WhatEveritTakes

Never an opportunity to waste, while most default to scrolling, this chap does his stretches or is he powering into the Underworld?

Oh Vienna…

The sky above a sea is forever changing and this wanderer appeared like a vessel, backlit by a setting sun. Silence is the space between musical notes, and I think of the boats as the notes with the sea being the conduit which carries time from note to note.

Of course, the sea has sound too, so nothing is ever silent, it’s a perception and not an absolute. We just choose to decide when it is; Quiet, at rest, calm, asleep. And what is silent for some is sound for another.

The Tube throws up opportunities. Here, a mother and daughter play with their youngest who shyly sits opposite on her Dad’s lap. The vertical post happens to emphasise the contrast between the composed young reader and the animated expression of said mother. B&W seemed to give focus to the theatrics of the scene.

Footnote: The mother’s hands hold the same shape as the book – being open to reveal, whereas the former is open to conceal.

Scale can change our perception. Perception can change scale. Even our beliefs.

The picture was taken from my drone – 120m above a farm in Essex. The barren appearance also coincides and references this long dry summer of ’26.

Helsinki. I just walked around the corner with my daughter and there he was, like it was set up waiting for someone to snap it. You have to react instantly otherwise it’s gone.

If one likes taking pictures then it’s impossible to just pass by a window like this. I’d like to think it was there waiting for me as I walked from the cinema, but this is just life strumming along as we go about with our heads in our screens.

If we look up we see a different world – more appealing, more engaging. Our phones are full of distractions, whereas the outside is stimuli.

The song ?…

Townies are a curious phenomenon. It is where we see ourselves behave more like other species. We sit, prune, call, stare, daydream. I can’t help but think that it is a form of self-analysis though. Are we not projecting ourselves onto passers-by and then waiting for some kind of internal response? By seeing others we reassess ourselves. And when we’re not sitting we are wandering – as footloose flâneurs. 

We want to feel the buzz of a kinetic world, even if it’s peeking through fingers – otherwise we’d stay indoors – disconnected. 

Paradoxically, our minds move much more when sitting on a bench than when we are scrolling. The mobile has not replaced the bench. Scrolling is a “never ending fix”, whereas benches are a connection to the world.

Every street had these little plastic coloured seats. Every channel of air was tight & tiring, but the place buzzed relentlessly with scooters and broth. Some sat in the still hours, some sold water, some cycled, some slept.

Hanoi.

Belfast Site Foreman was selected for the RBSA Portrait Prize Exhibition 2024.

So much of what Everitt sees is within his working environment – surveying buildings. This is where life happens for him – being inside the fabric and rhythms of a society in flux, and where his artistic inspiration is so often found. A few seconds either side of this shot and he would have missed the expression on the cutter’s face. He appears to have captured a “Sorcerer – Apprentice” scene within this geometric composition. The light of knowledge from the window is cast onto the inspected drawings which in turn instructs the younger man what to do.

“One’s senses really come alive on a construction site – the sounds, textures, colours; the continual evolving state of time and form. It’s like being at a fairground“.

Graham Everitt
2024.

Shepherd’s Bull was selected for the RBSA Photography Exhibition 2025.

“I love accidents” says the artist Graham Everitt who took the photograph, “or maybe random events have a natural purpose?”. Shepherd’s Bull continues his line of on-the-fly photography, where “planned chance” is a key factor. “I’m always intrigued by the concept of serendipity and of trying to process the fact that if I’d taken a different tube line or got up an hour later then I may never have seen this image and it wouldn’t be here now.”

“The Underground is an underworld of theatre, antics and characters, but this image was ready-made, just hanging there in front of waiting passengers like an intense scene from an Act.”

As we entered the stadium, the mother of all hail storms was summoned down like javelins. It only increased the drama of a structure which had already installed an impressively eerie futuristic hostility.

Upon leaving, I turned to see it reflected back.

Waiting for a train to Cambridge very early one May morning at Kings Cross.

“Yesterday we drove through a place called Senne which is a massive area of woodland controlled by the British as a NATO training ground. It comprises of almost one never ending cobbled stone road flanked on both sides by acres and acres of woodland, military training ground, deer and mines!

