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.

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.

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

L’ora del tramonto

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

(The violet hour)

The Architect’s medium

The architectural artist’s fundamental medium is not buildings, nor its forms and masses, but nor is it space, nor light, nor materials, nor any other of the thematic preoccupations of contemporary modernism. As simply as we can say that the plastic artist’s medium is imagery, and the writer’s medium is language, we can simply say that the architectural artist’s medium is activity. “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of human interaction and movement,” to paraphrase Le Corbusier.

– Quoted from The Diagram of Everything

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

 

 

 

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

MJR Print Editions ~ Ying Ang

So my little story zine is here, freshly printed and ready to be consumed! Come say hi at Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville to get yourself a copy or else you can try to chase me across various American states over the summer… but no promises… 🙂

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