Bass Pro & Cabelas (III)

These photographs continue an occasional series which somehow documents my visits to the bizarre and baffling, always surprising, sometimes strange and often sad Bass Pro and Cabelas outdoor hunting and fishing superstores. To see more images from previous visits follow the links below.

Part One: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/04/bass-pro-cabelas-i.html

Part Two: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/2010/04/bass-pro-cabelas-ii.html

Venustreet Book

I am proud to have one of my photographs published in Charalampos Kydonakis new photo-book venture ‘Venustreet’, which contains a wide collection of photography by some of the most interesting street photographers working today (in my opinion). It’s a fabulous and excellently edited book and well worth tracking down and ordering a copy. The images which make up this book were selected from his Flickr group of the same name.

Here is Charalampos’s introduction and description of his Flickr group which also gives a flavor of the book itelf:

"This group is dedicated to the beauty of women and all those who admire it. Its subject is the feminine beauty, also the interaction between women and man (or woman and woman, who knows?) and the interaction between woman and the photographer. All this through the eyes of the street photographer. Is it enough that a beautiful lady can create just by her presence in an image a beautiful photo of the street aesthetic? This group was made to try and answer this question. Our only matter is the photographer’s way of thinking and his/her guts to go close and to create street beauty from the beauty that one way or the other exists in reality. After the ‘click’ this beauty exists only in the unique moment caught by a photo and not in front of our eyes in real time."

Charalampos also hosts a wonderful and exciting blog which is well worth exploring.

The link below is to a recent feature he made about my own work:

http://dirtyharrry.blogspot.com/2011/05/simon-kossoff.html

Venustreet book can be previewed and ordered here at this link to Blurb.com

http://www.blurb.com/books/2560879

Charalampos is himself a wonderful photographer. His Flickr photo-stream can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirtyharrry/

Kansas City Zombie Walk For Hunger

On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the Kansas City Zombie Walk. The Kansas City Zombie Walk for Hunger is in its forth year and has helped many people in the Kansas City Metropolitan Community who suffer from hunger or homelessness. I did not 'go zombie' myself, but I showed my support and made several photographs which they are more than welcome use to publicize their events.

These are some of the photographs I made that day. Eventually they will be edited then used as a kind of punctuation for a series I am working on with Pogo Books, a publisher and gallery based in Berlin, who have kindly invited me to make a book of my American pictures with them which is presently being slowly edited under the title 'Resident Alien'.

POGO BOOKS:

http://www.pogobooks.de/

More images from Zombie Walks past can be found here at 'Get the Picture':

http://getthepicture.fr/En/Photographes/Kossoff/zombiewalk.html

Remains to be Seen. Book now available.

For the last 2 months I have been working on producing a book based on my photo-series 'Remains to be Seen'. After several hitches the book is now published and I finally picked it up from the printers on Friday. It was a huge learning experience for me and it was my first venture into self publishing a portfolio of my photographic work. It contains two poems and 60 photographs over 70 pages and printed in a limited edition of 100 copies which are all signed and numbered. This book is now available to order via the link below using Paypal:

To order a copy please follow this link, thank you:

http://www.jp127.com/Remains/Remainstobeseen.html

‘Remains to be Seen’ is a personal work which explores grief, loss and memory and the emotional impact these experiences have had on the way I have come to perceive the world here in the present. It’s a book of clues, keys, symbols, echoes and traces. Like latent fingerprints lifted from the psyche - made thousands of miles away from the graves of which it speaks of and recorded several years ‘after the facts’. Because of a lack of direct access to perhaps more concrete ‘evidence’ which still remains stored in a barn in England, a basement in Norway and a spare bedroom in Wales, this book has become very much a history of the present. Because of this, my only resources for making this work have been internal in nature - accompanied by a certain awareness, like a frequency that was tuned into and the series as a whole has been, to some extent, something of a ghost hunt. The sad events which have silently surrounded this project have consequently altered who I am today in ways which I am still discovering and has been part of the secret drive behind the books creation. It is not an exorcism because the possession (if this is what it is to be called) is permanent - dissolved into the self and is present more as an evolution in progress. There are seven stages of grief and this book, I believe, marks for me its final stage; Acceptance.

Follow this link to view a slideshow to the complete series:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonpaulkossoff/sets/72157624605701906/show/