Hearts and minds

When I first saw a picture from Marwencol I was so struck by it that I used it in a post. Incredibly, despite the attention it received and the awards it garnered, it never seemed to be available to rent or buy and it took almost three years since that post before it was available to download via Apple TV. We watched it last night and it was just as amazing as I had expected: a deeply personal and moving documentary about how someone recovering from severe brain injuries after a beating outside a pub creates his own little world based on 1940s Belgium, populates it with dolls and takes wonderful, naturalistic photographs of hundreds of little storylines he enacts with them., often apparently as a way of sublimating his feelings of anger, despair or lack of control. There is no ironic distance in his photographs: he is part of the world he has created and it is part of his. As a result the photographs he takes are like nothing else you've ever seen and a slightly sad story becomes meaningful and even beautiful.  Highly recommended.

World of work

My very first job was in the town where I was born, Haddington, a short bus ride (or, given bus infrequency, a daunting cycle) from my village. I had a Saturday job in an art gallery and coffee shop called “Peter Potter's”, a job my sister had had before me, working alongside a selection of Haddington teenagers, one of whom, a Glaswegian, became my boyfriend for a while. I never met Mr Potter, and know nothing about him, but he did exist, a fact perhaps known to the local kids who used to delight in shouting into the letter box at the front door: “Peter Potter picked a snotter!”

Peter Potter's was a genteel, rather pretentious little place run by elderly ladies who seemed to enjoy playing power games. I was 14 when I started there, and was paid GBP2 an hour (even at the time, circa 1983, this was insultingly low pay, barely enough to get the bus to Edinburgh afterwards) to work in the coffee shop, serving ploughman’s lunches, baked potatoes, toasted sandwiches, coffees, teas and cakes to the good folk of Haddington  (as well as tourists getting out of the rain, and once, excitingly, Ronnie Corbett, who enjoyed a bowl of our cauliflower soup). As ambivalent as I was about working there, I’m sure I sometimes behaved ungraciously in my role as waitress, but there were only two complaints about me from four years of Saturdays: I was taken aside by one insufferable woman and told that I was “scruffy”; and I refused to serve tea to the daughter of some local knight of the realm, because she arrived, demanding to be served, when the place had closed, and I was packing up for the day and no longer on the clock. This was an early experience of imperiousness that I’ve never forgotten.

I remember wearing a particular pair of tight black cords with a broken zip which I tried to fix, ineptly, with lashings of sellotape, only to have some grinning men point out to me that my zip was down. I remember making the best toasties ever for my own lunch, stuffed with grated cheese, ham, raw onion and Branston Pickle. I remember the smell of fresh paint and wholemeal flapjacks. I remember looking out at the rain and longing for my shift to end.

I'm sure lots of things about this job have stood me in good stead: the ability to be incredibly polite (almost to the point of sarcasm, where they're not quite sure you're not being rude, but don't dare suggest it) to people who clearly think you (as a waitress, or a teenager, or a woman, or all three) are beneath them, and, as a corollary, a lifelong appreciation for waitresses; naturally, a distrust of the sort of people who run small-town art galleries; and the ability to make a damn good toasted sandwich.

I spy

Dresses at V. Lotus

Manic Mannequins at Doug Up On Bourke

Rings from I Ran the Wrong Way

Breakfast at Little Marionette

When I first moved to Sydney, I had some time off before going back to work and so I started the blog A Place A Day. It's quite labour-intensive: I identify a place that is of interest, take around 40 photographs there, distill them down to 20 or so, and write a short paragraph about what I found interesting. Often I would end up covering the place where I had lunch. I put pressure on myself to do it almost every day; and now I'm back at work it's impossible to keep up, so it's more of a place a week (or less) and the title has proved to be fraudulent.

What I learned in doing this was that one of my favourite aspects of the process, apart from photographing and then eating food, was talking to the people who owned the place. Inspired by my friend Davey's Shot by Shooter blog (hands down the best, and most interesting, street fashion blog in operation), I decided to take my camera to work with me and shoot people who catch my eye in the street for Sydney Spy.

Sometimes people say no (older women are often very reluctant, and I lost a beautiful girl in a jewel-coloured gown who said she felt she looked terrible today); sometimes they say yes, then affect an attitude (the only photographs I haven't used so far are of someone who posed petulantly then said "are you done yet?" – why not just say no?). I'm drawn, not to obviously dressed-up or self-important people, but to people who are just quietly going about their day with their own style, and by definition this often means that they're camera-shy.

