Three Poems to End the Year
Reflections on literature and photography, with links to portfolios on Greece, Toronto, and the US. Oh, and three poems, to round off the year.
Have Camera, Will Travel
A Readers Digest update, in words and pictures, on August travels and travel plans for September - Athens and the Cycladic islands of Sifnos and Serifos, dear friends!
Talking Pictures
A photography blog, with a side story about discovering a branch of my family, on my father’s side, that had up till now been completely unknown to me….
To Know a Place
My English teacher, Jennifer Lloyd, gave me a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 as a gift when I left school, with the inscription, “May this book be a source of inspiration and pleasure to you in your ‘exploration.’” At the top of the page she had written, in her beautiful handwriting, this excerpt from Eliot’s Little Gidding. I have the book still, minus its dust-jacket. The spine is cracked, the blue cover is faded, the edges are worn. But the words are still alive on the page.
And there has been a certain amount of exploration, if truth be told, over these past two months, of the mental and affective as well as the physical kind, quite apart from all the exploring (and getting lost) that has happened over a lifetime….
All this travel - time travel, thought travel, air travel - makes me think about place - what a place is, and what it means to know a place.
A Fine Line
My blog this month leads with a lovely quote from an attentive and generous critic, Ramsay Bell Breslin, commenting on one of my Bailieboro photographs:
So many things to admire about this photograph. I like the way you use the edges of your photograph in surprising ways. On the left, a small scene in the far distance I barely noticed at first; on the right, a scene set in the middle distance. Of the photograph as a whole, what looks at first like a simple scene that one can grasp at a glance turns out to be more complex, which makes it fascinating (for me at least) to contemplate.
The romantic in me loves the waves of snow in the foreground and the feathery grasses that blow over them. The post-modernist in me admires the pole (another surprise at the edge), which throws what seems like an intentional wrench into our expectations of a quiet winter scene.
In post-modern architecture one sees annexes attached to buildings that look nothing like the buildings. Here the telephone pole seems out of place. As such, it grates on one’s desire for visual harmony and something we believe we have every right to expect of art.
But no, your photograph is anything but complacent. Life is harsh and often awkward and uncomfortable. Telephone poles loosen and tilt under winter conditions. Tolerating that visual discomfort is part of our job as viewers….
F is for February
In the midst of an unseasonably mild winter, I reflect on photography, the climate emergency, and the crazy state of the world right now.
2024
The global challenges and crises that are piling up as we enter 2024 are a sobering reminder that there is no guarantee that the things we value, or at least aspire to - truth, decency, democracy, tolerance, simple kindness - will prevail.
They are not - will never be, regardless of the consolations and promises of religious faith and political dogma (left-wing or right-wing, take your pick) - a done deal, an achieved state. Who knew? They always will be work in progress, and sometimes, instead of progress, there will be regression, confusion, even chaos.
So the struggle goes on, as it must and has to. Happy New Year, my friends!
Havana Reconsidered
Revisiting the photographs from this trip, almost eight years later, I see that my eye and my camera saw much more, and with more empathy and curiosity, than my more critical and judgmental mind did at the time. The photographs in this series, then, are a reconsideration, both aesthetically and imaginatively, of my earlier portfolio and of our Havana visit.
Harmony
This set of images is of the historic village of Harmony, PA. Led by George Rapp, leader of the Harmony Society of Lutheran Separatists, a party of German settlers established the town in 1804; in 1815, the town and 6000 acres were sold to the ‘second founder,’ Abraham Ziegler, a Mennonite blacksmith, and it was the Mennonites who shaped the development of the town thereafter.
This series forms the first part of a collection of photographs scattered over time and place that I have called ‘Americana’ - images of a country that has been written about, photographed, studied and commented upon from many perspectives - think Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Walker Evans - yet remains (to the outsider at least) elusive: strangely familiar, yet often alien.
Remembering the Sixties
Photographs and memories - remembering the Sixties, and my own sixties, 60 years later, as I turn 70.
Summer of ‘23
Summer’s here, in the northern hemisphere, and so is my June blog, with links and images from my latest collections of photographs, Rob’s collages, and musings about being alive.
Onward in March
It’s the not-so-merry month of March, and here in Toronto we march on, through the grey detritus of a winter that has hung about too long….
But, as I mentioned last month and mention again in this blog, we will soon be out of here, and on our way to sunnier climes - Cape Town, South Africa, with a homeward swing at the end of April and into the beginning of May through Amsterdam and Germany.
Also in this post, some thoughts on style in photography, a guest piece by Rob on her fabulous collages, and updates on exhibitions, my upcoming portfolios and, of course, our travel plans.
Heat and Dust
What I remember first when I think about Etosha is the vastness, the scale, the sky’s blue dome fused with the land, the heat, the bone-dry air heavy with dust. The light bright yet diffused, the heat haze shimmering, and on the line of the horizon the blinding white sea of the salt pan. And I remember flying over this northern stretch of Namibia, and seeing the pan like a giant mirror, reflecting back the light to our aircraft 30,000 feet above.
Only then do I remember the wildlife - the herds of zebra, slogging up the dusty roads, irritable and quarrelsome in the heat; the springbok in waves flowing across the veld; the statuesque geometric beauty of gemsbok and the dour, stubborn battle of the rhinos at the Halali Camp for control of the waterhole….
Hey, January!
Well, 2022 is finally behind us - do I hear you say, and thank goodness for that?! From rising inflation and the ever-increasing cost of living, to the downturn in the markets affecting our pensions if we have them and our retirement savings; from the continuing whack-a-mole battle with Covid variants to the climate emergency and the risible yet sinister lies and fabulations of the right-wing populists and alt-news media and on, most tragically and visibly, to Russia’s savage and unforgivable war of choice in Ukraine, last year was a year that many of us would prefer not to remember, a year we are happy to shut the door on.
Yet, at a personal, individual scale, 2022 was also, for us at least, a year of more positive changes and developments….
Why I Take Photographs
I’ve been taking photographs for most of my life, but I feel like I’ve only just begun…
As 2022 draws to a close, I’ve been asking myself about the amount of time I spend posting photographs to Flickr and Instagram, assembling portfolios for my website, posting blogs that possibly no-one - you, Dear Reader, excepted! - reads, and posing not just the obvious question - is it worth it? - but the rather more basic interrogative: what the hell am I trying to achieve here?