31 Under 31 - Young Women in Art Photography

(Tealia Ellis Ritter My dream is to be an artist, Milan, Illinois, 2007 — from the series The Live Creature)

At the beginning of the year, the Humble Arts Foundation put out a call for submissions to an exhibition - 31 Under 31 - Young Women in Art Photography - aimed in part at emerging photographers. The exhibition opened at the beginning of the month (and by all accounts the opening was packed) and is showing at the Gallery at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn.

(Ahndraya Parlato Untitled, 2007 — from the series Inscape)

It's a little hard to find the photographs online right now (I hope Humble is going to put more of it up eventually?), but thanks to Flak Photo it is possible to view a few (halfway down the page). I'm also familiar with the work of several of the photographers.

(Alejandra Laviada - Stacking, Mexico City, Mexico — from the series Juarez #56 )

I must say, having recently looked at Photo District News' 30 Under 30 selection, that with a couple of exceptions the 31 women blow that selection out of the water. Now I realise that the criteria were a little different, but it struck me that the PDN choices were rather disappointing. They went with what was safe - and derivative - young photographers following in the tracks of the trends of the last 3 or 4 years. You could pretty much pick out your Amy Stein clone, or your Todd Deutsch clone or your Anders Peterson clone or you Philip-Lorca diCorcia clone etc.

(Jessica Bruah - Untitled #13 — from the series Stories)

Whereas from what I've seen, the Humble managed to find an exciting group of young photographers who seem much more focussed on finding their own way. I don't know, maybe that extra year helped... (never trust a photographer under 30 :-) ) - or maybe it was that they chose all women. But I also think it has a lot to do with the Humble Arts Foundation's own vision.

(Jaimie Warren - Untitled (Naoko/Squid Teeth), 2007)

"Lumi Tan, Director of Zach Feuer Gallery in NYC, and Jon Feinstein, Curatorial Director of Humble Arts Foundation co-curated the exhibition. "While it is impossible to capture the full breadth of international talent by female photographers in one exhibition," say Tan and Feinstein, "we feel that the diversity of subjects and intent are a clear representation of the wide range of skill and creativity that is flourishing today. By allowing the works to be culled from an open call, we hope to give exposure to unknown photographers while simultaneously showcasing more familiar names in contemporary photography.""

(Mary Mattingly -The Hunt, New York, New York)

The exhibition includes photographs by Amy Elkins, Ashley Lefrak, Dru Donovan, Elaine Stocki, Helen Maurene Cooper, Ka-Man Tse, Mary Mattingly, Ahndraya Parlato, Alejandra Laviada, Alana Celii, Alex Van Clief, Allison Grant, Catharine Maloney, Dina Kantor, Hannah Whittaker, Jessica Bruah, Jessica Roberts, Jaimie Warren, Kate and Camilla, Kelly Kleinschrodt, Marta Labad, Manya Fox, Molly Landreth, Nadine Rovner, Rachael Dunville, Reka Reisinger, Sara Padgett, Sarah Small, Sarah Sudhoff, Talia Chetrit and Tealia Ellis Ritter.

I think now it's time for the Humble to do "45 and over - Mid-Career Old Fart Photographers"

(Ashley Lefrak - Headless Horse, 2007 — from the series American Documents)

Photoshop Disasters

Here's a fun blog to look at over the weekend - Photoshop Disasters - mainly about magazine covers and newspapers...

A couple of my favourites:

Out Magazine: Hey Mr DJ Put A Record On I'm Microcephalic


It looks great, yeah great. You know, one little thing. No big deal. But if you could make the top of her head smaller? Just the top part? So it isn't hiding the banner. Yeah, no, I know, but you know what, no one cares about the top of her head. Just make it smaller. Yes, I know. Just make it smaller. Just do it. I'm just going to go ahead and make that an order. If you could do that, that would be great.

Oh, and if you could make her shoulder disappear, that would also be great.

and

FHM: Yakuza Babes


At 4am somewhere a designer wakes up and utters "Oh God I forgot to put her finger back in."

Make sure to take a quick look back through the archives.

(Oh - and I'm pretty sure Anne Coulter's hand really does look like an alien's - I don't think that's a phtoshop mistake...)

