Finally -- Bleeding London!

The preview party for the Bleeding London exhibit was last night at London City Hall, an ultramodern, egg-shaped building on the Thames. The author of the "Bleeding London" novel that inspired the project, Geoff Nicholson, was on hand, as well as lots of the photographers who contributed legwork and lenswork, and the volunteers who helped pull the show together.

(That's a big satellite photo of the greater London area that we're standing on in the photo above. It serves as the floor of the building's rotunda!)

It was cool to finally see what had been chosen for the show. The pictures are exhibited mostly snapshot-sized, clustered together on boards. The curators seem to have tried to group pictures by common elements of color or shape to give some continuity to the boards.

Here's a close-up of one. The quality of the images is good and they do make for interesting browsing. My only complaint is that they are divorced from their locations -- there's no catalog or guide to tell viewers where each photo was taken. To me, the locations, and the diversity of locations, are key parts of the project and the individual images. But I can see how managing that in a display could be tricky -- you wouldn't want to clutter up the pictures with a lot of lettering.

So how did I do? Well, on the boards available for viewing last night, I found 16 of my pictures -- including a few surprises, like the Teletubby above that I photographed sitting out with the trash somewhere in East London. I don't think we were seeing all of the boards, either, so there may be a few more. Several of my own favorites -- which you've already seen here -- were also included.

To be honest, the opening felt a bit anticlimactic, after so much walking and so much work. But the joy, for me, really is in taking all the pictures and discovering the city. (Which I'm still doing!)

I think there are still plans for a book and possibly other future exhibits. This one runs at City Hall until August 14. The details are here!