Let me tell you a true story.
It happened here on the Italian Riviera eighteen years ago.
After eating some gnocchi al pesto genovese for lunch this afternoon, Anna and I finished developing another bunch of 120 film that we shot last week. She wore the most elegant of dresses and the negatives, which dried in no time, looked absolutely magnificent. I can't wait to make the contacts for my summer journal which I've been writing without abandon. It's just my dreadful spelling and clumsiness of the English language that concerns me the most, but then again, nobodies perfect! Oscar Wilde was right, "consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative" and I certainly prefer flamboyance and imagination over those who say they do not dream.
Fibre based silver gelatin hand prints in original art deco frames.
Well just last night for example, I had this tremendously vivid dream that was so colorful it turned into an awful nightmare. I woke up sweating, huffing and panting all over the place exactly five minutes before my alarm, with a piercing image of an old photograph I had taken, manifested by my subconscious. It was a photograph I had taken with Anna precisely eighteen years ago, and convinced that this was some sort of sign, stood up much too quickly and almost fainted immediately, before staggering off light headed towards my studio door.
Original C-Type hand print on Kodak Endura Ultra Gloss paper from colour negative film.
Far too tired to think, I decided to let my subconscious completely take over, which turned out to be the right thing to do. By some divine act of intervention my arms raised themselves towards an old portfolio perched on a bookshelf above my head. Half asleep and with glassy eyes, I knocked it by accident to the floor, where upon it landed, exactly on the right page with the photograph that appeared in my dream. A little confused and with an overwhelming desperation to pee, I rubbed my eyes and knelt down to investigate this bizarre situation.
Photograph of one of the original fibre based black and white hands.
I recollected my thoughts, realising that all these photographs were dotted about all over the place, in portfolios and frames, some in Italy and others in England. What was most strange, was that I had become blind to them and a weird paralysis had frozen my mind for more than a decade, from which it has only recently thawed.
Photograph of original fibre based silver gelatin hand print.
It was one of my only colour photographs from a series of black and white pictures that I took with Anna in Rapallo, featuring an Italian model we booked from Sanremo. It was our first time that we seriously collaborated together and I remember just how much we loved those pictures. It was honest, elegant, authentic, true, expressive and completely steeped in our own unique creative sensibilities and freedoms. It was really us, together! The beginning of our foundations, and with the sun beating down, drenching everything it touched, I remember lugging around my heavy Pentax 67's. Whilst Anna, pulling her suitcases of 1930's clothes and swimsuits all along the rocky pebbled beaches wasted no time in making things happen.
Photograph of original fibre based silver gelatin hand print.
Well, you know what they say, a flower either thrives or wilts in the sun, and so it must suffer, in order to grow healthy and shine with an extraordinary lust for life!
My recollections of London are always foggy at the best of times. Everything I remember always seemed to happen much further afield, always under the sun and never under the clouds.
I have heard it many times been said that all art is meaningless and not necessary to maintain life.
But for what else do we stay alive for!?