2012 endings and beginnings

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!

xY

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

On Tour

 

Finally done showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, the show goes on tour for the next 2 years over 2012 & 2013 around Australia. I will update the schedule soon as I find out about it myself! Thanks to all the people that came out to see it and continue to show support for the work. It is an honour to share the small stories.

 

Angkor Angkor

Siem Reap, Cambodia

We cruise along in the wet heat, doubled over in laughter. No traffic lights, the vehicles govern themselves and we make do. From slideshows to gallery openings to peer reviews to spicy bowls of noodle soup, to long nights of pool and beer, we weave through the dusty streets, navigating potholes and trying not to marvel too much at the scenes floating by and causing an accident. I bring Miss Adrienne Grunwald with me and she falls in love and tries to come up with ways to stay.

I see and hold my far-flung friends and we share stories. The weird, sad, freaky, side-splittingly hilarious, private ones. Not the ones in pictures. This is so precious to me. My favourite time of the year.

A farewell to arms

A 19 year old Ernest Hemingway came here. Freshly bitten by war, looking for a place to rest his wounds, he chooses the grand dame, Hotel des Iles Borromees in Stresa, along the bank of Lake Maggiore.

In the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway | Stresa, Italy

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once.” E.H. speaks of love between Frederick Henry and Catharine Barclay in ‘A Farewell to Arms’, set in Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees.

Reflexions; Lugano edition

Back in Australia for the moment… Europe is done for now. At least until February. My second session of Reflexions Masterclass is over, this time in Lugano, and I emerge breathless, confident, inspired.

I’m frequently asked what the sessions are like, what a masterclass actually is and whether it really is as wanky as it all sounds. Despite the lofty sounding name, I can honestly say that I have never been in an environment where I have felt more humbled and yet at the same time more honored to be a part of such a… movement of artists. (Sounds wanky, huh.)

Candidly speaking, I have to admit, a small, exclusive, arduously selected group of photographers meeting at a different location in Europe 3 times a year to discuss the peaks and troughs of their work and ways in which to elevate it, may sound like a load of tripe. In this case, the reality is much, much cooler. The result of this particular group, which I will be sad to see the end of, is an alternately humorous, serious, always passionate, warm and affectionate salon of creatives, all dedicated to their work and deeply invested in photography and the complexities of life that create the images that end up on the discussion table. The demands of the masterclass, a 3 times yearly deadline to produce outstanding work, is to first and foremost bring one’s mind and attention to the work of your peers. It’s a matter of insight and sharing that reflection in the hopes that we would serve as a multi-faceted mirror to each other and hopefully shed light upon areas previously unnoticed or unseen.

Lugano, Switzerland | October 2011

Second homes

I was recently asked to submit photographs to Das Magazin on “my” New York. The raucous cacophony that I pass through like a tiny tornado whenever my travel schedule will allow me. The enormity that I navigate filled with its beauty, crazy, concrete angles and deep rumbling underbelly. I feel lucky to call it a home… albeit a second one…

Grand shapes

These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated around me; the unstained snowy mountain top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds – they all gathered around me and bade me be at peace.

~ “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley

In the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock.

Cernobbio | Italy

R*U*N*A*W*A*Y

The flight from neighbourhood demons. I wrap myself in the cloak of anonymity and strike out into unfamiliar terrain, mountains of obscurity and nameless faces in a similar migration to my own.

I’ve been running for a long time… How about you? Veiled, probing questions over cheap cups of coffee. Sun-blasted truckstops in the middle of the Mojave punctuate the streaming barren landscape. I drive from the desert to the sea, across alpine ridges, high sierra lakes, passing all manner of lost souls along the way. Disappearing souls who don’t want to be found… Where being found denotes a return to a place they never wanted to be in the first place. Instead, the mask of the wandering stranger, observing from afar the things that make the lives of others: Salvation, intimacy, fear, doubt.

If you’re reading this, I’m still on the run.

California | USA

What it means

To be free.

I remember being young. Nosed pressed up against the glass. Breathing mist. Heart beating in earnest as I imagined the myriad of lives and adventures to be had beyond the twisted sycamore trees, past the monopoly houses of the burbs, track-suited moms with their porn star nails (it was the 90’s). I would feel my nose itch as the tears pushed through. “Please get me out of here”, I prayed. The tiles were cold beneath my thighs as I sat cross-legged on the floor, pushed as close against the outside as I could, eyes half-mast and dreaming. Time spent at my bedroom window.

My dreams were extrapolated fragments taken from Hollywood films, novels. Lives made fiction by their authors, ensnaring me nonetheless in their ideas of a world filled with long roads made for exploring and young men with a fire beneath their feet and questions in their hearts.

All road trips have a beginning and this is mine.

California, USA | July, 2011

Road trip journaling

Slide out of the city on those hot, sticky wheels. Grey ribbon of road and a blue sky so bright it seems white. Throw your head back and howl at the freedom of a horizon unencumbered. Marvel at the little things, the perfect mathematics of cumulus clouds and wheat. Bare your skin to the sun and be lost for a while in a place that doesn’t belong to you. Fall exhausted in a heap at the end.