november books

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only one book this month.

the mindful photographer - sophie howarth

 
 

desert dreams

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a morning in joshua tree national park.

shot on portra 800 with a vintage lubitel 2 camera.

october books

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only two books this month.

my private property - mary ruefle

how art can make you happy - bridget watson payne

on context

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on cy twombly at the getty
untitled (to sappho) 1976

the chunk of colour feels lonely until you slow down enough to decipher the text. the handwriting is scrawled long & pulling against itself–stretching into the margins.

it’s sappho. recounting the violent crushing of purple petal underfoot. the visceral feeling of it. the petals bruised from the pressure smashing down on them once delicate, now devolving into only colour. devolving into feeling.

the purple makes us feel the ache of the bruise blooming on pristine skin.

the getty center’s cy twombly exhibition, “making past present,” runs until 30 october, 2022.

meet the hollywoods

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film half frame photos from ciclavia’s meet the hollywoods event in august.

kodak gold 200 / kodak ektar h35 half frame camera

mojave morning

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a morning spent exploring mojave california & the surrounding area with my kodak ektar h35 half frame camera & a roll of ilford hp5.

august books

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brute - emily skaja

thrown rope - peter hutchinson

copy - dolores dorantes (trans. robin myers)

back at the rocks

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journal:

woke up at 3am & went to the desert. highway 14 served as a kind of line between the slowly spreading dawn & the thick close smoke of fires burning to the north.

the morning sun doesn’t so much rise here as it does spread out. the light fills the darkness like water saturating a cloth. it blooms. osmosis.

spent a morning a few weeks ago at my favourite state park – red rock canyon in cantil. I’ve taken a lot of photographs of this park over the years so I decided to bring my film cameras out to play.

standing stones

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journal:

“I don’t think I understoond the word verdant until now. not fully. whereas dublin is grey & a bit blunt the countryside is lush & rugged & rolling hues of green interspersed with slate rock & peat bogs.

the roadsides are dotted with serene collections of mountain sheep grazing away as the cars move around them like a planet in orbit. they can sense the rain & lay down when it’s on its way. sometimes they lay together in little groups of 2 or 3 resting their pitch black faces on each other like woolen pillows.”

poulnabrone dolmen is the largest & best preserved of irelands some 172 dolmens or pass through tombs. the partial remains of at least 33 people have been found here, indicating the site was used for ritual rather than an long term burial location. the structure dates to the neolithic era, but was in use up through the bronze age.

edge of the world

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located on the southwestern edge of ireland’s burren region in county clare, the cliffs of moher run roughly 9 miles along the coast. at their highest they rise more than 700 feet from the atlantic ocean below.

camcorder video diary

the cliffs were formed between 313-326 million years ago as a result of a river dumping silt, sand, and clay along an ancient delta. this sediment was collected over millions of years & compacted & lithified into sedimentary strata now exposed as the cliff face. the punishing atlantic ocean waves are now eroding the cliffs, causing them to collapse under their own weight.

you may recognize the cliffs of moher from their supporting role as the “cliffs of insanity” in the 1987 epic the princess bride.

I arrived in the early afternoon to an otherworldly view of the atlantic & the infamous cliffs shrouded in sea mist & swept by gusts of cold salt air. the cattle and sheep of the surrounding countryside didn’t seem to notice the bluster, & continued their lunchtime grazing without incident.

the cliffs now see over 1.5 million visitors per year.

 
 

emerald isle in black & white

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recently returned from my trip exploring ireland. despite bringing a wide range of cameras with me, sometimes the iphone is all you need.

cool pix

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a short walk around hollywood with a 20+ year old digital camera.

exploring with my new-to-me nikon coolpix 990. the swivel style 900 series cameras were released by nikon starting in 1998, with the 990 hitting the market in 2000 as the last of the models to be powered by four regular double a batteries. these cameras were pretty advanced for their time & still return decent pictures with their 3.34 megapixels & compact flash memory card. fun fact: the formatting for these camera’s cards can’t be read by mac computers. I had to do some finagling to get me images from camera to web!

on falling

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all politeness, digital collage, 2022

my grandmother sleeps in curlers almost every night & styles her hair every day. my grandmother loves cats—I get that from her—& jesus—which I didn’t. my grandmother collects clocks that play sounds on the hour, & she sets them to different times so she can hear each one’s unique music.

her father took her out of school in third grade because he felt it wasn’t worth it to educate a girl—she was just going to get married anyway. she helped to take care of her siblings instead, telling me about how her mother made them dandelion soup when they were too poor on a coal miner’s wage to afford groceries. my grandmother got married at twenty & had four children in as many years. when her husband decided to move across the country she packed up her life & left her family behind. she never went back. she never worked outside the home. she never learned to drive. she would give her mail-in ballot to her husband & sign it after he’d picked all the things for her to vote for. in the months & years leading up to his death of congestive heart failure, my grandfather never told her where their bank accounts were, which bills needed to be paid, or even where he kept the checkbook. he never put her name on the cable account or the phone bill. she never bought anything without asking him for permission first. she had a cash allowance she would spend at goodwill or the dollar store. she never had a credit card or a bank account in her own name. she never owned anything that was hers alone.

she once told me it was ok that she had been taken out of school because she was stupid anyway, it would have been a waste for her to continue.