Sunday

Sunday in Kassel and it's hot hot hot, so hot I've pictures of Middle Eastern fishing boats bobbing up and down in the Persian gulf on the television to cool me down. It is also empty empty empty, because nothing happens in Germany on Sunday and that means even less happens here.

Thank the Gods that the bar next door is open, we'd be stuck dangerously low on supplies if it weren't.

And time to reflect, to use a rather overused academic term, on the strange world of the Photo Bookfair. Firstly there is no doubt the world of photography is thrown in to as greater confusion as anything else by technology. The poster lying to my right declares 'Will Chemical Photography Survive?' in garish green and black. There are photographers out there who don't even take photos anymore, but graze for them fiendishly on the internet. And why not, just as I might say it would be daft to say 'all bonna fide knowledge comes from reading real books'.

Four days of this and you are pretty much done in.

However, I did find myself a genuine photographic gem taken by a sufficiently charming man with a camera of the old school, and I found it in a second hand record shop. Thirty one years ago, David Lee Roth slipped a poster of himself chained to a dog pound into the sleeve of Women and Children First. The photograph was by Helmut Newton and the provenance behind it rather good. Seeing as it's a poster it's incredibly rare to find it, and seeing as it was a record shop and Woman and Children First is a bit of a crap Van Halen record, I got the LP for 11euro and couldn't believe my luck. I shall dispose of the Lp and frame the poster- that's photography for you.