Dream and Awake

"Believe, really believe you can move a mountain and you absolutely will. Not many people believe that they can mountains, so as a result, not many people do. Those who believe they can't, cannot. Belief triggers the power to do. Actually, in these modern times belief is doing much bigger things than moving mountains. The most essential element - infact, the essential element - in our space explorations today is belief that space can be mastered. Without firm, unwavered belief that man can travel alone in space, our scientists would not have the courage, interest, and enthusiasm to proceed. Belief that cancer can be cured will ultimately produce cures for cancer. Some years ago, there was talk of building a tunnel under the English Channel to connect England with the Continent. The fact that this tunnel is now complete depended on wether responsible people believed it could be built.

Belief in great results is the driving force, the power behind all great books, plays, scientific discoveries. Belief in success is behind every successful business, church, and political organisation. Belief in success is the one basic, absolutely essential ingredient in successful people." - David J. Schwartz

Believe, really believe you can succeed and you will.

Journeys, Traces & Unlikely Spaces

"What's it like living at the bottom of the ocean?", he asked. "It's in hoping, every day, you'll rise to the surface", she replied.

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The following is a personal journal entry taken from August 2012 in relation to the above images

Some days are just hard.

Some days I just remember.

Some days its difficult to understand how things can materialise out of what once was. 

Or what now is.

Or what now ultimately remains.

(if anything)

And I look back, as if it was another life or another universe and another face. As if those birds or that sky or her hands were perfect boundaries from a life that now is.

And now my warped relationship with gravity correlates the disturbance and chaos between here and then.

Between now and the time of my red suede shoes. 

Between trying to understand the analogy of what happens today and tomorrow and next week because of yesterday.

Some days I'm learning.

Other days I don't think I'm even beginning to understand.

Some days I just lie and feel and watch the world turn and it feels too fast or too slow and I feel not enough or too much. Other times I wonder if I'm feeling too much or thinking too much or not enough or not at all.

But I can still touch it.

I cant go back, but I can touch it.

We can all touch it.

I guess theres faith in the ability to touch who you once were and know there are still fragments of you that remain.

Because there'll always be a part of you now in who you were before.

The hard(est) part is knowing how to find, and ultimately recapture your true self before adversity.

I'm learning.

I guess the process is just a little bit longer and a little bit (lot) more obscured than backwards and forwards and forwards and backwards.  In the end; the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Alive In Skies

"A dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." - Oscar Wilde 

I feel these images don't exactly illustrate my recent desire for delicious light filled things. Its been (too long) since I gained my original satisfaction from shooting and developing film. Time, it's a funny. If we spend too long in one place (lingering, pausing, thinking, suspending the inevitable until tomorrow...always tomorrow), then days, months, years pass by. Skies pass over, again, again, and again. Light turns blue, white, red, purple, pink, orange, yellow, and we blink and breathe and sleep and eat (and repeat) but do not notice, time.

Its true, that we can't stay in the same place forever.

Perhaps these images could have created themselves a deeper meaning, though. To be kept as a passage. A confirmation, and a reminder that the present only ever exists for an unreasonably short period of time before established actions, permanent memories and lost opportunities set themselves comfortably into the past.

"I only do this until I get dizzy, then I lay down on my back and watch the clouds, she said. It sounds simple, but you wouldn't believe how many people forget the second part"

Shutter Crack

I'm absolutely delighted that my work from this set will be showing at the "Useless, useless" exhibition at California Building in Minneapolis, California on May 3rd. Information on the exhibition can be found here. I'm gutted I won't be personally attending, but if you are in that area, I'd love for you to go!

More mishaps, ongoings and shenanigans will be updated on shortly. 

Happy April!

Escape To The Greens

(Nikon FM2n)

"When I was five years old my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I wrote down 'happy', they told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." - John Lennon

fernweh

fern.weh, noun, orig. German

a crave for travel; being homesick for a place you've never been

The above was shot yesterday on my usually precarious HTC phone camera on the drive home from a day shooting at Macclesfield forest and Trentabank Reservoir. 

It was a while ago I started realising just how much there was left to do (how many places there were left to visit, to capture), but yesterday truly installed that vision and my itching creativity has returned. Its hard to comprehend, accept, and be content with the here and now when there are so many places, so many people, so many corners.

((and just so little time))

The Dust Dances, Too

Working over a four week period in Cheshire, England, I have used traditional photography to explore areas at the interface between natural and synthetic landscape.

To me, photography is a solitary act: it is necessary to be involved in the place, to be forgotten, and to become soaked with it perfectly. My images are generally melancholic, and oneiric, but without artifice. There is a sense of mystery of which I can’t even reveal to myself. I try to provoke a feeling, a mood.

This project, starts to explore what landscape means to us. Land is more than physical landscape and environment. It is unique and has symbolic importance. It has value — perhaps a meaning as significant as its physical embodiment. British landscape and its predominantly manufactured presence affects us physically and emotionally and stimulates us intellectually, even spiritually. These are images of landscapes that are connected to human activity; tracts of land at the crossing point of the rural and urban.

The underlying theme of the work comes from its engagement with basic human issues of our place in the landscape — how and where (and why) we belong.

And you know, I've had fun (clarity) these last few days. In wrapping myself, my lenses, and my eyes in the rolling, clashing, ethereal light recipe that we so seamlessly seemed to be caught between as morning came, went, turning light, to dark, and back again, drawing the sky and turning, awakening matters below into mere fragments of glowing, luminous pleasure.

"I am on a journey. With my work, my explorations, and a few sad stories. I travel with a suitcase full of outrageous blessings. I am on a quest for truth, beauty and quiet joy. I am an artist, a writer, an explorer."

You know, I think we should all be grateful, in the way in which the world unfolds each day, and in our own unique, personal journeys and the paths in which they lead. They may not always be delicate or warm or healthful, but they are real. These things, they transform us into real people. They make us who we are. Learning? Its such an incredible tool, and one we cannot do without the bricks that come to fall in our paths. 

I'm thankful. Not for everything, but for most things. Let's not look back, just ahead. 

After all, it's not yesterday that matters, but tomorrow (always) that counts.