How it ends

My pieces of 2010.

Some video, some stop-motion, some slideshow, some highs, some lows, some revelations:

ICP and beyond – My year at the International Centre of Photography, New  York

Pre-Games – When friends come over for the party before the party

In the early AM – Heading downtown in a cab, late one night/early one morning with Ling

Sneak peek – A cracked window on how I like to “work”

Escape to Fort Myers – Brief respite from New York in Florida

Insomnia – No sleep in April

Loss – I lost someone

Getting personal – Understanding what it means to be separate

From England to Australia – Journeying away on wobbly post-ICP legs

x Ying + Ling

 

The Great Disconnect

In a time of a disintegrating sense of community and the diminishing family nucleus, I wonder if the public personal space of the internet has found a unique role to serve: A modern conduit for human connection.

The further we shrink into our “self-reliant” biospheres of meals-for-one, studio apartments, stranger neighbours and the “foreign” corner-store owner, the more dependent we become on the often silent, yet omnipresent company of Skype contacts and Facebook friends. That urge to share lives and to be communal has moved to a virtual dimension, crossing geographical boundaries and the equally distancing local and lifestyle divide.

A binary bridge across the Great Disconnect.

The community of my heart is far-flung. Communication technologies have spoilt me for choice (I want to be friends with her and her and her and him and him and her and him too… so what if they live in Azerbaijan) and the proliferation of travel options hasn’t helped either. Because of this, I am an addict. My time spent online and in post offices declaring love to those on distant shores definitely outweighs my time spent with the kids next door.

Perhaps the answer to my posture problems and failing eyesight is a simple matter of finding local playmates…. But first, I suppose I need to decide where “local” actually is…

Perpignan – Paris – Rome | September 2010

The Rapture

July, 2010
I learnt that I wanted to speak with photographs in 2002. Really speak. In an articulate and sophisticated way about how I felt and the rapture and humanity going on around me… the everything and the nothing. I realised that it wasn’t enough for the photograph to be vernacular.

It was summer, I was in Paris and my father had given me a Canon Powershot G3 to photograph my debut independent voyage on foreign soil. I wandered down the Seine, through the Tuileries and criss-crossed the Pont des Arts during those long and meandering hours on the hazy cusp of sundown. It was my first day away from home, without the guidance of my parents. I photographed incessantly, the scenes around me, the people (timidly and from afar), the landscapes (much bolder and sadly predictable) and occasionally myself (black and white and in the nude – as you do when you begin thinking of yourself as an artist). I stumbled through my images and clumsily composed frames that I was mildly interested in, but mostly around my misconceptions of what makes a good photograph.

8 years later and I find myself again in Paris. It is the same time of year, the same time of day and I wander a similar path to that of 2002. This time I have learnt better how to articulate. I am closer to knowing what I want to say and I know how to begin saying it. I confront, with each frame, the myriad of decisions I didn’t even know mattered when I was 22, that lead up to the final pressing and releasing of the shutter. I know how to woo the people whose faces I am captivated by and the way to frame a landscape that I want to remark on. I have begun to understand my tools. Paris saw the beginning of this process, the shy introduction to my coming-of-age as a photographer.

Now perhaps, I am more the tenacious teenager – bolder, unwisely cockier and still so damned eager to take on everything the world can throw at me, broken bones, grazed knees and all.

CDG – SIN

Morning flights. I’ll be straight with you… I don’t enjoy them. It’s the hardest drag out of bed, the bleary eyed stumble around making sure you haven’t left anything behind, the anxiety that perhaps you left it all a little too late and there’ll be an accident on the road somewhere on the way to the airport.

It’s my last morning in Paris and I’m still slowly making my way home.

Paris

Stop 2: France

(Making my way home)

Mademoiselle Charlotte

New York – #1 print from the colour darkroom, ICP.

Mademoiselle Charlotte. Photo taken in Perpignan, France. 4.9.09

Hello, Home

Welcome to the Zoo

Visa pour l’image avec MJR collectif de photographes, 2009

For my companions

Perpignan, France – Late night in the south of France

I had an important conversation tonight. It came as a reminder of many things. An anchor, even.

Simply, it was about people… and heart. Conducting your actions with truth and honour, doing justice to your companions and having the clarity to look people in the eye and communicate compassion, loyalty, sincerity, strength and being able to show them the importance of who they are.

To hold them up to the light and show them the beautiful transparency that they are capable of when they aren’t afraid to truly see the nature of their heart. To recognise the family of your wider brethren of friends and strangers. To be happy for the successes of the ones who hurt you, to understand that people come before business and that to love is to understand. To live up to your name.

Truth and Honour. All else is false.