A bower-bird, bric-a-brac nest

I love the poetry of Marianne Moore - acerbic and erudite, she connects the minutiae of everyday life with swooping tides of human history and experience. A recurring theme is her punctuation of that unending ocean with objects both familiar and elevated to pure symbol. Glass bottles, vases, train tracks, palomino ponies, pine cones...somehow the lives of emperors are contained in these dusty poetic antiques.


Nowhere is this more obvious than in her poem 'No Swan So Fine...' in which the swan in question is both the iconoclastic king-slaying power of the common man, but also, literally 'the chintz china one with fawn-/brown eyes and toothed gold/collar on...'


Ted Hughes wrote of visiting Moore in her New York apartment,'her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest'. Ever since reading Moore's poems I cannot pass a junk shop or antiques market in quite the same way. All the objects there seem laden with significance, reverberating with their own and others' stories.


In light of that here are some other images taken at Bermondsey Antiques Market.

 

Red, Blue and Green Ghosts

It was a series of retweets which led me to an article from the Big Picture feature on Boston.com: a series of extremely early colour images by photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, extracted from a survey of the Russian Empire which was supported by no less than Tsar Nicholas II. They are incredibly sharp and saturated, probably due to the technique used.

These photographs stuck with me all day. They are disconcerting, and not just because lots of the edges don't quite line up, giving the sense that you're watching a 3-d film without your glasses, a certain sense of sea-sickness. 

We as viewers of photographs have a visual language training which naturally equates the past with black and white, shades of grey, and great gritty chunks of silver on the print. This lends us a sense of security and superiority over our ancestors akin to that sense of smug righteousness which Western cultures have traditionally held towards Eastern.

'Look at them with their funny clothes! Hairstyles! Customs! Oh, aren't they quaint, and aren't we glad that we have now reached the apex of civilisation!'

Our grandparents become archived savages, affirming our own attainments and our beating pulses. Nothing more than a record of what we have moved beyond.  

Prokudin-Gorskii's sitters, on the other hand, are staunchly alive. Rich with blood and breath, with their anodyne dyed clothing and even with the pores and hairs visible on their faces, these images say 'we live'. 

Time passes and is recorded in the flow of a river or a restless child. 

Those faint coloured phantoms of movement at the edges of the image remind we viewers of our own movement through time. Our own rejection of the past and its claim on life crumbles. 

We can't live on forever on the internet, however many photos we post of ourselves on Facebook staunchly living. We'll be red, blue, and green ghosts before long.

Homeless Gallery at Dilston Grove

Yesterday I went to the Dilston Grove gallery, part of the CGP double gallery space in Southwark Park, to pick up a print which had been hanging in the Homeless Gallery exhibition for the past week. This particular installment of the project was organised by Deconstruction Project as part of Photomonth 2010. Deconstruction Project is a non-profit arts organisation dedicated in part to promoting Polish artists and culture. Homeless Gallery is an open-submission group show that has taken place in a number of different locations and guises over the last few years. The Dilston Grove space apparently used to be a church but has been stripped right back to the concrete walls and plank flooring. It's quite spectacular and has a lot of nooks and crannies, making the exhibition interesting to explore. The only problem as far as I can see, is that the gallery is not very well lit. There were, on the private view last weekend, only floor uplighters, while in the day time the high narrow windows don't allow a great deal of natural daylight in.

For me this was a big problem. I exhibited the image at the top of this post. It's by no means a perfect photograph - it needs a good, strong light source to bring out the detail in the left hand side of the subject's face. I couldn't push it further in the print without risking some nasty colour noise. I guess this is one of the pitfalls of exhibiting in a space you don't know and that is not geared to your images.

A couple of the other exhibitors whose work I particularly liked:

Alicja Dobrucka: 'I like you, I like you a lot'

Jonathon Griggs: Untitled, mobile phone series

Borough Market

Even though it's only just down the road from my house, I rarely visit Borough Market: mostly because the goods for sale are too tempting for my skimpy purse and partly because it gets so very packed that you can't reach the free samples of cheese (which is the real reason I go, obviously). Last Friday an epicurious uncle of mine was in town and demanded a visit. Roast duck, creme caramel, organic juice, potted shrimp, juicy kalamata olives and Monmouth Coffee. Me oh my... I genuinely think that the flash of red on the pheasant below and the beetled blues and greens of its neck feathers are nothing short of exquisite.  

I cannot resist taking a photo of a pig's head when I see one. Weird or what?

Have you ever seen a more beautiful presentation of artichokes than these babies? 

Surrey Docks City Farm

Last week I headed over to my local city farm to test out my new lens, the Canon 70-200 f2.8 L. It was perfect weather both for sauntering around this tiny slice of countryside in the middle of the city, and for testing the lens. Long low warm sunlight, a 'violet hour' lasting from half past one until three pm. Just gorgeous. Next sunny weekend I'll be down there like a shot, testing out their cafe.