Infinite space

I could spend all my time alone, inside my head. Stopping and slowly smelling, discovering every curl of every bloom of every idea that pushes through the fleshy undergrowth. I could walk through the infinite space of a feeling, testing out the words to describe it by rolling them around my mouth like marbles. Left to my own devices, I could wander there and never come up for breath. Buried deep, secrets to make the heart burst, the mind shatter, the voices howl, whisper, mutter, moan. I could keep them company. Find the secrets to make the heart whole again, piece the mind back together and soothe the voices to silence.

I could paint the underside of my skin forest green, my ribcage a stone gray, my hands a deep vermillion. I could obsess over the memories of places I’ve never been before. That time we never floated on the mist shrouded lake, flame torches in our hands with honour on our lips and murder in our hearts. That time you never said you loved me and meant it.

All this in infinite space, alone, inside my head.

MERRY MERRY

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

xY

 

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

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

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.

Submerge

I know these people. I know their lives. Photojournalists, photographers, visual story-tellers, however you want to put it, they see life, often the darker side, and bring it to the rest of those who do not travel and do not see.

The consequence is a solitude and a dark shadow that flits within the dim retina of their eyes. The solemn Onlooker. Submerged beneath the surface of raucous laughter, devil-may-care attitudes and sunlit smiles are memories that can’t be let go of. Vast journeys that sear the skin and the appraisal of a thousand strangers, locked in their own battles and greeting the Onlooker as they win trust and weave intricately beneath the surface… a poem, a story, an idea… with images.