Life in loops

In an effort to drive less, I’ve been travelling to work via two different trams. The first one, heading south, stops in the city on Collins St and then I walk across the road to catch the second tram whose route then runs east to where I work. While the route running south has only one tram, heading east I have four different trams to choose from, some running quite frequently while others can be quite rare in comparison.

Yesterday morning I got off at Collins St as usual and immediately saw an easterly tram just arriving at the stop across the road – it was the one labelled “Victoria Pde/Hoddle St” which I would see the least often and it’s not very popular either. Great for me since then I can always grab a seat. So I moved quickly across the road to get on and reached the front-most door just as it was closing. When the door is already closing, there are two options: press the “door open” button or muscle your way through and force it back. I don’t believe I’ve ever tried either so I pressed the button repeatedly but the door continued to close and then the tram moved away. I was a bit annoyed since I was standing right outside from the tram driver and he just couldn’t be bothered I guess. I made a mental note for next time to not bother with the button again.

So, this morning I got off at Collins St as usual and immediately saw an easterly tram just arriving at the stop across the road – it was the one labelled “Victoria Pde/Hoddle St” which I would see the least often and it’s not very popular either. Great for me since then I can always grab a seat. So I moved quickly across the road to get on and reached the front-most door just as it was closing. When the door is already closing, there are two options: press the “door open” button or muscle your way through and force it back. Slightly weirded out by the fact that this episode was exactly the same as yesterday I ignored the button and pushed at the closing door. It gave way, then tried again while I was entering and closed on my legs before giving way again.

Tomorrow I’m driving.

Silence, in the eyes of others

Whenever I actually manage to sit down and type something, let’s call it a story, and that story could simply be an email or an essay like this one, or even an actual story, there’s this niggling burden of responsibility at the back of my mind that the ending of the story should already be known when I begin to engage in the act of writing it. Possibly it’s the same when we watch a movie and try to figure out the twist before the ending, but why is there such a compulsion to map things out like that? It seems that it’s human nature that the beginning and end of all things must be inextricably woven together.

George MacDonald once wrote of the “welcome already overshadowed by the coming farewell”; that there is an irony that while an ending brings us the comfort of certainty, it also haunts us with the sorrow of finality. Instead of being able to simply enjoy something now, we must “worry” about future goodbyes and ephemera. However, we must do this to bring about happiness itself. If there is no ending then there is no beginning either, so we sometimes acknowledge the truth of the coming sorrow in order to recognise and appreciate the current happy moments in our lives.

It’s probably easier if looked at from the other end, to be at an ending gazing back towards the beginning. In essence this is what we label “nostalgia” and is rather a more popular subject in art and literature. For example, in the movie Citizen Kane, Kane longs for his “rosebud”; but Rosebud only has significance because of the subsequent journey his life made from that point. If Rosebud never ended, then it never really began either. What is innocence if it is never broken? So sorrow must exist in order to bring about joy.

Whether it is consciously or subconsciously, these themes creep into every art form, possibly the most powerful and least noticed is that of music. I know nothing about music theory, but quite often I find that long emotional pieces end the same way they began, in a way to recall the beautiful innocence of the beginning, that despite all of the different events that occur in between, ultimately the most important thing to us is how we began; innocently. An example that comes to mind is the first part of Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge where it ends exactly as it began. He even revisits it in a nostalgic reference on a later album. It’s also quite a staple of music scores for movies.

Probably the whole reason for writing this in the first place is how I feel it relates to photography. In some ways a lot of photography, not necessarily all, reduces moments to silence, frozen forever in a suspension of movement and time. Once in a silent state, the image becomes more universal to the viewer, the contemplation of which can connect an image to a particular memory or a feeling. They can then adopt their own sounds, music and aromas. Our propensity to create our own stories, beginnings and endings – our ability to fictionalise and connect to our own experiences and feelings is what elevates art in the eyes of the viewer. But more about that in a future post.