Michael Schmidt

My second post on this blog was a fairly brief one about Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt. It's quite hard to find a lot of information about Schmidt online and the same goes for his pictures - and yet his influence on many contemporary photographers is significant - among his pupils are Andreas Gursky and Ulrich Gorlich - and his working colleagues include Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston, Paul Graham and Robert Adams. Basically, you need to get the books or go to the shows.

Then other day I saw a refence to a rare N. American exhibition (he has actually had two solo shows at MoMA in 1988 and 1996) of his work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in NY - which also has a small selection of pictures online.

"Schmidt arrived at a strategy of disseminating his work early on. He photographs large quantities of images without a specific project in mind. These images are then organized into groups with socially evocative titles, such as Ausländische Mitbürger (Foreign Co-citizens, 1973) or Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Images of the City, 1976-80). He exhibits the work in clusters or groupings intended to draw relationships among the images, often in a public context, and then, circumstances permitting, publishes a book of the images. Unlike many artist monographs, Schmidt’s books are not intended to catalog discrete images but rather to interconnect images dependant on those associations, mirroring his process of hanging photographs on the wall. The books tend to be light on text—often having none other than the title—and are truly more artist book than monograph, despite mass production by major publishers...

...Schmidt continued to explore a landscape and a city fraught with history in his pivotal work Ein-heit (U-ni-ty, 1991–94), shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996 and published in the same year. The importance of fragmentation as an interpretive trope is reinforced by Schmidt’s dividing with hyphens a word meaning wholeness, diametric forces embodied in the very title of the project. Conventional aesthetics of black and white photography were abandoned in favor of intentionally inconsistent prints, often with compressed, almost monochromatic tonal ranges, large grain, and poor detail, all of which served to reinforce his subjects. The book presents a startling record of Schmidt’s fascinations with the weight of history upon the German citizen, the cultural lineage behind his project, and the interrelatedness of past and present, and the impossibility of truly knowing, especially through photography. A project of epic scope, Schmidt included photographs that he made of portraits and landscapes in Berlin, photographs of objects of significance to the German populace, and re-photographed images resonant in collective German memory. By combining portraiture of ordinary citizens with landscapes changed through history and historical material, Schmidt points to the effects of the latter two on the subjects in the portraits. Examples of re-photographed materials include stills from Leni Reifenstahl’s 1934 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, photographs of soldiers of the German Democratic Republic passing a review, and a tablet inscribed with the third stanza of the German national anthem, the lyrics of which were used under the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic. Images are doubled on facing pages, cropped tightly to fragment the scene, printed backwards, and otherwise freely manipulated.

Dense with precise historical references but also elusively vague at points, and lacking a declarative personal style, Schmidt’s work has not achieved the international market success of many of his better-known German contemporaries. Nonetheless, Schmidt continues to live and work in Berlin, weaving his own layers into the variegated strata of German culture and history. His legacy is already enormous. (from the 20th Century Encyclopedia of Photography)"

Probably the two easiest books of his to get hold of are Michael Schmidt: Berlin Nach 1945 and Irgendwo. His best, and possibly most important, book is Waffenruhe - but it's almost impossible to find and even more impossible to find at an affordable price ($1250.00 at Vincent Borrelli)

""Irgendwo" presents rather bleak views of province-life in the reunited Germany with suburban houses and village pubs, deserted low-cost supermarkets and historical buildings, as well as distanced motorways cutting through the landscape. Typically for his Modus Operandi Schmidt conflates architectural and landscape photographs with portraits and shots of seemingly unimportant details. It is only through the arrangement in groups - the interplay and dialogue between the images - that the individual images acquire their distinct meaning and the issue of a relation between spatial environment and individual biography comes into view. The photographs, however, do not depict particular places. In his work Schmidt seems to be more interested in tracing the loss of a subjective connection to "home as a place with identity":

"Home says nothing to me. In any case, home is what you carry with you, inside you. You remember places because you spent the most wonderful or the most horrible time there during your childhood. But these places have become more arbitrary, less specific. ... There is no such thing as an objective category that one might call 'home' any more. Such things take place subjectively nowadays."" (Michael Schmidt)

There's information on a previous exhibition of Irgendwo here

Personally I find looking at Schmidt's photogrpahy to be an intense and deep experience - in many ways it is a counterbalance to (or antidote to?) much contemporary photogrpahy, especially of the Gursky, Struth or Soth style. Even some of his "straightest" images have an air of enigma about them and their are layers to unravel - especially in a series. It provokes thought and imagination, having the depth of a good poem - and it takes as much work as reading a good poem to draw out its many meanings.

