My Mother Died Today

Liala Payne was also the Mother of my Brother Daniel and the Daughter of my Italian Grandmother, Ofelia.

I guess I am writing it down to clear my head. Perhaps it will be cathartic. Maybe I am finding any opportunity to distract myself.

At 2:20am as we lay exhausted in our beds after many many bedside hours, she was breathing out her last breath.

She lay in a hospital in the center of England. She did not die alone. By her side, Nigel, her partner of 12 years who had shown a superhuman strength in staying with her continuously over the last week.

Although suffering many different ailments it was pneumonia that was taking her away from us. The first hint i had got that she was not well was almost two months ago on the morning of her 57th birthday. I had arrived with presents and a card and could see she was not well.

She never complained and avoided doctors when she could. As a result, a bruise she suffered in a fall had gotten infected and started to spread inside her chest. The doctor we called didn’t see it and when we finally persuaded her to go into hospital it had already taken hold.

It grew swiftly and silently until only the most powerful of antibiotics could slow it down. By this time it was too late.

There were many goodbyes. But as each doctor gave us a different prognosis, there were days where we still thought she would pull through. On Christmas Eve we kept to European tradition and she opened her presents in a public ward.

At 1am Christmas morning my first gift was a call from the hospital informing me of an imminent procedure that was about to take place that she may not survive through. Later that day she was moved into a room so she could ‘have more privacy’. For me that was the point I knew, but did not want to believe.

The day before yesterday we were told in great detail that she would not last the night. She did.

She was unconscious for most of the following day and every moment a breath passed we were certain it was her last. Both me and my Brother both found the counting of breaths unbearable. Waiting for a moment we never wanted to arrive. From dread to fear and back again, all the time our hearts pounding, aching and on the verge of beating right out of our chests.

We needed sleep and left our sleeping mother lifting and falling behind her oxygen mask.

We got to mine and the phone rang saying that my Mother had opened her eyes. The hour drive back was the worst drive of my life. We did not know what to think.

I am so very glad we got there when we did. My mother had made one of those miraculous and albeit brief recoveries you hear about and we managed more goodbyes and words which had to be said. We had been given another chance to tell her how much we loved her and through movements and hand clasps, She too got the chance to communicate. It was a last momentary reprieve from the edge of death.

Exhausted and deeply saddened by the final realisation we were saying goodbye for the very last time, we choose our words carefully. We gazed into her eyes and she gazed back until this last miraculous bout of awareness seemed to flutter and wane. This was the point me and Daniel decided she was waiting for us to leave so she could let go.

I have always thought mourning to be the selfish act of someone who could not let go. Someone who found it hard dealing with loss and bereavement. I am thinking now it is more natural than that. An inbuilt mechanism to stop your heart from exploding with grief and pain.

I am mourning now and I imagine a part of me always will. It will be a smaller part than the one that remembers her love and cherishes the memory of every moment spent in her company.

She’s my Mum. I owe her my life. I hope I made her proud. I hope I earn her gift.. my life.

(There is a small site now up at www.Liala.co.uk)

Up and coming Projects.

OK, I am upping the stakes now as in a few weeks I hope to be flying out to Jordon to do a podcast on refugees fleeing Iraq.

To do it properly I would really like to get my hands on the best possible digital
SLR on the market today. In my mind (as a Nikon user with a heap of lenses) this has to be the Nikon D3.

This is a whole heap of camera costing a whole heap of money (over £3000) and although I stand a good chance of bothering a few of my podcast listeners and blog readers, I would like to ask everyone out there this..

If you are in a position to help sponsor me in my quest to acquire the best tool for the job please do so by either donating/sponsoring what you can (see the little box on the right) and you can be sure to receive my heart felt thanks and gratitude as i promise to do a good job in raising awareness and taking pictures that may well change lives.

I am a hand-to-mouth photographer and would appreciate any financial assistance or even a heads up as to where and how I can purchase a Nikon D3 in a market place that seems to be snapping them up before they hit the shelves.

Sincerely thanking You in advance.

christian

Seesmic

It feels like it has been days since I last posted. It is days, weeks. Days and weeks spent on Seesmic.

This is what I wanted to talk about today.. Not the fact that I need to work on my time management, not that I have been short of bloggable inspiration, but the fact I am hooked on a new video blogging application I have been meaning to write about since my first ’seesmic post’.

Initially I saw Seesmic as a video-polaroid. A place to sound off in a timeline with a random thought, question or instance of craziness. Then as more and more pre-alpha testers were admitted, conversations started. Then it became more of a Video-Twitter.