Korean film maker, Kim Ki-duk, preferred to have no dialogue in his films in order to make the story more universal. Once you introduce language, barriers are created in both expression and communication. Silence, in this regard, can be a great unifier…

The Princess & The Goblin

During the week I was on the 109 tram reading a book and a guy sat down next to me. Fresh stitches intersected at various angles across his face. He looked at the pages I was reading and probably noticed that the novel had some pictures in it.

“Hey mate, what book are you reading?”

I didn’t reply in words but simply turned the book over to reveal the cover.

“The Princess & The Goblin!? What kind of book is that?” Exclaimed in a way that would normally precede laughter.

Knowing how silly such a book might seem, I knew the choices of my reply lurked somewhere between offhanded and nerdy. Instead I went for honest, hoping that wouldn’t equal nerdy.

“It’s a childrens book written for adults, written about a hundred years ago.”

He seemed quite amused.

It did seem too complex to explain to a stranger why I liked the book as I would have to start explaining in personal quotients. Part of that reason, is that the writer of the book has had a profound effect on me over the years. Reading his work informed my artistic aesthetics, including photography, more than any other writer. It’s hard to explain why except that it’s to do with the way he sees the world, just as all artists, writers, painters, photographers alike, have their own way of seeing. Admittedly, The Princess & The Goblin is the first book of his I’ve read that one could say is a fantasy story, in our modern definition of the word. Not being too far removed from stories like The Hobbit. So that’s the pigeonhole into which it will superficially fall.

As a side note, it’s interesting also how storytelling and culture have changed over the years. There’s a part in the story where a miner’s son tells his dad that he would like to stay in the mine overnight, as he might discover what the hordes of dangerous goblins seem to be planning. The dad’s response is a classic.

When he told his father, he made no objection, for he had great confidence in his boy’s courage and resources.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay with you,” said Peter; “but I want to go pay the parson a visit this evening, and besides I’ve had a bit of a headache all day.”

Way to go, dad.

The writer is George MacDonald. Thankfully, due to our new age of Barnes & Nobles, Borders and Amazons, books are less often out of print. Also thankfully, I’m rediscovering how much I enjoy reading them.

Absence

an autumn afternoon
Seoul, Korea
November 2008

Already some months have past. Been away from this for too long. I hope you’re still watching

Celestial Avenue

picnic
Elwood, Melbourne
March 2009

Starting today I’m spending the next six days as stills photographer for a short film called Celestial Avenue, written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes. Should be a fun set to work on, also working with a few familiar faces from previous films.

(The above pic is something I happened to spot when I first arrived on the Elwood foreshore, but doesn’t have anything to do with the film.)

Incidentally, I shot my first wedding yesterday. Since it was my first time I was a bit worried about how it all would go, but just having a look at the shots now and it seemed to turn out quite well. Thanks to Lawry for backing me up on the day. It really took the pressure off! Also, many thanks to Audunn for the loan of the lenses!

Nihil

I didn’t grow up reading comics but there was a distinct period of five years where I would happily fork out up to $50 for my weekly dose of superheroes. It was a good five years and it all started with Uncanny X-Men and ended with Preacher. That was when I went cold turkey very suddenly and hardly a touched a comic since. The last “weekly dose” still sits in the brown paper bag I bought them in, unread.

The reason for writing this, however, doesn’t have to do with the beginning or the end but what happened in the middle. The middle was somewhere around 1993 and a friend of mine Dave, also with a weekly habit, told me about his idea of trying to publish some comics. From that point on others got involved, the numbers of which went up and down, then finally resting on 11 people under the name of Cold Angel Press. The strategy was to publish short stories in a single regularly-printed anthology. After about 10 weekly meetings of deciding what the anthology would be called, we came up with the name of it finally – Cold Angel.

There are a lot of great tales to do with Cold Angel, some of which I’ll tell later. From this point on though, I wanted to talk about the story I worked on in the comic; titled Nihil. I wrote the story and the script but the visuals were done by Ty Carey, whose work on this comic still amazes me when I look at it.