Greg Crewdson

I got the new issue of Aperture the other day and it's one the couple of issues a years that's actually worth getting - with several good articles in it.

But a major feature is about the work of Gregory Crewdson. Aperture has also gone to town on their website with a whole interactive setup with images and interviews with him and his crew around one of his more recent projects: Beneath The Roses. (Along with the obligatory book - interestingly, not by Aperture)

I also just finished watching the last of the BBC series - The Genius of Photography (very good overall BTW) - in which Crewdson is featured - working on the picture below, among others.

I don't intend to go into examining Crewdson's work in depth here - that's far to big a project involving comparisons with others such as Geoff Wall, Joel Sternfeld, cinema (and numerous directors), fashion photography, the history of painting and so on...

Needless to say I do quite enjoy Crewdson's work. It doesn't quite bowl me over in the same way as the work of certain other photographers, but it holds my attention and causes me to think. I enjoy what he does and how how it looks.

What I did want to mention was how some people seem to react to Crewdson's work - sometimes quite vociferously. It's not the actual photographs they seem to dislike, or even that they are constructs, sets, staged, but rather the way he makes them. Some folk seem positively offended because he isn't just one man and his dog and a big camera on a tripod taking the pictures, but that he has a whole crew - not just actors in his scenes, but lighting crews, a director of photography and a camera operator. Somehow this seems to cause an outcry in certain areas, along with an awful lot of angst, with comments along the lines of - "he doesn't even take his own pictures", "he's not a photographer, damn it (bah humbug...)"; "why does he need someone else to do the work for him" etc etc

"On Main Street, Pittsfield Massachusetts lights are being rigged, props are being positioned and actors are taking their places. It looks like a movie, sounds like a movie and smells like a movie, but it isn't. All of this activity is to make a single photograph, by Gregory Crewdson.

"I work with a production crew that all come out of film. We work with cinematic lighting but we are only after creating one single perfect moment." (Gregory Crewdson, photographer)

Over an 11 day shoot in a variety of locations Crewdson's team will make a series of multiple exposures which will be digitally combined to make six final images. He'll produce an edition of six prints of each image priced at approximately $60,000. There's already a list of prospective buyers.

With his striking tableaux which combine Hollywood's production values with suburbia's bad dreams Crewdson has become hot property, confident that he has an audience who will appreciate, and if they can afford it, buy his work. For Crewdson the business and benefits of being a photographer feel very different from the experience of earlier generations. (From The Genius of Photography, BBC)

And I guess what surprises me is that - well, it surprises me. I find it a little hard to comprehend how someone can get worked up about how Crewdson produces his pictures rather than the pictures themselves. Love them or hate them (or be indifferent) - but that he has someone click the shutter for him - so what?

One final bit of analysis of Crewdson and his work - it has obvious links with cinema, and in some ways with the early proto-cinematic photography of Muybridge - someone who didn't think twice about having a whole crew assist him in his project.

A couple of updates - Robert Capa and Karl Hoecker

First, the Digital Journalist has a brief update on the work being done on the newly recovered cache of Robert Capa's negatives:

"...Cynthia Young told me the negatives were in remarkably good shape. This was perhaps because of Mexico City's climate. The three suitcases were in a stable environment in an attic where it was dry and the "boxes" were not moved around. This is important because not only was the climate a factor, but the fact that the rolls of film were intact and in good shape will make the job of unraveling each roll that much easier. No chemical work is necessary, remarkable in itself considering the film is 70-year-old nitrate stock. According to conservation experts, the rolls are "like they were made yesterday. They are not brittle at all" – a good sign for the future when the photos will be put on public view. Once there is a digital image of each frame, the work on the roll is complete, and it is placed in cold storage to further protect the discovery. Importantly, because Capa and Taro kept extensive notes about the pictures they took, each suitcase, as we can see from these photos, had extensive notes about each roll of his and her film. Capa and Taro were good record keepers. Contact sheets were important to the way they worked. The extensive notebooks and tear sheets they kept are in the hands of the ICP, and the newly discovered rolls of film correspond to these notes and contact sheets. In some ways, Cynthia Young of ICP says, they do not expect many surprises from the Capa and Taro film. But even at this early date, the curators are able to see how in some cases a negative changed as it passed through the darkroom to become a print. In the future this will provide exciting material for scholars, journalists and the public.