Look it up on Wikipedia a few days ago and you would have seen nothing.. today it says “Seesmic is a video micro blogging web application in pre-alpha stage being developed by French Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur“ And it was Loic that gave me my invite.

Phil Campbell mentioned it in a twitter post so I DM’ed Loic and moments later I was in. I think that being on twitter already may have helped as Loic did not know me from Adam. He has spent more time hanging out with Bush than he has talking to me..

So now as videos were being batted back and forth at close to real time speeds. Comments made and themes formed, I realized this wasn’t just a chatroom I was looking at. These were multi dimensional people not too dissimilar to me and I was getting to know them in a face to face kind of way. In a far more personal manor than on any other social network. The international timezones crossed have tested my ability to survive on only a few hours sleep as i have been facinated with the threads and conversations spanning the globe.

It is still early days for ’seesmic’ At the moment it is in Pre-Alpha release and the number of people signed up and online have formed a tight nit community posting snippets of their opinions from their home computers, from there work spaces and sometimes even out on the road streaming through 3g networks or public wifi.

I feel like I have been a part of seesmic for a lifetime and I feel like seesmic has taken a chunk of my life and placed it online for the world to see.

Whilst podcasting I had previously made a point of not giving too much away about my life or my opinion.. Seesmic has really brought out the Jeckell to my Hyde the yin to my Yang and I find it very therapeutic. Cathartic I guess.

I could go on and on but I won’t, Seesmic is a different application to all who use it and to really find out about it’s intricacies you need to be signed up and a part of the myriad conversations helically intertwined across the globe between anyone with an internet connection, a webcam on a computer.. and of course.. the golden ticket.

I feel I have so much to say.. but it’s easier to show you.. to ’seesmic’ it..

Check out the embedded post below and… “Seesmic ya later..”

Incidentally the Seesmic Crew have been kind enough to give me a couple of invites to pass on to anyone that has read this far and is willing to leave me a blog comment below telling me why they want to join Seesmic. Let me know..

If you want to see what I see.. Here you go..

The Democratic Image - Photography and Globalisation

I was very pleased to receive an email today telling me of a published report being released on a symposium I attended earlier this year.

The report from The Democratic Image - Photography and Globalisation held in Manchester last April covered this groundbreaking event that sought to investigate how digital technology was aiding representation in a connected world.

My initial invite came out of the blue after a listener to my podcast recommended me to one of the ‘Look 07‘ organisers. Before I knew it I was giving a talk on Photography and New Media to some seriously influential movers in the world of photography and journalism. Pedro Meyer of Zone Zero and Geert Van Kesteren the Magnum Photographer behind Why Mister Why were amongst the many that left a lasting impression on me. (In the photo above.)

I didn’t blog my experiences at the time as the moment it ended I was continuing further north to commence an expedition by canoe down the river Spey in Scotland. Once at the end of that successful trip I was back in the thick of work and assignments.

Now it seems I can summerise by means of clipping my mention and linking the whole report below. Please take the time to read what Redeye do as Britain’s largest photographers network.

NOTES ON THE BLOG In collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery and hosted at openDemocracy.net (http://thedemocraticimage.opendemocracy.net), The Democratic Image blog launched on 11 April and posed the following question: Time magazine has voted you `The Person of the Year’ for `seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game’. As a `pro’, what is your take on the democratisation of art and media in the digital age? First to respond was Christian Payne, the blogger and podcaster behind OurManInside.com, who thanked Time `for the recognition’ and the `corporate media [...] for making me switch off, for making me sick at heart, for making me angry’. Thanks to them, he turned to his computer `to get a bearing on some kind of meaningful truth’. For Payne, the Internet revolution counters the mediation of Big Media, allowing `diversity’ and `a deeper, wider, discourse’ that has enabled him, in his words, to `make up my own mind’. Switched on again, Payne became a blogger, primarily of images. More than that, the medium inspired him to self-finance a journey to Northern Iraq in 2006, video-podcasting a photo-documentary about the Kurdish Peshmerger warriors under the title of `Those Who Face Death’.Payne is very clear of the political importance for image makers like him of increasingly accessible new media, which in his view `are reviving our dwindling hopes for genuine freedoms’. But he is equally clear that the only alternative to corporate mediation for the new `pros’ striving for these freedoms is an alliance with other bloggers, podcasters, and other internet users, in which new work can be mutually financed and supportively criticised online. This raises the issues of the blurring between image makers and audiences, and of how cooperative might the Internet be. What structures might enable real collaboration beyond the much celebrated interactivity touted by the corporations behind the Internet? And to what extent are corporate interests foreclosing the emergence and maintenance of truly democratic internet use that might conflict with their values?

If you would like to read the whole report.. Please click here.