Someone said to me they'd be too shy to go up to people in the street, but I enjoy the interaction, particularly the pleasure on their faces when I tell them how good I think they look, and I like the idea that they go away feeling good about themselves.

Stefanie

What I've also discovered is that fashion bloggers are very different from food bloggers: for one thing they are almost all women, many of whom photograph themselves and not others: obsessively cataloguing their outfits every day. I'm far happier behind a camera than in front of it.

Faded glamour

Yesterday's Observer published some incredible photos by two French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, from their book, The Ruins of Detroit. Their observation was that in Europe, generally old buildings are picked over for their antique fittings so nothing much remains; in Detroit, the original 1920s art deco chandeliers in the Vanity Ballroom, where Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey one played, remain in place, the ballroom crumbling around them.

I took some photos at Sydney's State Theatre in November. Marchand and Meffre's picture of the United Artists Theater, closed since 1974, is in terrible synchronicity with the State Theatre's gleaming auditorium, of which Sydney is justifiably proud.

Third image ©Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, 2010

What do I get?

“My mother once said, ‘We were too poor to be photographed.’ And there began my life’s fascination with the medium.”
Linder Sterling

A day to remember

Kirsten Owen 2000, by Corinne Day, 1962-2010

Vigorous anonymity

The Healing of a Lunatic Boy (1986), Stephen Conroy

The first time I think I felt really excited about art was at an exhibition at the then newly-opened Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Belford Road, Edinburgh, in 1987. Entitled The Vigorous Imagination, it was a showcase for contemporary Scottish artists, many of them painters such as Stephen Conroy, John Bellany, Adrian Wizniewski, Ken Currie and Peter Howson. I was particularly taken with Stephen Conroy, whose painting above was used for the poster, which I had a precious copy of for years. I remember feeling such a sense of amazement, walking round the new, expansive space, taking in ideas, that I could hardly breathe. Before then, paintings and sculpture and installations had never really spoken to me, even though I grew up in a house where art was all around me; I had an appreciation of it that fell short of real engagement. The mystery and majesty of Conroy's paintings, as well as his undeniable skill, had a profound impact on me. I longed to own one.

So long Marianne

Poster for Marianne Breslauer exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie, showing the Swiss photographer, journalist and androgyne Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1932): "She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel".

The past is another country

August Sander, Peasants (1914)

I stood in the National Gallery in London for a long time looking at this picture. There is something so elegant and dignified about their faces, full of hope; on the way to the dance and wearing their best suits. I thought of William Trevor's wonderful short story, The Ballroom of Romance, about rural Ireland in the 1950s: hopeful, lonely people making their way to the nearest ballroom, some walking or cycling for miles for the promise of love.

There's an interesting article here by John Berger about this photograph, and others in the Sander catalogue: his project, cut short by the war, was to capture "Citizens of the Twentieth Century".

The heart of light, the silence

We went to the Tate Modern in London last week. Despite the fact that it's such a huge space, I find it strangely disappointing that the gallery rooms are all small, so that it feels as though you have to file by the artworks, which is a bit too close to ticking off the sights for my taste, and follow the familiar pattern of white walls and pale wooden floors. What's exhibited consequently seems somehow stale and dead.

On each of my visits I am always drawn to the same place: the Rothko room. Rothko was commissioned by the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, New York, to create artwork for their walls, but before he'd even finished the sequence of paintings he abandoned the idea of putting them in a room full of people eating, as being incompatible with what the paintings ask for, which is contemplation. This was the right decision (although when I first saw them, in a room at the old Tate Gallery, I was childishly moved to comment that they were rather foodlike - one of them clearly depicts two fish fingers on a slice of burnt toast - as usual in attempt to avoid being pretentious I went to the opposite, prosaic extreme). What springs to mind on looking at them is the line about looking in to the heart of light, the silence. They are displayed in their own room, although there is no door, in dim light as specified by the artist. Having been to Stonehenge for the first time a few days earlier I was struck by the parallels between those bold shapes. Doors open or closed? Gateway or barrier?

The most compelling for me is T01165 - portrait-shaped, with blood/rust red oblongs on a pale, almost lilac background. I'm pulled in to thinking about nothing and minutes pass by effortlessly.

After seeing them I wandered out into the gallery again, but the rest just seemed like noise.

-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.

TS Eliot, The Waste Land