Slow trek

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

Albert Camus

The Architect’s medium

The architectural artist’s fundamental medium is not buildings, nor its forms and masses, but nor is it space, nor light, nor materials, nor any other of the thematic preoccupations of contemporary modernism. As simply as we can say that the plastic artist’s medium is imagery, and the writer’s medium is language, we can simply say that the architectural artist’s medium is activity. “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of human interaction and movement,” to paraphrase Le Corbusier.

– Quoted from The Diagram of Everything

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

 

 

 

Hot blind earth

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

William Faulkner

Spring, New York | USA

Los cerezos

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
(I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees)

Pablo Neruda

I exist

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

Jean Paul Sartre

Hotel Regent, Rome | Italy

Burning wings

Few know this kind of dizzy glee:
an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.

Ouyang Jianghe

Reflexions Masterclass, Rome | Italy

Rookie error

Melbourne, en route to Rome.

Cold morning light, the beleaguered mid-Fall sun sliding its reluctant way into partial view. I watch my mother put on a brave face, hand raised (fingers splayed), after a sleepless night on the eve of yet another departure. I touch my fingers to the glass as the car pulls away from her, half conscious of the parody we make – her in the tightly wrapped bathrobe, me and my over stuffed bags.

Heart strings thrumming as I feel that strange regret. The one where the scene laid out before me loses its line of sight and I am left helplessly committing the heaviness, the poignancy to memory, empty-handed.

Cameras in the trunk.

Whispered conversation

I  like the whispered conversation that photographs have with each other.

I like to cup my ear and listen in.

In two days…

… I shall be on the road again, slowly making my way back to Home #2. It’s been 6 months since I’ve cruised down the concrete ribbon pavements of Manhattan on my wiry, 2-wheeled crimson steed. I miss it. The clamour of the city beating on my window, the madness of my friends, the photography community – ever vibrant, ever comical, ever passionate.

In two days, I’ll be firmly ensconced within the ill-fitting polyester seats of a giant airborne vessel, en route to Singapore with enough time for one swim, one meeting and one night of blathering away with a close and very funny Brian. 30 hours later, another check-in, en route to Roma Fiumicino, six days of intensified Reflexions Masterclass before boarding one last flight to arrive in the fabled arms of my hard and dirty love, New York.

Two days from now, 30 hours of air time, 6 plane snacks and one week of photo-talk later, I’ll be at Home #2 again, stale, weary, excited with a head full of crits and a tune on my lips…

MJR Print Editions ~ Ying Ang

So my little story zine is here, freshly printed and ready to be consumed! Come say hi at Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville to get yourself a copy or else you can try to chase me across various American states over the summer… but no promises… 🙂