There was once a village here where Northern Irish families lived whilst the soldiers trained during the Troubles. Prior to that settlements existed from the sixteen hundreds until 1939 when the area was redeployed for WWII. Some ruins remain. It is beautifully lush yet desolate, quiet yet there is a peculiar tension in the air as if something is about the break. We drove through during heavy storms & thunder which made the atmosphere even more eerie.

As one eventually leaves the area it is said that one is re-entering Germany such is the extent of it. A zone of curious interest.”

“Think About The Future” was selected for the RBSA Photography Prize 2021.

It is statement on the dawdling, procrastinating nature of Big Business towards environmental matters. Mother Earth’s mental health is being harmed by “progress”.

Money speculates on greed and not the future.

Dubrovnik’s city walls offer a fascinating method of navigating the old town via vertices, elevations and sections.

In Hanoi, little girls would run up to my teenage daughter with a wave and a “Hello”. The delight on their faces when my offspring replied back – two sides of the world connecting.

Hanoi was a broth of uncomfortable humidity, but for the locals it was merely another day. For a westerner, the absence of aisles and hostile retail surveillance made for a refreshing and liberating browse where the sellers were more intriguing than their actual produce at times. Every stall and stand was like a theatre scene. Back home, our supermarkets have lost that endearing authenticity – if they ever had it.

As a kid I played in the street too. All day, everyday. It may not have taught us Shakespeare but perhaps other survival techniques. Such as how to use your mettle – as the world would only get tougher.

From a bus shelter the sun was setting behind the yellow tap which gave the illusion of the background becoming the foreground. Then I realised the one kid was coming towards while the other going away.

I am a passenger,
I stay under glass.

Pressing against the thresholds which try to contain us.

I’d like to see more adults do this.

When people as passengers pass-by in their little windows which they have temporarily rented, they are anonymous and yet contribute to the make-up of a city. Behind each face is a name, age, plans, worries, relationships, the last meal, debt, their home and a yet-to-be-determined deceased date.

As flickering cinema projections, their fleeting presence may repeat like some planets, one may occasionally recognise a face and put a name to it with a multitude of details in nanoseconds, but the majority are unknown, strange masks and they only come alive if and when we engage.

They amused me. One day they might be giants.

One can disappear from New York when in Central Park, but New York never really escapes you.

Istanbul markets are a must.

Julian Barnes once wrote something along the lines of “Satire is when irony has ran out of steam”.

I find there is a fine line between the mocked and the mocking. When in performative mode, the ostentatious often resembles self parody rather than anything authentic, and to the point where they’ve managed to detach themselves from the rest of us to unrelatable and sometimes hideous levels. Perhaps this is the point. After all, they can afford not to care.

In order for that frog-legged form to be up there, he must know people or know things. Or know people who know things – who we don’t know. 

This is architecture not as a convenience or a facility, but as a prop for the privileged – like a sports car. The suspended pool only works when someone is swimming in it. The one needs the other which makes this theatre. And the shear elevation accentuates the gap between them and us. It is both impressively audacious and resentful. And he most probably knows it.

A homeless couple just off Shaftesbury Avenue.

Taken during the filming of MENTALk – a men’s mental health film.

We loved the setting here which formed part of a contemporary dance performance featured in the film. A train went over creating a dramatic tribal-type thumping – the acoustics were amazing.

Little to say, it just happened, movement & stillness as one.

More to say, I often think of the windows in the tube trains as film cells, the flickering motion of ephemeral & ethereal life.

Just before lockdown, at the back of a row of shops in Newcastle. Little did we know that close proximity and zoom meetings would become main themes for the then foreseeable future.

A stripped out retail store reveals more.

The Overground from a warehouse roof.

JFK airport, waiting to take off – in more ways than one.

8th Avenue.

We’re walking towards Chelsea in Manhattan and this guy is off his face trying to rip his face off.

Dumping the unwanted: people, memories, trauma.

Slow it down.
Slow it right down.
To the point it barely moves.
Then put it in a box.
Quarantine it so it can’t escape.
So it can’t spread and affect other parts of your life.
Then you are in control.
And you can start to cope.
To breathe better.
To see more clearly.
To think properly.
To begin to be yourself.

Like addiction mental illness steals your personality.
Your character.
Your friends.
Your future.
It will leave you isolated.
And at the mercy of one thing –
Fear.