One of those flash ephiphanies of travel, the realisation that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not.
Travel gives such jolts.
Frances Mayes, from A Year in the World.
Yesterday I spent some hours over at the Radiant Light Yoga Studio here in Antwerp. These last few weeks have seen me working on a new project that involves creating a series of yoga portraits. It's probably clear in the portrait below but I am absolutely loving this attempt of capturing the truly lovely yoga folk I find there.
Today was the day when I could no longer resist dipping my toes in the 'water' of this discipline that was causing me to relax even while I was photographing the classes. Today I attended my first yoga class.
My body has suffered quite some damage over the years and I was slightly concerned about how it would go, this desire to make the stiff and unbendy bits of me supple again.
I loved it and I can barely wait to return although the next few days are busy and I'll have to be patient ... so patient.
Huge thanks go to Yogalates Instructor, Lama (pictured below), for being so patient with me as she worked her way through a series of moves from her yoga practice and for permission to post her image here.
There I was on the beach, no clue about anything else going on ...
The light was extraordinary, late afternoon, Holland.
I wanted to take something of the sea with me and played a while, at the edge of an incoming tide. This pleased me. Surprised and pleased me.
The beach huts, they intrigue, horrify, and amuse me ...
For me, a child of New Zealand, the beach is about Nature, with a capital N. It's not about about shelter and masses of 'stuff'. It's not about windbreaks, umbrellas, or cafes.
But there I was, down on the beach in Holland today, delighted by the light and the colour, horrified by the 'civilised' nature of the beach ... but. at the same time, enjoying a glass of red wine or two at those cafes located every few hundred metres along the sand.
There was live music too ...
You can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree.
Then a taller tree. Then the sky.
That’s how you’ll end up … If you let yourself love a wild thing.
You’ll end up looking at the sky.
Truman Capote.
We were over in Holland today, in Zeeland, on a couple of their emptier beaches.
I love photographing birds in flight. And so I did.
The sun was going down ... the light was exquisite.
Kathleen put out the challenge and here I am, still blogging those things that make me happy ...
This is our dining room/lounge area - taken a few moments ago. There's a lot of happy here.
I love the colours Gert painted it, partially inspired by Monet's kitchen in France. We loved the yellow there. Then you can see Amedeo's painting resting between my two photographs taken in Istanbul. I adore that painting because it was gift from Amedeo, because he's hugely talented and because he painted me a photography shop there in the city of Genova.
Most of the furniture you see in the photograph is secondhand. Gert and I are divorce orphans. Our divorces pretty much took everything we had accrued over our 12 and 14 years of marriage and voila, later, when we met each other, we had to begin again.
Children, stay married, or get pre-nups because divorce can be a vicious beast if you end up on the wrong side.
Anyway, I love the oak table pictured, found for 70 euro at our favourite secondhand shop here in the city. I introduced Gert to secondhand treasures and he quickly succumbed to its curious charm. The chairs were 65 euro for the lot and the red couch in the background ... it was something very reasonable that I fell for too, writes this woman who is easily made happy with treasure found secondhand.
Oh! And, there on the big wooden cabinet, are flowers by Dieter. We really like Dieter because he's a lovely man and makes the best flowers arrangements. I changed this one a little because I was rushing but, truly, his arrangements are beautiful artworks.
Whenever I leave Genova, I go through a withdrawal as I leave the source of some truly superb coffee, found at Caffè degli Specchi.
I know there's a shift to make ... from the sublime back to the-best-I-can-find-here.
This was my answer to the spotty quality of coffee found outside of Genova. A small machine, the most I could afford and yes, it makes me happy.
The small cup is just the perfect size. An exquisite gift from the mother of my first husband, given to me when she came over and spent a couple of weeks with us last summer. Thank you, Valda :-)
Any time I raise anything on stage, I ask Di Mackey to join the project. Her photographic work is magnificent and I love her presence: her portraits are stunning, they expose intimacy, humor, and pensiveness; her photographs capture the space, the movement, human interaction deliciously, in a way that one feels invited to an event long after it disappeared from the public scene.
In all her unobtrusiveness when working with the camera, Di is great fun to hang out with, the artists, scholars, thinkers, curators of our big Berlin exhibition highly appreciated her, and when working together in Cairo, Istanbul, Berlin, or wherever else, I enjoy her kindness, humor, and delightful presence.
I miss her at the time when we are “in between projects.” One of the first things I will do when starting a huge new project is to ask Di whether she wants to do the photographic work. I hope she will.
Shulamit Bruckstein, curator, director of TASWIR projects / ha’atelier.
The desire to go home is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Rebecca Solnit.
I used to sit there, near the top of the hill, at the edge. Located on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand, it was a great place to sit and dream about the world ... 6,000kms away from my east coast they told me.
I'm beginning to believe that I'm finally going home ... after 8 years away. I never imagined, not even for a second, that I would ever spend longer than a year away from this landscape that owns my soul.
But I've looked around while I've been gone ... fallen for Genova, loved Istanbul, live in Flanders, wandered in Cairo and Paris and Amsterdam, Barcelona and Salamanca, Madrid too. Adored and was awed by Rome, smiled in Naples, survived Berlin. Enjoyed Ireland and England, France.
But going home ... it's as the quote says, I suspect.
I was wandering back outside for lunch yesterday, when I noticed how the light was in the doorway ... just beautiful, I thought.
Loved this light ...
I'm getting ready to go out tonight but resting a little, looking through the results of today's photo-shoot. I do believe I would rather enjoy have this chandelier above our dining table.
it was just a little wander but one that confirmed that I am happiest when catching a train or a plane, a bus or a car to someplace else ...
It was a short journey, maybe an hour and a quarter across Belgium, into French-speaking Wallonia. There I had the loveliest day, lazily catching up with Wendy and Patrice, and Momo the dog.
And their sunflowers were stunning, just stunning!
It doesn't happen too often, thank goodness, but sometimes you arrive to photograph someone and voila ...you become the subject of a Patrice van de Waller's videocial.
He explains: Videocials are the specific combination of videos and social media. In other words, the videos are made specifically with Social Media in Mind. What is involved in this?
Patrice van de Walle was the bloke who made this photographer the subject ... dammit.
I should tell you though, he brings more than 20 years of experience in television & the Internet to any project he takes on. He has managed a satellite TV channel in India and helped found a TV production company in the UK. He launched TV channels in Germany and the UK, launching several video and B2B web sites too.
Actually, he is also available to speak at conferences about his favourite topic: the many uses of video on the web and the communications revolution it will engender.
He's charming, engaged, intelligent ... so yeah, I let him film me at work. It's not me at my best. I might have felt a little bit ... filmed. My preference is a kind of invisibility ... the kind a documentary-style photographer seeks. I prefer to know about everyone else but here, Patrice captured something of me at work.
I recommend you having a good look around his website ... Web Video Impact, and then wandering on over to Videocial.
Here's the man. I may have pointed my camera his way too ...
This summer, we spent two weeks using this staircase so many times every day ... our bedroom, with that exquisitely huge old-fashioned bath, was up on the first landing.
I snapped this image, handheld, 'interesting' light, didn't think it would work ... but I like it.
I remember seeing this photograph one day ... I'm not sure I ever posted it here. It was no one I knew ... a stolen image really. Stolen from someone who had simply walked past me.
Perhaps he won't mind.
