"Hey, Statue of Liberty! Can I take your picture?"


This afternoon I met up with the inimitable MrJohn for a photo/blip walk. We met at Leeds Gallery where there was to be an event in the evening where photographers could bring their photos, related to the subject 'Pictures in Leeds', to both showcase and get included into a photo book which would be made live on the night - more on that later.

Before that however, we had some lunch and I grabbed some great people watching seats looking onto a busy high street. I saw a few potential subjects walk past but I had already decided to ask Grace (and Segundo) who I had noticed in the food place. When they were leaving I grabbed my camera and ran after them.

After lunch, we had a wander through the market looking for more subjects. MrJohn took one or two portraits there, but at some point I caught sight of Amanda here.

“What’s the special occasion, why are you dressed as the Statue of Liberty?”
“No occasion, I just like to dress up as her”
“Why is she special to you?”
“I think she’s awesome! A lot of people admire her, what she stands for and the history of how she came to be.”

Amanda was quite an expert on the subject, and told us a little bit of the history involving the French sculptor, Frederick Bartholdi and the relationship between him and the engineer Gustave Eiffel, who of course went onto construct the Eiffel Tower some three years later.

A fact I learned from Amanda was that although the sculpture is quite massive, the copper skin is a mere 2.37mm thick (she actually showed us using her fingers, I looked that up).

Amanda also showed us pictures of her trip to NYC and her meeting Lady Liberty. MrJohn asked whether she went there dressed like she was, and she replied that she had, but so many people had wanted to take pictures with her that she had little to no time to enjoy the statue for herself so she usually didn’t anymore. I think she said she had been there twice and would go again when she could afford it.

We wandered around some more then headed back to the gallery for the event. It was an interesting discussion, which seemed to make an important point about collaboration in photography and forming groups and networks effectively. I don’t know if they reached a solution to it however.

The photo book didn’t happen in the end as they didn’t expect so many photographers to come with pictures - they had 120 pictures in the end. We were told to ‘watch this space’ so we will see if our portraits will end up in there or not...


Humans of Leeds