Created •
- Stumble >
-
funkymonkey8
-
Created •
Hamnavoe | George Mackay Brown
My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke
On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide
And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged Water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.
Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.
A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of cornstalks and milk.
In "The Artie Whaler" three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.
The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,
And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.
The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples, lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.
He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
My seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;
And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Aw5RANyjY
Reviewed • 3 reviews • youtube.com
Ashes and Snow
I didn't know anyone else knew about Gregory Colbert's film, "Ashes and Snow." A visit to dawnlaurens' blog has beautifully shattered this illusion with one of the most transfixing video excerpts I've seen of the film. Click on this link to visit the source for a HQ, large viewing.
More stills.
-
Created •
Eugène Atget
"Eugène Atget (1857-1927) took up photography as a professional in the late 1880s. Details of his earlier life are shadowy. He is known to have been a sailor and then an amateur actor, which may account for the 'stage set' quality of many of his images. He seems to have lived a largely secluded life in his apartment in Paris.
His project to record 'Old Paris' began around 1897 and continued until the 1920s. In it, Atget was driven by the disappearance of buildings as schemes of modernisation swept the city. Ignoring the grand new vistas, he set out to record the character and details of the timeworn streets. He made a stock of prints for sale to artists, museums and libraries, in France and abroad, selling some 600 prints directly to the V&A.
Today, however, Atget is admired less as a record photographer and more as a forerunner of Surrealism and of modern approaches to the art of photography.
His urban scenes - featuring snatched glimpses, tangential perspectives, odd reflections and bizarre details - convey a distinctly modern experience of the city. In 1936, critic Walter Benjamin described how these images operated beyond their ostensible purpose, appearing unintentionally, but uncannily, like the 'scene of a crime'.
This shift in perception about Atget's work began in the last years of his life, when he met Berenice Abbott, a young American working in Paris for the photographer Man Ray. After his death, Abbott bought the remains of his archive and began to promote his work. She was entranced by the strangeness of Atget's photographs, seeing in them a Surrealist vein as well as a 'relentless fidelity to fact' and a 'deep love of the subject for its own sake'."
-
Created •
Eugène Atget
"Paris was a modern metropolis, but this was not the Paris Atget photographed. Atget worked in the early morning hours to avoid traffic and people. He wandered the haunted Parisian streets like a ghost in search of some unfulfilled desire. In that magical morning light Atget saw through time. He found on the ground-glass of his view camera the noble remains of a grand culture that lingered on in the architectural style of the elegant Hotels, the picturesque courtyards and royal pleasure grounds of a bygone era. Few photographs show a human figure. His photographs are peopled mostly by Baroque statues, architecture, empty parks and mythical trees. There are no signs of industry, no Eiffel Tower, no lively café scene. In short, he recorded the existence of another Paris that lies just under the veil of modernity."
"Along the outside of the fortification wall, literally outside of Paris, Atget wound his way down narrow well worn footpaths. 'Fosse' is the word he chose to title most of these images. The term translates to ditch or grave. Here he finds his trees rising up from wild waves of unkept shrubs and prickly brambles. They sway between us and the sun behind them. They shimmer in and out of sight like spectres threatening to either take physical form or disappear forever. In fact, they did disappear. With the onset of the war Paris prepared itself for possible attack. The Fortifications were made ready and all of Atget's trees were cut down. His photographs are all we have left of that dry rough natural world bathed in a primitive beauty.
"Atget's photographic method was antithetical to the experimental and soft focus-pictorial approach practiced by members of the Linked Ring and the Photo Secessionists. He focused on lyrical details, and it is the poetic content rather than the technique that carries the image."
