L’ora del tramonto

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

(The violet hour)

Supplication

I offered my heart in supplication. I offered it up for a life that was fuller… full-bodied, full-blooded, full-flavoured. I was given everything as a child. Everything that I was told I could ever want. Everything it was written that a little girl could possibly desire in her charmed, pink, lilac scented life, in every story book ever written that made it to a mainstream bookshelf. There was only one mistake. I was never that girl. My favourite colour was green, not pink. Green was the colour of hope, the colour of the ink that Neruda used to pen his odes to the crashing sea and the long length of Chile. My favourite scent was tree, not lilac, not to be bottled and sold duty-free.

So when the time came, I made a deal. Incision of the deepest kind, slicing through the safety of story-book comforts, I cut free the most precious part of me and held it up to the world. To be attacked, to be protected, to be valued, ignored, spat upon, cherished, I held it up in supplication. As a result, perhaps it’s a little more worn than the rest, a little ragged around the edges… but it pulses in response to a beat that resounds louder and with more conviction than I ever had in the lilac-frilled life my parents had wanted to give me.

And now there is my story, not theirs, in all its complexities and simplicities, madness and humanity. An opera.

Hong Kong | February, 2011

…They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flight path.
But inside your sob-sodden kleenex
And your saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek-scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true…

~ excerpt from “The Shot” by Ted Hughes

Playground love

I’m a high school lover, and you’re my favourite flavour
Love is all, all my soul
You’re my playground love

Yet my hands are shaking
I feel my body reeling, time’s no matter, I’m on fire
On the playground, love.

You’re the piece of gold that flashes on my soul.
Extra time, on the ground.
You’re my playground love.

Anytime, anywhere,
You’re my playground love.

~ Air

Be generous with your love | Australia | Summer | 2011

Exile

I obsessively scour lonely neighbourhoods, organise and reorganise the moving theatre of our physical constructs – at times with a tune in my head, other times with the incessant repetition of numbers (f4, f8, 1/60 sec, 1/500 sec, 200 iso, 8m – ∞), and occasionally nothing but the low hum of dead white noise.

I think that the photographer who roams is consistently on a search for a state of unreality. A conscious search for a state of unconscious displacement. A state where everything that you’ve been taught is real, is suddenly unreal and in a way, irrelevant… the home that you once knew, your family, your childhood friends. And then, when you return from these journeys, to holiday in reality, the very true sense of displacement, which you probably always carried with you anyway, begins to make sense. The home in the suburbs, your neighbours with their yappy dog, the smiling old couple whose names you don’t know who you see when you take out the trash… all of what seemed strange to you in a deep, subconscious sense growing up, becomes strange consciously and so begins to makes sense. Perhaps that’s all we do in a modern age where survival is no longer a simple agricultural struggle. It is to make sense of the way we feel – to turn the external manifestations of our lives into a reflection of how we feel about it on the inside.

The roaming photographer – a part of nothing and yet a part of everything – the one who had no problems with pretending that they were a part of you, of us, and yet held themselves aloof at a very intrinsic level. The one who had no problems getting close and even fewer problems saying goodbye. An exile from the start.

Northern Italy | Winter | 2011