Most comics are usually titled after the main character but, for my comic, I named it after the villain. I never really could decide on who was the main character in the story, the “good” guy and the bad guy were always equally important.

I set it in waaay in the future, something like the year 3520. I could never understand how futures in science fiction were never far away. Robots take over the planet in 1996 in the movie Terminator and in ten years from now we’ll have replicants that are next to impossible to identify from humans if Blade Runner is anything to go by. I remember there was also an old black & white film which had flying cars, set in the far-flung year of 1980.

So… 3520 was not a good year, the story being downright dystopian, before “dystopia” had been beaten to death by the Matrix trilogy. Prior to this era, clouds of spores had arrived from deep space and filtered into the Earth’s atmosphere causing a mysterious illness which caused most of the human population to fall asleep, never to wake up. Sleepers would not die either, living on for centuries unless they were “euthanised” which most of them were. The only surviving sleepers were generally those kept secret and protected by their wealthy family members.

Enters the first main character: Hade. In his dreams he taps into a collective unconsciousness of all dreaming people. There he meets Nihil, the creation of a dreamer who was suffering from the sleeping sickness and had thus become an incredibly powerful dream over the ensuing centuries. Hade unwittingly brings Nihil from his dreams into a real world and then a real battle begins. There was a third character, Aion, who serves as narrative exposition in the beginning but was going to play a larger role later on.

Unfortunately this story never saw its end as only three parts were ever published. Maybe one day I’ll try to wrap it up somehow and reveal the identity of Nihil’s dreamer. For me, that would be pretty cool.

As good as the comic was, it was the enduring legacy of Cold Angel Press that ultimately became the best thing about it. Out of the original 11, most of us became very close friends, and still are to this day.

Afterhours

polne róże rwala (she picked wild roses)
Collins St, Melbourne
Feb 2009

No Photo

no photo
Collins St, Melbourne
March 2008

I’ve taken a lot of photos with a medium format SLR camera called a Pentacon Six TL. It’s the camera that I’ve felt the most in tune with so far in my journey of photography. However, I haven’t actually used it since May 2008, except for a single roll around the time of the MEME show in July. The film winder broke and I never got it fixed and started using an Arax instead.

Last year I decided to do something about it and put it in for repair. Today I got a call from Shutterbox – I can pick up the fixed camera on Saturday. It’ll be great to use it again, especially now that the Arax is playing up after I dropped it. I had planned to have two working cameras at the same time. It might happen one day.

Past Imperfect

on hold
federation square, melbourne
april 2008

From one old book to another, I once read an excerpt from Lyly’s Campaspe which I recall sometimes:

Alexander. When will you finish Campaspe?
Apelles. Never finish: for always in absolute beauty there is somewhat above art.

While that quote pre-dates impressionism by a few hundred years, there is yet that feeling that many forms of photography are an impossible pursuit of perfection. I think that even when I started into taking pictures I shared that belief. Perfection aside, we might still extol the wonders of the imperfection in the world around us, but it’s best to capture them through perfect lenses and perfect equipment. These days are sold on sharpness, megapixels and high-definition TVs. Being a cheapskate photographer I’ve embraced all the things I shouldn’t. I let my lenses flare freely, shoot out of focus, underexpose, and celebrate shutter curtain shadowing on my photos. I haven’t cleaned a single lens in the past year, though I should really get around to doing that. I’m not recommending anything I do, just that’s how things have ended up. I think if I didn’t do these things, I probably wouldn’t have many photos. So it goes.

Hopefully I’ll get rid of the feeling that anything I write in here is something other than narcissistic rambling. Thanks for reading.

The Door

the shadow embassy (ii)
zhonghua gate, nanjing, china
feb 2008

I think it started with the interview on the Flickr blog. The realisation that there were things I wanted to say but couldn’t through the rather limited framework of the questions. Plus there are a few photographers around that have started up some really effective and great-looking blogs, so I think that’s what led me to here. I never pictured myself ever starting a blog, but I do have a passion for writing and feel out of practice with it. Hopefully this’ll be a great way to exercise my word palette once again.