UK - Cambridge - Professor Stephen Hawking in his office at Cambridge University

Sunday is Stephen Hawking’s seventieth birthday so I thought I’d feature a portrait I made of him a few years ago.

Of course I taught him everything he knows but he never lets on …

After visiting Hackney twice in the last month for the first time in several years (once to work on a story and once to mentor a young photographer), I’m currently re-reading Patrick Wright‘s excellent ‘On living in an old country‘. Wright’s one of those brilliant cultural commentators who should be far better known and the edition I’m reading (because I lost my original copy) has illustrations by another underrated genius, the Polish cartoonist, Andrzej Krauze. I knew Krauze from his biting satire in the Guardian and a few years ago, I got to photograph him for a magazine. I remember that I had very little time (it wasn’t his fault) and that I didn’t have chance to put up the usual lighting rig. Anyway, here are two images from the job… I remembering noticing the label that reads ‘Mr Pen’ at the top right of the chest of drawers he kept his work in…

UK - London - Polish cartoonist Andrzej Krauze at his studio

UK - London - Polish cartoonist Andrzej Krauze at his studio

A bit more British Summertime… at the rather excellent Standon Festival in Hertfordshire. Possibly the only place to see naked hoola- hooping this year…

UK - Standon - A man dances at a portable sound system during the Standon Festival

UK - Standon - A couple dressed in gold lame costumes relax at the Standon Festival

UK - Standon - A man in gold body paint relaxes and drinks a pint of beer at the Standon Festival

UK - Standon - A man collapses clutching his groin after failing to hoola-hoop naked

This Saturday, July 2nd 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War and events will be held at memorials all across the UK. This annual commemoration honours the 2,500 men and women from the British Isles who served in the International Brigades as soldiers or medics, of whom 526 were killed in Spain. They were among 35,000 volunteers from around the world who rallied to the Spanish Republic as it tried to put down the fascist-backed military revolt.

In the London ceremony on the South Bank, I believe that two surviving veterans plan to attend. They are David Lomon, who was captured with other members of the British Battalion during fighting in Aragón in the spring of 1938 and spent six months in the notorious prison camp of San Pedro de Cardeñas, near Burgos, and Thomas Watters, who served in the Madrid-based Scottish Ambulance Unit. I hope I can be there.

In 1996 I wrote and photographed a piece for the Independent Magazine about the veterans of that war.

Here are three images that I found from my archive.

No Pasaran

UK - London - Alf, Spanish Civil War veteran

UK - London - Michael Economides, Spanish Civil War veteran

UK - London - Max Collins, Spanish Civil War veteran

Here’s a recent tearsheet from the May/June 2011 edition of the rather lovely German Magazine, Effilee with my long term piece about the Indian Coffee House in New Delhi.

Effilee is a food and lifestyle magazine who commissioned the images and a 5000-word piece from me. The English translation can be found under the Writings section of my website here.

The piece is called The Palace of Monkeys and Memory

It’s with great sadness that I heard this morning that the rather wonderful Indian artist MF Husain passed away during the night. I wrote about him last year as he’d taken Qatari citizenship but continued to keep a house in London. Doubtless those shrill self-appointed, hateful voices from the Hindu religious right will be celebrating his demise – and how brave they were from keeping a old man from dying in his own country. I remember him as a courteous and thoughtful subject, delightfully playful during the evening I spent with him in apartment in Mumbai a decade ago. A charming man and an astonishing talent.

India - Mumbai - MF Husain, India's greatest modernist painter at his studio in Bombay. Before him is a picture of his muse Maduri Dixit, a film actress

I was intrigued to find in a copy of today’s Tehelka magazine an article on Raghu Rai, the rather wonderful godfather of Indian photography, where he says that “Shooting a portrait is like making love by surprise”. Now, to be fair, the article is, as they say credited to ‘as told to Yamini Deenadayalan‘ but nevertheless it does strike me as profoundly daft.

Unless of course I’m doing it wrong. On both counts…

It reminds me of ‘Swiss Toni’ of the Fast Show fame – a comic character – a rather sad second-hand car salesman with a natty line in shiny suits whose metaphor for everything in life is that “It’s like making love to a beautiful woman…”. His take on making a cup of coffee is here.

Here’s a recent portrait. I did nothing more than press the shutter. Honest.

India - Delhi - a homeless rickshaw puller wakes under a bridge on a cold morning