(Robert Capa)

However, there is a strong belief that there will be surprises in the Chim photos because there is no complete record of what he shot. Curators are also making digital copies of each Chim photo. These represent about one-fifth of all the rediscovered negatives, and it is here where they expect to find something new...."

And just as I finished writing this post, I came across another article - The Mexican Suitcase by Trisha Ziff on Zone Zero - the fascinating story, very well done, of tracking Capa's suitcase down in Mexico.



Next, on the album of photographs taken by Karl Hoecker, Adjutant to the Commandant of Auschwitz; Jim Hoerricks of the Forensic Photoshop blog has pointed out that next week's New Yorker has a story on them. My guess is that Jim did some work for the story on showing that Hoecker was indeed on the ramp at the railhead in Auschwitz - based on the evidence of the only other album of photographs from Auschwitz, the "Lili Jacob" album - and contrary to the evidence that was given at his trial, at which he received a lenient sentence as a result.

(Unfortunately, there are only some of the pictures online at the New Yorker - you'll need to by the magazine if you want to read the whole story...).

Luis Belmonte Díaz

A while back I was looking for photographers who were doing urban winter photography and I came across the work of Spanish photographer Luis Belmonte Díaz.

It was Zima (Winter), his work from Poland (I think he is based in Warsaw?) that caught my eye - I really like the way he has managed to capture this kind of long winter around the city.



But there are several other sets of work on his site (love the minimal front page...), such as Gdansk which are also well worth looking at.



He also has a low-key blog - sort of "Field Notes" of his day to day photography.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize - Esko Männikkö

Well, Esko Männikkö was the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize last week.




There's an interesting little piece in the Guardian on Männikkö and the prize:

Who said never work with animals or children? Last night the most sought-after prize in fine art photography was handed out, and the £30,000 cheque went to a man whose winning exhibition included close-up portraits of horses...

First, excuse the bad pun but I think the judges backed a good runner. The winner, Finnish Esko Männikkö, has called himself a "photographer of fish, dogs, and old men". The horsey shots in his winning exhibition - which are a million miles from pet portraiture or equine machismo - are a refreshing break from the usual array of human portraiture, reportage and landscape subjects. Instead, his guiding principle is a simple sense of capturing unusual natural beauty - whether animal, vegetable, mineral or human - wherever it arises...

What's so fascinating is the way Männikkö immerses himself with his subjects - human or otherwise - in remote parts of Finland. I was lucky enough to go there recently, and I too discovered a nationality still in thrall to nature, folk customs, and in some cases a tendency towards melancholy, yet often this is concealed beneath Nordic propriety. What Männikkö's pictures do is completely rub off that modern, social patina and uncover the deeper character that lurks beneath. His portraits of people are just as magnificent as those of wild, untamed beasts...

The Ecology of the Novel - traces etc

(Venezia 1939/tim atherton)

A couple of days ago I came across an interesting essay about my own work - traces, Peripheral Vision and Immersive Landscapes.

"...Atherton’s collection of Traces seems pretty much inspired by Calvino’s remarks from the Invisible City (Le città Invisibili, Torino, Einaudi, 1972), that may even count as a very interesting meditation on hybrid ecologies based on the merge of literary references and sensory experience of landscapes. Namely, the bare concept of Le città invisibili entails open reference to cities that are there even tho they are not perceivable by sight. Actually, Atherton’s Traces exert potential of landscapes referring to previous or potential actions. The camera can help guessing or foreshadowing past or future events on the basis of clues, leftovers, affordances ready to be triggered by somebody who’s actually out of the picture..."more

Some months ago, Anatole Pierre Fuksas contacted me to find a bit more about my work and said it fitted into a project he was working on - a book called The Ecology of the Novel.

