Articulacy

"Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images."

words and image: Helen Levitt

Reportage

I almost always find my favourite photos and my favourite photographers come from the world of essay or journalistic reportage. The ones who approach the world like an observer destabilised by the emotion, events and impulses that pass before their lens are the ones who most directly affect me. The ones who make images of the world that, to abuse Ezra Pound's words on poetry, are "news that stays news". But there is also something to be said for those photographers who exist on the front line, who document those moments that must be seen, must be preserved and must be remembered. The series of images of this kind that never fails to move me is the work done by photographer Charles Moore during the civil rights movement in the deep south of the USA, particularly in Montgomery and Birmingham. His images are justly famous, but viewed as montage rather than in isolation, they embody a force and fury that is impossible to evade.

Delicate World

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”

 Words: Anaïs Nin (Diaries Vol 1. 1931-1934)

Image: mine

The Late Nite Taqueria

It's been a tough month. Facing a bit of an existential collapse in the face of the haunting bureaucracies of Australian film financing I have spent long periods imagining that rather than rewriting draft after draft of scripts and submissions, I am instead running a late night taqueria on the streets of Guadalupe, Guanajuato or Guadalajara. Luckily, we had our christmas party on the weekend and we converted the bottom of our studio into a sleazy taqueria, streaming vaquero radio while I got to live out the fantasy, flipping tortillas on the grill, serving up a friend's black bean goodness and doling out my own slow roasted tomato salsa while beating myself over the head with tequila and beer. It was better than I imagined. Damn the eternal curse of this film addiction or I would forever be a happy, drunk tortilla flipper.