Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 23:04:40 +1300

Pedro:

You may remember we spoke( E-spoke? ) some time ago about young people and technology, when I was wearing my other hat as a photography teacher. Well you were right and I was wrong. This last year has seen a huge change o the part of my students, who have(mostly) grabbed hold of digital and run with it. The blocks in the road have been all mine...

but you know what they say-the worst kind of smoker is an ex-smoker.. and I have jumped onto the bandwagon.

A story..I have just finished a project photographing the young night life of our city, pushing the envelope as far as I could. I used an hybrid technology, shooting on pushed 800 ISO neg and using a film scanner, then outputting through a Fuji frontier....What was interesting was that the scanner/P-Shop approach gave me far more control technically than I would ever have had using a wet darkroom...

But the project came to an end as I pushed conventional technology and documentary approaches as far as I could.

And still I had not reached the point where i was dealing with what was important to me, namely being able to depict the other that I saw around me, the sense of an alternate and somewhat bizarre reality that lies beyond....the life of the city

Then a friend turned up on my birthday with your book Truths and Fictions, and in your work and that wonderful essay by Joan Fontcuberta, I began to grasp a new way of thinking, and to realise what a profound shaking I was getting...so now there is a way to put feathers on buildings, and to document my own reality( which, in spite of my trying to be objective and cheat reality and Heisenberg I was doing anyway).

Anyway, to the point of this Email. I have just built a website for myself, and in it I have included a reference to ZoneZero. I hope you will not mind. Perhaps if you have time you would check it and, if you take issue, i will change anything to which you take exception.

The link is

http://www.silvereye.co.nz

Kind regards

Tony Bridge