Creating your own story
Often when I read the biographies of well known artists, politicians, athletes, renegades or pioneers of our time, I think about how my own biography would read in the future.
Would it be interesting and reflect the idea that I was a true individual who carved my own path with adventures, travels and hard-fought for success or would it show that I succumbed to the mundane practicalities or frustrations of life.
The idea of creating your own life story is a big concept to me.
Picture source unknown
Absence
I haven’t had much of a chance to write on this blog sadly because I have been working so much at the gallery (and loving it!) and trying to do my honours work and dance. Life is hectic at the moment but wonderful.
Beginnings and ends
I’m starting my job tomorrow at the photography gallery and museum and I could not be any more excited!!! I’m so excited, I’m so excited, I’m so excited!! Sometimes amazing things do happen out of nowhere. As cliched as it sounds you just gotta keep the faith and put one step in front of the other towards the general direction of where you would like to be in life. One day, everything will work out.
Picture of Marilyn Monroe by Sam Shaw- this is how I feel at the moment.
But on a different note, it was very sad to hear that Frank McCourt the author of Angela’s Ashes has passed away. I read his works as a high school student and they had such a massive influence on me. Even now I can recite some of my favourite passages from his books that encourage a love of learning and books:
“Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
“I don’t know what it means and I don’t care because it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.”
“You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it.”
World’s Most Interesting People: Salvador Dali
Surrealism seems to have been the flava of the week! I finally went and saw the Salvador Dali Exhbition, Liquid Desire, at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of their Winter Masterpieces Series late last week- only problem being so did the rest of Melbourne as it was school holidays! Kids everywhere talking loudly, providing their own colourful interpretations of the Dali work (“the clock is melting Dad because it can’t hang anywhere!”) and parents nodding with massive smiles on their face. It was actually sorta cute. I saw a Dali Sculpture Exhibition in Vienna several years ago and I was really not impressed at the time particularly in comparison to the mind-blowing Caravaggios that I just saw. Now, I am convinced that he is a genius. He didn’t stick with any one particular medium or technique but stood out amongst the artists of his generation and was certainly a free spirit, marrying a married Russian woman (Gala) ten years his senior and encouraging the commercialization of art. With my obvious bias for photography I loved that he believed that photography is ‘essentially the most secure vehicle for poetry…’. Sadly I didn’t scribble down the rest of the quote because I thought I would find it on the internet but can’t!
My favourites from the exhibition:
Dali loved rhinos because he was fascinated with the geometry in the spirals of their horns. Photo taken by Philip Halsman.
Photo taken by Philip Halsman, part of their ‘jumpology’ series.
Study for Fifty Abstract Paintings: Royal Bengal Tiger. Probably my favourite Dali painting. If you look at each square, each could be an individual abstract painting. If you stand back you can see 3 Chinese-looking Lenins. And obviously if you look at the picture as a whole, it’s a Bengal Tiger.
Destino~ A short-film collaboration between Walt Disney and Dali
Dali Jewellery- The Royal Heart to commemorate the coronation of Elizabeth 2.
Sunday Markets- Camberwell
Generally markets in Melbourne can be a bit hit or miss. I went to the Sunday Market in Camberwell this morning (as I’m thinking of having a stall there to raise travel funds) and I’m happy to report that it’s worth a visit! There is a junk load of junk but also lots of decent, clothes, jewellery and antiques.
Purty bird cage chandeliers
MJ Record- love the hat placement
Blinged out Buddha statue
Collector’s Winnie the Pooh for only $20!
Big bags, small bags, furry bags, gold bags.
I’ve put a deposit on my new camera so hopefully pictures will be much better in the future!
Photography Tip of the Week
Take photos from unusual angles! Don’t stick to the same ol’ angles and portraits my lovely fellow photography fiends- get outside the square….or under it. Also read Dialogue with Photography, it has amazing interviews with the ‘men and women who shaped so much of twentieth century photography’ such as Man Ray, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andrés Kertész, Helmut Gernsheim and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. I found it in the store of the gallery I work at and it is super-inspirational. Get to it!
Ethics of Photography and Journalism
Scott Anderson’s Triage is one of the best works of post-modern literature and dare I say it compulsory reading for aspiring journalists and photographers- particularly war photographers. It’s also a fascinating and disturbing insight into the psychological trauma of war and our selective morality as a society. Mark Walsh, the central character in the book, is a war photographer who believed he was immune to the horrors of the wars he was covering until he was injured in Kurdistan and placed in the triage of a make-shift hospital in a cave- ‘The Worst Hospital in the World’.
Anderson writes about post-traumatic stress so well I have to wonder whether Anderson, a veteran war correspondent himself of 23 years (and a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop like the wonderful Nam Le), has experienced it himself . I first read the book a few years ago as part of my Year 12 English class, however find myself returning to it constantly for its simple expression of such complex issues and the different nuances I pick up everytime I read it. It was also one of the books that made be interested in photography and writing.
It’s particularly relevant to me at the moment. I will be travelling to Sri Lanka in a few months, a country which only very recently ‘concluded’ a bitter 26 year old civil war. I have lately been considering the photo and writing opportunities that would present itself and the ethics of the whole thing. I guess I don’t want to exploit the situation for my own gain, but how the hell do you draw a distinction between exploiting a situation and highlighting a situation? I guess that’s something I will have to figure out myself.
James Nachtwey- right or wrong?
A passage from Triage (p.46) that addresses the morality and economics of war and photography:
“For Mark, war had become a job, and when stripped of its grim romanticism, what this job seemed to most closely resemble was speculating on the stock market. To prosper, one had to guess which wars would rise in public interest, which would wane. Which war was headed for a spike, a crisis that would draw America, diplomatic involvement or even better armed intervention? The war industry even had its blue chips and its penny stocks, the bush wars no one cared about that ground on in anonymity until the day one side perpetrated a particularly grand atrocity. The photographer or journalist who saw it coming and went in at the right moment could make a fortune. The key to picking wars, as with picking stocks, was in reading the trends, knowing when to buy in and when to bail out’.
Warm fuzzy feeling happening in 3…2…1…
This is so sweet from photographer Tyler Knott, I think I’m about to explode with cuteness. Yeah, yeah i’m a romantic.