Fuksas teaches in the Department of Linguistics & Comparative Literature at the Università degli Studi di Cassino in Italy and one of his areas of research focuses on the relationship between literature and reality - the ecology of the novel:

"...the novel does not imitate a given reality through language, as claimed by approaches based on aristotelian mimesis. Likewise, it does not establish a more or less consistent fictional world intersecting an actual one more or less consistently, as theories based on modern epistemology offer. Indeed, the novel is not the mimetic reflex or the dialectic alter ego of a given reality, since ‘reality’ and the novel are different outcomes of the same process. They both answer questions like when, why, what ‘to do’, implicitly providing given definitions of ‘doing’. That is, they both rely on an integrated network featuring perception and action, reason and emotion in order to plan meaningful actions. Since the novel and that special ‘thing’ humans call ‘reality’ are built in the very same way, to keep regarding novels as imitations or virtual reflects of a given reality definitely sounds sort of naïf."

He is writing a blog as a day-by-day work journal documenting the development of his research plan on "The Ecology of the Novel". As part of that he has also investigated how certain artworks do a similar thing visually and what he calls an ecologically artistic approach to landscape for part of which he examined my own work.


(Venezia/Trieste 1939/tim atherton)

Update #2: Friedlander's Olmsted

The other day I wrote about the current exhibition and book of Olmsted's parks and landscapes by Lee Friedlander.

Well the book - Lee Friedlander: Photographs Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes - arrived yesterday. I only had time for a fairly brief browse, but it's a gorgeous book. The pictures live up to expectations and the printing and paper is just superb - the images are very "photographic" with a wonderful depth. And the overall design and feel of the book results in a very satisfying experience for the reader (viewer?) - at least for this one anyway. Everything down to the colour and feel of the linen cover and the sort of tipped-in print on the front comes together so well.

Update #1: Odd Photographers

Just a quick update on yesterday's post on the Metropolitan Police's hunt for odd photographers.

Here's the script text from their radio spot"

Female Voice over:
How d’you tell the difference between someone just video-ing crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack?

How can you tell if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or if they’re planning to make a bomb?

What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously?

How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person, or a terrorist?


Male voice over:
The answer is, you don’t have to.

If you call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321, the specialist officers you speak to will analyse the information. They’ll decide if and how to follow it up.

You don’t have to be sure.

If you suspect it, report it.

Call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321 in confidence.

(you can listen to it here)

This is just bad in so many way's I don't even know where to start (leaving aside the implied sexism of the actual sound version)

Has the Met been taking lessons from the Stasi?

I wonder, has the Metropolitan Police (London U.K.) been taking lessons about how to run an informer society from the old East German Stasi (after all, those 90,000 ex-Stasi agents must have something to offer to someone)? Below is a jpeg of the Met's (along with the City of London Police and the British Transport Police) latest "Counter Terrorism" campaign (they are also targeting people being suspicious in their home or using cell-phones...hmm).


You can link to the pdf here for a better look (as well as click on the images for a slightly bigger view):

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS EVERY DAY. WHAT IF ONE OF THEM SEEMS ODD

Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that we need to know. Let experienced Officers decide what action to take.

Funnily enough, I just came across a copy of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier today in the library at work so he was on my mind as I looked at this. I wonder what old George would have thought...?


Peter Jones on the Streetphoto list brought the campaign to my attention and John Brownlow came up with a couple of suggestions about what their next few posters may say. I added one of my own as well. Funnily (and sadly) enough, they don't seem that far-fetched. In all honesty (and I write as someone who has dealt with violent terrorists first hand - no armchair critic here) I have to ask - what on earth were they thinking when they came up with this?


All I can say is that 90% of the photographers that I know - obscure or well known - are a little "odd"...



(Oh, and if any Met Public Affairs wonks are reading this, the use of the poster comes under both satire and commentary fair use under all relevant Copyright legislation...)

"Muybridge's Horse" - Rob Winger

A spellbinding work of poetry, Muybridge's Horse is something of an epic poem, taking in it's scope the whole of Eadweard Muybridge's life and work.

