iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

My teaching philosophy. “We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Art: Michael Hayter.

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Bernand Plossu. The Fresson charcoal process. “The Paris cinematheque formed me visually. I saw the films of Dreyer, Buñuel, Eisenstein, Bresson, Mizoguchi, Bergman and countless others. I didn’t go to my philosophy classes I went there and learned from the classics of cinema.”

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Walter Benjamin. ‘Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.’ He was at the heart of my dissertation and much of my approach to literature, photography and philosophy. A terrible loss at such a horrendous point in history.

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‘Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.’ He was at the heart of my dissertation and much of my approach to literature, photography and philosophy. A terrible loss at such a horrendous point in history.

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Homo Sapiens. Nikolaus Geyrhalter “The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.” Claude Levi-Strauss Empty spaces, ruins, cities, overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt. Now abandoned and decaying. x.com/bertrom/stat...

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Guess who’s not going home?😏

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5 a.m. “Lift your bum right up….right up”.

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Patrick Kavanagh. The Hospital. I’m leaving hospital tomorrow. Thank you for your company.

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I am a self confessed Andrew Garfield fan. Loved him in Never Let Me Go. A film I taught for many years. Eclectic in his choices of film. Also a perfect fit to play Anthony Perkins in a biopic.

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The target audience for Cold War cultural propaganda was foreign left-wing intellectuals and avant-garde writers and artists, who were attracted to communism and the Soviet Union, turning them into anti-communists. A fascinating read. cpa.org.au/guardian/iss...

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Yves Klein. Leap Into the Void, Fontenay-aux Roses, France. 1960.

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Lorna Simpson. Detail of ‘Walk with me’. 2020.

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Matthew Krishanu. Banyan Tree, Two Boys. 2025.

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‘I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.’ Wendell Berry.

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Wings of Desire. Wim Wenders. My heroes are no longer the warriors and kings … but the things of peace … But no one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace. What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn’t endure … and that its story is hardly told?

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🤣 Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible Bob!

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Bertrom. @bertrom.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I call this series, I’m Going Nowhere’.

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7 am. Just woke up to a nurse asking the man in the next bed “Can I borrow your arm for a minute?” In a very strong Bolton accent, then moving on to singing Mel and Kim’s ‘Respectable’.

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Bertrom. @bertrom.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Not how I expected the day to pan out. At least I ended up with some nice new shoes.

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Bertrom. @bertrom.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Vivian Maier. Vivian was a truly remarkable woman and a visionary photographer. Her story began for me in 2007, and I was able to include it, as it unfolded in my film and photography classes.

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Bertrom. @bertrom.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Vivian Maier. “Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.”

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Bertrom. @bertrom.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Invisible City/Night Walk. In the 1980s Ken Schles was living in an abandoned tenement in New York’s East Village, documenting his life in the underground art and club scene, a mesmerizing existence during a turbulent time.

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Bertrom. @bertrom.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A walk I have taken so often, and one that gives me peace.

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Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. Bergman's Dreams - An Original Video Essay. youtu.be/JFQtlSvdWxQ

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At the bottom of our garden, 27/03/2023.

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Gwen John. Lady Reading. 1909-11.

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We always have their words. Jorge Luis Borges Carson McCullers Boris Pasternak Marguerite Duras

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Nick Brandt visited five animal sanctuaries in Africa to portray the people displaced by droughts and the creatures whose very existence is under threat. “We need to be far better stewards of the earth. We all need to learn to be good ancestors .” 2020.

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Dulovits Jenő (1903-1972), was one of the most significant and defining creators in the history of Hungarian photography and photo technology, treating aesthetics and technique as a distinctively individual photography style based on backlighting, softening and light-shadow balancing.

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Hugh Hood. Glasgow. 1974-78. This Glasgow was a city of ghosts and rubble, its air a miasma of sandstone dust and occluded sunlight. Hugh’s work was local history reframed as National Geographic anthropology.

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In the 1980s Brian Lomas photographed shops, mainly in Moston, Blackley, Newton Heath and Harpurhey, revealing a little of Manchester's urban history and celebrating its independent shops of the time.

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Birkenhead park. A lovely place to be.

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The Descent. Dir Neil Marshall. 2005. A brilliant claustrophobic shocker I loved to teach in a British horror module. It works not only with movie imagery, but with the stuff of myth and dreams too. It evokes hellish visions, from Goya to Fuseli, gothic gargoyles and Dore's engravings.

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The Story of Temple Drake. 1933. Directed by Stephen Roberts and adapted from the controversial novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner. Steeped in southern-gothic shadows by influential cinematographer Karl Struss and shot through with moral ambiguity, it is a harrowing vision of sin and salvation.

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Harold Ancart. Branches et cercles. 2024.

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RIP Tony Gatlif. Filmmaker. “I have waged a battle against my destiny, against myself, and that is no small thing."

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Edvard Munch. Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine. 1906. He had already fallen into alcoholism at this point so the inclusion of a bottle of wine is symbolic. His mental health problems are also apparent in his sad demeanor. He sits alone, reflecting on all that haunted him.

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