While I was overseas I drank a lot of coffee. I drink a fair bit of coffee here in Australia, but man alive, Italians know how to pour a good espresso, and I thought it would simply be rude not to sample roughly as much as possible while there. After a few days I decided I would try to take a picture of each one, because in fact coffees are extremely photogenic – the different table textures and cups, and sugar packets and saucers, make each one interesting. I’ve ended up with a set of photos that I’m quite pleased with.

These coffees are from Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, and France. The Italian ones are the really short, delicious ones. Swiss coffees are, for the most part, what we would call a long black here – and as much as I hate to confirm a cliched stereotype, the quality of the coffee really does decrease the moment you cross the border from Italy. The take-away coffee is from France, where you can buy a reasonable espresso on a train.

If you’re interested, you can see these photos in higher resolution in this set on flickr.

I love strange and funny signs and this is one of my favourites. I think it is pretty self explanatory – it’s all the things not to do in the Italian alps. Don’t light fires, no loud music, don’t ride your moterbike into cars, and – especially – do not poke owls with sticks. They really don’t like it.

These two photographs are of the hands of statues. If there isn’t a band out there already called Hands of Statues, I think one should be created with that very name. You saw it here first.

Montmartre, in Paris, is famous for its moulins (windmills) and the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, for being a red light district and having a lively cafe scene, and for being the location for much of the filming of Amélie. It also turns out to have a large amount of awesome street art. The piece in these first two photos is by Gregos and is part of his series called “Mon visage sur les murs de Paris” (“My face on the walls of Paris”). Apparently there are almost forty of these faces, all with tongue out, some painted, some blank, on walls throughout Paris. I am sorry that I only saw this one while I was there!

These next two photos are also of street art in Montmartre. I don’t know who the artists are, so if you happen to know, please drop me a line so I can credit them properly.

Something that I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time is having some of my photos available to buy online as framed prints. I’m pleased that now I’ve sorted out what I think is a good way to make it happen, so from today many of the photos in the collections have a green ‘buy framed print’ button above them. The prints are sold through RedBubble, and can be bought framed, with matting, or mounted on ‘gaterboard’ – a material that is stronger than foamcore, and which I assume from the name also has something to do with crocodiles and the like. Please take a look through the collections, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you have comments or suggestions about it all.

In other minor website tweaks, I’ve also added a page about these prints, lightened the gray text on the homepage to make it more readable on dark monitors, and added descriptions to collection photographs.

This is Monsieur Chat, AKA Mister Cat or M. Chat, a creation of artist Thoma Vuille. M. Chat first appeared in the French city of Orléans, then in Paris in 2000, and quickly sprang up in a great many other European cities – this particular photograph was taken in Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. M. Chat was the subject of Chris Marker’s film Chats Perchés, which looked at the cat’s appearance over France as a reflection of the state of France post 9/11. See also: a website dedicated to collecting M. Chat appearances, an article on the M. Chat phenomenon, an interview with Thoma Vuille (en français), and the flickr group of Monsieur Chat photos. The mysterious and widespread emergence of Monsieur Chat reminds me of Sydney’s Eternity street writing, in which the single beautifully written word “Eternity” appeared throughout Sydney from the 1940s to the 1960s. It turned out to be written by one Arthur Stace, who, like Thoma Vuille, left his mark on the city anonymously for many years and allowed the art to speak for itself.

Here are two other photographs of street art that I took earlier this year. The first, of the banana, is in Bern in Switzerland, while the second is in Toulouse, France. I love that the vulture is pecking at the spot where the paper of the poster has ripped – it is the ever changing, ephemeral, mysterious, often anonymous nature of street art that I think makes it so special.