It’s you I like | Post Halcyon

2012 endings and beginnings

January 26, 2012 § 2 Comments

I’m leaving WordPress for different pastures… One that I feel has a greater and more engaged community, not to mention a less clumsy interface. If you haven’t joined Tumblr, I recommend it, if only to follow the rapidly increasing population of curators and tastemakers from every web connected corner of the globe. There is an expanding wealth of knowledge and photography abound, one that I have enjoyed enormously being a part of MJR’s All The Things We Love!

Thanks for reading, hope you will continue to follow, observe and engage at Post Halcyon II 🙂 and a happy Chinese New year!

*This blog will remain up indefinitely to serve as an archive of old thoughts.

Richard Siken

November 29, 2011 § Leave a comment

“All of us are trapped in our skins and drowning in gravity.”

The Cinnamon Peeler

June 6, 2011 § Leave a comment

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
you belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Pale sun

March 27, 2011 § Leave a comment

My sister, she photographs too. She roams and laughs with her young Italian lover and their friends by an Australian shore. Clicks on no more than a whim. Purity and pale sun in March.

A call to networks

March 14, 2011 § 1 Comment

Hello Post Halcyon community,

This is a collaborative project that Sarah Elliott, Agnes Dherbeys, Benedicte Kurzen and myself are working on, in an effort to use as a tool to bring this issue to sectors outside of the photographic realm. We want to bring this to the academia, corporate sector, philanthropic circles (for example) to open up ideas to a means of survival and the continuation of life after rape.

Women in the villages of the DRC are the fabric of life in the community. Without these women capable of functioning in a normal capacity and being ostracised for atrocities beyond their means to prevent, society is broken down. They are the tapestry in which all community life is woven and it is torn.

We would like to use this project to bring this issue to light in areas of the public sector that would be otherwise unaware of the steps forward that can be achieved in lending these women a helping hand to continue with their lives, either through mental or physical rehabilitation. In addition to this, the continuous call to abhor and stand against the very foundation of warfare fought on the bloodied ground of innocents.

Please share this project with your friends/network (especially to those outside the photographic community) if you find this at all important/relevant. We are totally open to communication or dialogue so if you have any contacts that you think would be useful or ideas for the project, get in touch! We would love to hear from you.

Best,

Ying

VIEW THE PROJECT HERE

Mise-en-scene

November 18, 2010 § 1 Comment

MISE EN SCENE:
TERRAIN VAGUE
BOUFFEE DELIRANTE AIGUE
J’AI LEVE A TETE ET J’AI VU PERSONNE

(Arrangement of a scene:
no-man’s-land
thunderstorm of madness
I raised my head and I saw no one)

Few photographers have moved me and captivated me in their vision as much as Justin Maxon. If you see his earlier work and the places where his mind has been, to the places where he is reaching for, the age-old dichotomy and struggle of good vs evil, war vs peace, dark vs light becomes clear. Recently selected to participate at the World Press Photo Masterclass, Justin set for himself a new task – to break through the madness and the thunderstorm and to take solace for a moment in the sun. I remember speaking with him for hours about this… the idea of filling your life with the anguish of others because it’s all the reality you know, or perhaps… something different. Perhaps it’s just as important to balance the darkness with its lighter counterpart, to photograph with sincerity and heartbreaking earnestness all that you might have hoped for, all that you might want to live for. It takes enormous courage to hope. I’ve found that fewer and fewer people are willing to openly throw off the mantle of cynicism for fear of being vulnerable and ridiculed, for fear of losing street cred. Justin hopes… and if he has fear of it, I have yet to see him succumb… and we, as his audience, are better for it.

Slow down…Breathe…Only this life

Comma

October 28, 2010 § 1 Comment

And I

I am the bodiless

The spectre

The comma nestled between the verbs

J. Larkin

August 16, 2010 § Leave a comment

In The Footsteps Of The King ~ Jason Larkin

There is a tree in the middle of Dakhla oasis which, according to some locals, possesses a soul. They call it the tree of Sheikh Adam, and it has stood for centuries at the heart of one million square miles of vast, almost waterless isolation, a space once considered to be amongst the most inhospitable places on the planet. A British scientist and explorer W.J. Harding-King reached this spot in 1909 and declared the tree to be a symbol of everything magical about the desert, “a land where afrits, ghuls, genii and all the other creatures of native superstitions are matters of everyday occurrence; where lost oases and enchanted cities lie in the desert sands.”

A land of lost legends is being slowly turned, house by house, road by road, into the most improbable of solutions to Egypt’s rapidly-escalating population crisis. The Cairo-based government is aiming to turn over three million acres of arid ground into green farmland over the next decade, and provide a home for up to 19 million Egyptians along the way. Nothing less than an entire new valley of life is being scheduled to rise, phoenix-like, from the sand.

It will be the country’s biggest construction project since the pyramids, cost billions of dollars, and according to many scientists, is so bold as to be completely unachievable. Metamorphosing beyond all recognition the ‘untouched’ wilderness of the Western Desert that Dr Harding-King stepped into one hundred years ago, which forms the eastern fringe of the Sahara and spans parts of Egypt, Libya and Sudan. On the centenary of his remarkable expedition, we followed in his footsteps to find a forgotten hinterland in flux.

Street Shooter

July 16, 2010 § Leave a comment

Every so often, I come across a street shooter that really makes me look. You know, those moments that are quintessentially generous, the moments that belong to everyone in their familiarity and ubiquity, but are also sacred in their casual magic. The characters that come into play, with their dirty tattoos and entirely disarming charm. When we talk about photographing for history, I believe in the language of the street as much as I do in the language of war. In some ways, the street speaks to me more. War can look much the same, wherever you go… the street is always shifting, evolving, changing from one to the other and perhaps back again in the cyclical nature of fashion. The street will bring you back to the things that you recognise from living; that aimless saunter on a hot day, the people-watching, the waiting in line. It speaks of a time, a place and a sentiment, and the street photograph is a record of that… and a successful one reveals the utter poetry beneath.

In this together

June 26, 2010 § Leave a comment

One of my favourite things:

Meeting photographers who see life in ways that I do not, and show me the magic slices of this great giant pie of human existence I may have missed in the tumult that is my own.

Presenting, the talented Mr McDonnell…

Where Am I?