Massive chunks of carved stone lie in the middle of fields in the middle of France, where they had fallen 2,000 years ago. This used to be a Gallo-Roman temple, of incredible proportions, until it was destroyed by invading Gothic hordes, the ‘barbarians’, who went on to ruin the villa a short walk away, and conquer the land, just as the Romans had before them, just as successive waves would after them.
The dead fox at La Valette. I had initially thought that it had been shot, because it was at the edge of the forest with a lot of hunters who were after wild boar. But it seems to have been run over, with a long slash just above the hip. It lay buried in the snow for most of the winter, with just a ear sticking out, frozen hard. By March the snow had disappeared, but the fox remained.
I might have usually shot something like the second shot, but while it might make more photographic sense in that the subject is off-centre, the road leads the eye, blah blah, it just seems inappropriate for the purpose at hand, which is showing the death of the fox. Sometimes, you just need to give your subject space and keep it simple. The one with the road might even be better according to personal preference, just not for me right now.
This was my first shot, which didn’t quite work out either, which is a pity because I’d have preferred snow. The paw prints in the foreground are of my dogs.
The water tank carved from a single block of stone, among the ruins of a Roman villa. Or, if you’d prefer: vestiges gallo-romaines des Cars.
Waves of settlers started coming here to the plateau of Millevaches more than 2,000 years ago, cutting down forests to create agricultural land. Later, by the first century AD, private estates here adopted a Roman way of life. To my left, as I shot the massive tank, lay a shallow stone swimming pool, and at the far end to the right, past the stubs of walls, a patio where the family would sit looking over the pond, now a dry bowl held together by clumps of grass. The stream that filled it, and the villa’s tank and pool, still flows today.
The remains of the villa were discovered in 1936 by a local archaeologist.
The strange growth on the tree, just above the source of a stream in the Forest of the Druids.
Janine Tasdi, on the first day it snowed, and after a lunch of foie gras followed by Saint-Jacques, followed by chestnut and beef and vegetables, followed by ice cream followed by coffee. Just your usual home cooked meal when inviting guests to one’s tiny apartment in Clermont-Ferrand.
Photo: Ireland, 1972.
I’d drool over the desolate photography of Joseph Koudelka while I was dreaming of photography while in college. It was perfect: dark, stylish and full of gnarled people and hard stories. Half a century later (I am much too late), much of western Europe is dead boring with a generic EU-specified look plastered over. The closest I’ve come to it is in the loneliest depths of central France.
Koudelka’s Theater of Exile, from Lone Visions, Crowded Frames, by Max Kozloff:
Pete Turner‘s work is beautiful, but always reminds me of why I never want to shoot color. It’s sort of like the opposite of what I am looking for in a subject. He got famous after his photographic road trip from one end of Africa to the other, from Cape Town to Cairo. But that was 1959, and we can’t still be expected to rave about the color of Africa.
From Dario Mitidieri‘s incredible book, Children of Bombay. Sixteen years after this photo was shot, Savita is pictured here with the photographer.
Francesca Woodman, the art student who killed herself when she was 22, before most of her 800 or so photographs, mostly of herself, were seen.
She created a series of what she called ‘ghost pictures,’ long exposures of the human body in water, in graveyards, disappearing into walls and fireplaces in a blur of slow movement. She once described a photograph she had taken as a portrait of ‘legs — and time.’
In 1981, a year after her first attempt, she committed suicide, jumping off a building. She had to be identified by her clothes.
Her work has been called borderline kitschy, not the most original, and melodramatic, but she’s also been turned into a star. And now, there’s even a movie.
I am disturbed by Richard Mosse’s Infra, where he uses infrared film to shoot the conflict in Congo, so that the green of the foliage in each shot is rendered as a sickening pink. It is masterful, in a way, as an artistic idea, but I don’t see it serving any purpose other than a self-fulfilling one for the creator.
After a few half-hearted years of being on Facebook, I decided to kill my involvement with it once and for all.
I think there are certain misconceptions about what we have begun to call social media, in spite of it being accepted common sense these days that you have to be engaging through it to expand your audience.
What is social media anyway? Isn’t any media social? An email is social. A phone call is social. In fact, much of the media we have been using before Facebook is a lot more social than the reigning king of social media today, an internet within itself.
Yes, Facebook is great for keeping in touch with college friends, its original purpose. But it’s been a while since I was in college, and, after the initial novelty of rediscovering people I’d forgotten about, I have also come to realize that if I didn’t miss them, I wasn’t losing out on much. You keep in touch with people who matter to you with or without Facebook. And, if the person is worth it, you pick up the phone (even if that’s the Skype app on an iPhone), or email, or sit down for coffee.
But what I’ve always hated about Facebook is its atmosphere of sharing, which starts of as a good idea but slowly degenerates into endless feeds of babies, holidays, photo albums named ‘Random’, invitations to Farmville, fake accounts and idiotic comments. And being tagged in photos.
