At...

Peter Campbell's short article on New Zealand made me miss the place for the first time in many months. 
From the capital city: "It has been very wet this year but only one yellow patch shows where a few tons of rotten rock and clay slid down to spill over the road." - closeness to the earth; to its perfumes and gritty textures. 
A place where "houses will still shudder and tremble a little in a high wind, rain will still rattle on tin roofs". 

ICA

Evening walk 2

Do I have to?

As a child, hanging out the washing was a job I particularly disliked being asked to do. It took longer than emptying the dishwasher and meant you had to go outside, even if it was cold and you wanted to keep watching TV, or you just really couldn't be bothered. It's still a chore now, in that it cannot be left undone, but it's one I seem to increasingly enjoy. 
When I walked into the room at the Tate Modern and saw Mira Schendel's work 'Little Train' (above, top image), I immediately thought of washing hanging on a line. 
confronted with our limits
'the visibility of the invisible'
always comforting to know you've 'read' it right, although really, in this instance the idea is not particularly obscured. 
the idea, as i immediately saw it, was of impermanence, frailty.

The Analysis of Beauty

Evening walk

"Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them. Only do that which insists on being done and runs right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you do it."  

 - Samuel Butler

Photography involves happenstance, fortuities. This not only applies to the act of taking photos, but to that of finding them. The New Zealand art dealer, Peter McLeavey, collects photographs - as a counterpoint to his gallery work - and describes, in the 2009 documentary, The Man in the Hat, his patient quest for completion:

"I think there's one more photograph I have to find: the last photograph.  

I'm still looking for it. It's out there somewhere. I'm waiting; for it to claim me: the last photograph. 

I don't know what it is, but when I see it I'll know it and I'll buy it and it will hang with all the others - and maybe then the life, the story, the quest, will be complete". 

"...And cut", you hear the film director say quietly.

…...

Phil Collins was playing in the doctor's waiting room this morning. Just about the most depressing choice possible I think, given the scene around me: outdated health-related posters on the walls, tatty magazines, driving rain and cold, slippery umbrellas. The people waiting there were slow moving, burdened, heavy - in contrast to those at the London Review Cake Shop later that day, who looked alert, agile, free.