MERRY MERRY

This is how we do down under, holiday styles. Merry everything, live large & laugh lots, my friends!!!

xY

 

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

Interludes

Small spaces open up to me where a certain time and a certain few people make a brief interlude in my life. The beginning of this summer has been one such time. My glorious little household in New York has been scattered to the four winds – Barbara to Croatia, Talia back up the Russian River in California and I continue my search for answers to questions that I don’t understand, across oceans and continents. Adrienne stays in New York and laments our desertion. I make Barbara and Talia promise to return whenever I make my forays back into the city. Every great album needs interludes.

Last nights together in the city.

New York | July, 2011

Make-believe

Legs piston-pumping through the opaque heat of a New York summer. I blink through the veil of sweat and wonder briefly at your life, carrying on, evolving, happening without me. So firmly held prisoner and apart by our own skins, continents, the sea, promises we made before we knew each other.

I whistle something tuneless that catches on the breeze and it whips past me to the rider on my right. She is an old friend, lost in her own biking thoughts, one eye turned inward and the other on passing cars and strangers.

I swerve simmering asphalt potholes, look up, note a passing plane, fancy outrunning it to Chelsea and grin at my own foolish games of make-believe. Finally making my darting way home through the constant obstacle course of big city traffic, I wonder if you ever conjure up my life happening over here without you.

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