Slowly, as the romance waned, I started tweaking my privacy settings till you couldn’t tag me, couldn’t write on my wall, couldn’t find me and couldn’t see my photos. I created groups within groups of contacts, with separate levels of access.
But I also think it’s silly to be on Facebook and complain about privacy. We make our choices. We’re on Facebook to share, and that’s great, and if it isn’t then don’t. Facebook is a great platform but it just isn’t for me.
Instead, since it is my work I most want to talk about, I will keep posting updates and thoughts through Twitter, which cuts out the fluff in a way that Facebook just cannot. What is it about Twitter that is different? I love the fact that the interaction is one on one. It isn’t a status hanging invitingly on a Facebook Wall for everyone to add their two bits. It’s clean, and since it forces you to write not more than 140 characters per tweet, it creates an atmosphere where you focus on what is most important. There just isn’t room for all that other stuff that makes Facebook so unbearable.
Monika Gubler lives alone in a little apartment in Basel, Switzerland, with a sprinkling of angels in every room: on the shelves, on the walls, hanging, propped up, realistic, cartoonish, romantic, in paper and clay and metal and glass. Over her white Bose speakers. Opposite the neighbor’s door that has a sticker that says the flat is protected with a handgun. In front of the lace curtains of her little balcony, where she looks over the narrow one-way street and to the attic studio with the bald man who doesn’t say hello. It is a modern flat except for the massive wood cupboards that used to be her parents’, and the angels, whom she insists are ageless.
Narrated by Johanna Schwegler. Photo by Ingeborg Schwegler
“There was a hill with a monastery on top close to my house in Wattwil, and I learnt to ski on its slopes. My mother, who was a very good skier, taught me. School ended at 4pm and I’d train after, until it got dark.
“My mother took me to the main ski slopes 5km away on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. When we came home my father always made chicken on the grill. He was a good cook, and we were very hungry after skiing. He always used a lot of spices: a lot of paprika and mustard and… he was very creative. We had a portable orange rotisserie that we’d have on the table. This was our traditional Sunday dinner. I loved the skin grilled crisp.
by Pinaki
It is summer, but it’s 14ºC at 8pm and we are eating beef mince and onions and tomatoes laid over beds of hollowed-out courgettes, and salad known only as a cutting salad because you can keep cutting its leaves off for months as you grow it. And gewurztraminer. By this time the entire village of Termes is silent and will soon go to sleep. Only the swallows are moving, the hirondelle, and they’re flying high and that means the good weather will hold. Ten degrees at night is good weather if the days warm up again.
Narrated by Sonja Nebel
“One of the nicest memories I have is of my grandfather and me flying kites in early September over the flatlands near Hannover, around our little village of Abbensen. This was just after the grain was harvested, with the stubs of the grass and the wind kicking up as it always does in early Autumn.
Narrated by Nancy Papathanasopoulou. Photographed by Kostas Papathanasopoulos
“I was born in Athens but the sea defined my first steps: I swam before walking.
“When I was a baby, my father left me floating in the sea out of curiosity to see if I’d sink or float. I floated and started swimming. I walked two months later, at the age of one year exactly, to the day.
Narrated by Valentina Mustafa and Aseya Ahmed
Valentina Petrovna Shveda is in Kagarlik, 70km from Kiev, a few years old and wedged between her parents, posing for a portrait. And now she sits with me over smetana and sour cherries and talks of what happened next: the childhood of travel, moving every five or six years with her parents as they taught Russian and Ukrainian, and then, grown up, working in a bookshop in Kiev when the Bahraini she would marry walked in, looking for books on art. “Bahrain? I didn’t even know of it. It was a little dot on a big map.” But she left when she got her papers, left with Aseya, then 3 years old, to a Bahraini family of Bastakis who traced their ancestry to Bastak in what is now Iran. They spoke Persian at home, and Arabic outside; Valentina could barely speak English. “Telephone calls were very, very expensive. We wrote letters once a month and that was our relief for homesickness.”
Narrated by Brinda Toprani. Photo by Arvind Toprani
“Kids hate holding their parents’ hand while walking. I hated it too. And as I was growing up, I began to wonder why.
“I thought it was because of the need to be able to run away and play, but when I think harder, I have this exact moment in my head, when I was about 3, when I didn’t like it. Because it hurt to hold my hand up for too long. Kids need to hold their hands up high up to reach an adult’s. Imagine holding your hand up and walking around for more than five minutes.
“As silly as it sounds, such small flashes from childhood help me understand why some kids behave the way they do.”
Narrated by Masha Klochkova. Photographed by Pinaki
“My earliest memory is of me lying in my crib. So I saw everything from this position, lying on my back. I think it was Sunday because Galya usually cleans the house on Sundays, and she was cleaning the house then. It was a sunny summer or spring morning and she was cleaning the windows. They looked so big. We lived on the second floor in Podolsk. I saw trees outside, and perhaps the sky. Clean, bare windows without curtains. It was uncomfortably bright.”
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