It is a first publication for poet Rob Winger and although it falters in a few places, it's good (and at times excellent) sections more than make up for it.


In form, it certainly owes a lot to Michael Ondaatje's majestic The Collected Work's of Billy The Kid, but in this case, Winger certainly makes the form his own. He draws on all sorts of sources about Muybridge's work and life, as well as from further afield (there is a good little quote from Diane Arbus that every photogrpaher would do well to remember: "The more specific you are, the more general it will be")

the split second in walking when both of your feet are airborne
the distance between a target and the knowledge of a gunshot
water in your throat
the space of decline when a masseuse’s finger slips from a knotted muscle
the time between balance and impact with the earth
my fingers submerged in water, in a dive
the moment, in a train lavatory, when a sideways sway has thrown a spray of urine
away from the bowl’s mouth
any sporting ball suspended in the air
the heat of mouths before lips contact
the time between an engine and the sound of it
the stretching of a knuckle before it cracks
a drill changing its tonality as it contacts a sheet of maple
whole snowflakes as they meet your tongue
a minute hand jumping to its next hour before the clock can chime
the stretched pressure of a guitar string before sound
the darkness that happens before any object collides with your face
the second of ease when the piano you are pushing has built up enough force to glide
any form of jumping
waves

a bird in flight

------------------------

reading the Plaza of Antigua

All across the frame, people have refused capture.Their bodies, brief streaks of light across the market’s noise.Bodies arriving at the paper’s surface from the hills as though they’d dropped from the background - clothing filling the frame with contrast.

Eadweard uses their blurs.Some have stood, perhaps, for hours, under a certain shadow, and (seeing Eadweard place the wet plate into the camera’s box) have jumped from permanence.Their bodies are ghosts, transparent, building’s bones seeping through grey skeletons, half-exposed on glass.

This curve of colour is a woman, arguing over the price of beans.This round whirlwind of white light, a boy spinning in place.This silver banner, a man who’s just exited the frame to walk ten miles back to his village, up the side of the volcano, toward sky.Two specific legs support a burst of light, where a figure has bent to the ground in a perfect semicircle, painting the foreground with waves.The dance of a young woman in a white dress paints a halo behind a fixed, staring farmer.Angelus novus.

Eadweard’s finger must’ve traced the gradual background curve of Volcano Agua against the air before framing it in the dry photograph’s top half.He must have positioned the Palace of the Captains General intentionally, so its highest corner just grazes the slope in the background, a meeting of territories.Volcanic throat against stone’s collarbone.


Like Eadweard, I’m attempting to fix blurs, to translate motion into language.Like Eadweard, I want permanence, want things named.I lean into the paper’s grain, watching, smell its dust lifting from the book, sunlight falling through the window into the centennial clouds of moving bodies there.This image, traveling the entire North American mainland, over a hundred years of distance, to find me here, in the particular light of a Canadian afternoon.

Frame around the image, marking possibilities. Circles of light against the nails.

In the picture, round baskets perforate the cloth geometry, balanced on heads, giant nails digging into dirt.Every stall is covered by the tilt of a square umbrella, each reflecting the sun in a white shine.The squares float like prints drifting in the development bath, edges curled from the acids’ work.Your eye can hop from one to another without dipping into the river of bodies. Or, you can circle, move from umbrella to umbrella, around the square. Slip, if you like, from the surface into liquid and lose your boundaries.

(The most important time is happening between categories.)

P.S. I like the fact that if you flick quickly through the pages you get one of Muybridge's horses galloping along in the bottom corner - a nice little bit of whimsy in the book design.

Admin Note - emails, replies etc etc...

(the photographer's studio - Josef Sudek)


Just a quick note, I've received quite a few emails recently related to this blog. Some just saying "hi" or thanks for the blog, others with questions, others asking me to look at the senders work and so on.

My apologies if I haven't replied. As well as being a bit under the weather lately, I've also been getting going on a new "proper" day-job as a curator/(photo) archivist, so it's been a little bit crazy and disorganized at times.

I do hope to get around to all the messages though. So if I haven't replied, you aren't being ignored... :-)