12.04.2000 Pisa, Italy. View of the Leaning Tower obscured by rainbow lollipop

This photo is now available to buy and download from this web site for just €1,00

It is probably the most famous tower in the world and one of the Souvenir classics; the leaning tower of Pisa. Begun in 1173 and finished 177 years later, the tower is actually built like a banana; the builders compensating the angle over the years to try to keep it upright. Engineering work during the nineties strengthened the tower and slowly pulled it back to the angle it had had in 1838. In 2001 it was reopened to the public.

Eight hundred and twenty-seven later, in Easter 2000, my family and I were travelling through Pisa on the way down to Tuscany. After Loreley, New York and Berlin, Pisa was the next Souvenir on the list. A friend of mine, Heinz Krimmer, who runs and owns an agency for funny photos had given me a resin table-lamp in the form of the tower to take to Italy out of his collection of strange objects. I was pretty pleased with the lamp because already a serious problem was beginning to manifest itself; the necessity to find interesting objects to replace the originals in the photos I was collecting.

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Houses of Parliament, London. Combined pencil sharpener and bell in the form of a policeman's helmet

One of the favourite stories of my childhood is the one of the boy asking the (English) policeman if his head goes right up to the top of his helmet. It is the combination of naivety and cheek which I really like. For me this picture epitomises this attitude, it is also a real photographer's picture. 

Sometimes I travel with my daughter Lea to London to visit art galleries and museums, usually Marion comes over for the weekend to do some shopping and we fly back together. This trip was 2001 and, as usual, we had lovely weather. We took the tube down town from my friend Don's place in Islington and got off at Oxford Circus to walk down to Hamley's. Quite soon we found a Souvenir shop and, although I hadn't necessarily intended doing any photography that day, Lea was enthusiastic and we ended up buying a load of stuff. Different kinds of cut-out postcards, a plastic pencil case in the form of a London bus, a fridge magnet telephone kiosk, a beefeater teddy bear and a pencil sharpener in the form of a policeman's helmet as well as a few other things which never got into the frame.

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The nice people who promote Spain in Frankfurt arrange trips for journalists which I go on one, sometimes twice a year. In Spring 2002 a small group of intrepid journalists set off to explore Bilbao and other parts of Galizia over an extended weekend. We arrived at Bilbao airport at night. The place is shaped like two wings, designed by Santiago Calatrava, but I had the impression walking out of the terminal that night as if I was leaving a monumental cave. We were driven to eat a steak at a local restaurant in the old part of the city where the guest can drink wine out of potes; wine served in little glasses.

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Loreley Cliffs on the Rhine near Mainz in Germany 1999

At the end of November I was on assignment for the Finnish daily newspaper "Helsingin Sanomat". Heikki Aittokoski, the German Correspondent and myself were doing a story about the Loreley legend which was why we were perched up on a hill top above the river Rhine on this bleak day. The light was completely dead and the colours could, at best, be described as pastel.

The Rhine is very deep and narrow here and it is one of the most dangerous places in the Upper Rhine Valley. So dangerous, in fact, that St Goar settled there to nurse ship-wrecked mariners back to health. At this spot, legend has it, Loreley threw herself from the cliffs on the way to a convent  because her lover had been unfaithful. In the romantic ballad written by Clemens Brentano in 1801, where Loreley appears for the first time, the woman's ghost sits thereafter on the rocks, combing her golden hair and luring ships to their destruction. Later Heinrich Heine wrote the poem which was later set to music by Friedrich Silcher. I give you Heinrich Heine's "The Loreley";

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2007 London, Abbey Road. Zebra crossing and Beatle's Abbey Road CD

The Abbey Road picture belongs to my Souvenirs set. It was taken in October 2007. I had previously tried this shot in July 2005, about a week after the London bombings. A combination of factors  made me dissatisfied with the results and I left one (lightly photoshopped) version in the set knowing that I would want to go back to it.

The problem with the first version was that I had not got close enough to the crossing. The original cover photography was done by Iain Macmillan, who had 10 minutes for the shoot on the 8th August 1969. Macmillan had an elevated perspective with a normal or slightly long lens for the original. According to Wikipedia the man on the pavement in the background is an American tourist who only found out much later that he had been immortalised. On the left of the original picture is a VW Beetle which they had tried to had moved for the shot. The owners lived in the apparment block opposite. Later, the number plate was stolen many times as a souvenir. The car was sold at auction in 1986 for $23,000 and is on display at the VW Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany.

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