removes distracting detail and focuses us on the subjects, while implying some kind of universality to what they say. Personally, I like environmental portraiture precisely because it locates the subject in a setting which adds something to our understanding of them. Be that as it may, the film is great, and a full length version on DVD comes with the book. One of my favourites from among the interviewees is the painter/photographer Chuck Close. Apart from his comment that “inspiration is for amateurs”, which features in the clip, I also cheered his remark that “far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation”.  Enjoy.

During the recent cold weather, I met him at the BBC buildings and got to see behind the scenes in the editing suite, where he was getting his next programme in shape. (More on that below). Handily, just in front of the BBC buildings is The Science Centre, which provided a fitting backdrop for this shot of Andrew.

The programme I saw being edited looked, from the clips I saw, absolutely fascinating. It looks at waves (the watery version) and investigates the ways in which these strange, changing entities can illuminate the human condition. It’s sciency but comes at things from quite a philosophical angle, so there’s quite a lot of discussion with the scientist/philosopher Raymond Tallis. The programme goes out on BBC 4 0n February 2 at 9.00pm.