Contrary

And now for something completely different -- after a day in Arles and the Camargue, I choose to post this. In my defence, it's my very own art, and I don't often blip abstracts. I rushed towards these shadows with my camera as soon as I spotted them.

This morning we started at the Espace Van Gogh -- not the art gallery, but the former hospital of which Van Gogh was a resident; it's now the departmental archives and a literary translation centre. The central courtyard has been beautifully planted to resemble what Van Gogh saw. There were two exhibitions here: Swiss photographer Robert Frank, famed for his book The Americans (which a contemporary review in Practical Photography dismissed as “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness”), and French photographer Raymond Depardon -- both street photographers, with very different styles. Depardon's use of light and shade reminded me of Sara Evans -- or should that be the other way round? Here we bumped into G and J-M again.

We then extracted the car from the now happily almost empty multi-storey and drove to the nature reserve at Pont de Gau. It was half past twelve by now, not the best time of day to go birdwatching ... we chose the longer circuit correctly surmising there would be fewer people, but there were fewer birds too. In fact we got more close-up views of birds while sitting in the cafe eating a sandwich at the end of the walk than we did on the 5-km circuit. Including a host of flamingos. We did see a couple of horses with egret accessories though.

The flamingos had been startled by a passing helicopter, and when we came out we discovered that it had landed at the entrance to the car park, so the gendarmes had closed the road in both directions. Apparently someone had been taken ill, and the medics spent quite a while stabilising her before taking off. So we were a bit late leaving and eventually got home about seven, feeling more than a little tired.

The small Arles album is here. And the Arles backblips start here.