Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
- Rumi
A beautiful soul I met and was fortunate enough to photograph in those days when I lived in Berlin for a while. Thank you, Noga.
I have more images to add but I've begun work on a photo gallery titled the Yoga Series.
I loved working with these guys. Light conditions varied wildly and the series was created over a couple of months but I'm pleased with the end result. More to follow in the days to come.
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools.
She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California.
Based on her feelings of connection to, and solidarity with the Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French and shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art. She became a painter. But it was with her participation in the poets’ movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, “an American poet”.
In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976.
In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the “France-Pays Arabes” award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of War Literature. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris.
In the late seventies, she wrote texts for two documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab, on the civil war in Lebanon, which were shown on French television as well as in Europe and Japan.
Extract, the website of Etel Adnan
Searching for information about Etel Adnan also led me into an interesting world that left me wanting to stay and read a while. And there was another book too, Sea and Fog.
I took this photograph of her at the TASWIR Exhibition. I was off to one side, taking photographs while she was interviewed.
My camera was filled with interesting people during those months on the project.
I wanted to come back to documentary photography once more and just say, never stop watching. For me, it's a little like hunting ... perhaps.
I don't go in with a plan beyond the attempt to capture the story. To tell it true. I picked up a 3-day documentary shoot, over on Flanders Fields, working with the New Zealanders a few years ago.
The image that follows is one of my favourites and I have to confess, it really was about swinging round and capturing this exquisite moment without thinking too much about settings. A hongi ... a Maori greeting, was being exchanged.
I had been traveling in France with the New Zealand veterans the day before and so they knew me a little. The New Zealand London Rugby Club were playing a commemoration match in Zonnebeke.
Moments like these make documentary photography a big love of mine ...
I finally reached university when I was 34 years old.
I hadn't known to dream it when I was young. My people didn't have a history of university attendance but I was a natural researcher, a terribly curious child who became an intensely curious woman.
My first husband suggested the marriage owed me a degree as I had followed the development of his career, moving around New Zealand's South Island over the years.
And so I began. I dived into literature, wanting the papers necessary to apply for Bill Manhire's creative writing course. I explored film studies, psychology, and archaeology along the way. Then I discovered social and political anthropology and detoured off into that seductive discipline.
Degree complete and realising that there wasn't much work in New Zealand (population 4 million), divorced, and having lost my mother along the way, I set out for Istanbul. To teach English, of course, like so many good kiwi students looking for work and experience.
Ten years later and here I am, a photographer, a writer, a woman of dual-nationality living in Belgium.
All that to introduce today's story. Last year, one of my favourite people published her first novel. I packed it, back in November, and read it as I traveled the 16,000kms+ home ...
Home for the first time in 8 years. But the book pulled me in anyway, despite all that was going on in my head. I recognised situations and characters, I knew that feeling of expat dislocation ... of not being sure of where home was anymore.
And then I arrived in NZ, put the book down, and spent 5 weeks wandering my old worlds, spending time with family and friends while sinking into that landscape I love more than any other. There were roadtrips and beaches, mountains and forests, there were bush walks, jet boat rides, rivers ... everything you can imagine and more. And friends, so many really kind friends.
I arrived back in Belgium ... that other home, to a life that demanded quite a lot of me. 4 hours on public transport twice a week, 2 hours on the other week-days. And more. And housework. Life ... just the usual messy demanding life we all lead but I found it incredibly difficult to settle.
And the book review I wanted to write kept being put to one side. I knew, part of it was that I had no space in my head for writing ... most definitely not even for serious review-style reading. Time passed, it sat there on my shoulder, poking me occasionally, waiting.
Back at university we knew that to write an essay worthy of an A+, we needed to adopt a written language we called wankspeak. Delightful I know but it was a way of recognising the elevation of language required to be truly worthy of an A+.
It terrified me. I love poetic prose and always understood that that wouldn't get me an A+. I developed a kind of nervous tic when it came to formal writing ... I required time, usually an extension on date due, and much misery. You could say I developed a certain technique that got me through with maximum suffering.
Back to the present and somehow I had decided this book review needed to be worthy of an A+. I should have pulled that idea out of my head at some point, discussed it with someone, had them say, Di, it's not about earning an A+.
Today, more than 4 months after opening the book, I decided it was time. And I wrote.
I was stunned to find that I didn't need to reread the book, making notes and laboriously researching secondary sources. I was stunned to realise that Diana's book had remained inside of me ... like the story of an old friend that I hadn't forgotten. And that I understood, somewhere deep inside me, that it wasn't about wankspeak ... it was simply about tellling my truth.
Imagine that!
Anyway, let me introduce you to Diana, or a glimpse of her, via the photograph below. Taken in Genova in October last year ...
My journey is the destination companion recently knitted her first hat. She is the creature who gave me much-needed permission to squander my money on that beautiful scarf pictured in the previous post.
I loved the colours she used and so I am currently negotiating my very own woollen hat. One with a Miss 8 designer label.
As for the origin of the concept, 'the journey is the destination' ... I stumbled across Dan Eldon's work back when I lived in New Zealand. His book has been traveling with me since. I had this idea it would inspire my English students in Istanbul however the syllabus was always quite tight in the private schools where I worked.
So he simply inspires me. As does Miss 8.
