Journal

Singapore Naming is a funny process. Something twigged after the last couple of blog posts about taking a break from the nomad life. Having decided, in writing, that my days on the road might be over for a little while, I started wondering how daily minutiae would change if I didn’t have to leave every few months. The biggest shift? No more living out of 2 bags, and ridding myself of the mentality that goes with it. The former is easily done, the latter, not so much. I’ve been back for almost 3 months now, and I still operate out of the same 2 bags that house my work and life elsewhere in the world, where I am only a visitor. Some of this has …

Singapore I’m in one of those “I should just bloody sell my camera” places today. Yeah, you know the one. Had a run of lousy days shooting, culminating spectacularly yesterday. Every frame in my memory card looked like it’d been shot by someone who’d never heard of a camera before. Pile of useless virtual crap. Except I don’t really want to sell it. I’ve said many times before, how beautiful I think the Fujifilm X-Pro2 is – especially this graphite edition, ermagherd! – but it’s more than an aesthetic thing. There are plenty of beautiful cameras in the world. Every banged up edge and scraped surface of this, and the ones before it though, is a marker on my journey: as a photographer, as a …

Singapore. It’s that time of the year. The sun has swung over to glare at our kitchen windows. My neighbour gives her bedding a thorough whacking on the bamboo poles her laundry dries on, with a new fly swatter. There’ll be no mites or other potential invaders on anything when she is done. These are the little things that anchor me here. I understand them – why they’re done. Who does them. What they mean – the way I don’t, just about anything/-one else in this place. They make me laugh, and make my day. My latest piece, The camera as passport, is up on Fujilove. Somewhere in there i mention that coming back to Singapore – home – is a destabilizing prospect, even after …

Singapore, Match 2014 A word after a word after a word is power. – Margaret Atwood This is a careless snapshot. This encapsulates the journey between unspeakable grief to rebirth. This is a film picture. This is a digital picture. This was made with a Fuji. Or was it? Who’s speaking? Who’s listening? Who owns the picture? Who owns the stories? Who gets to decide if they are heard? It always comes down to words. Does a picture paint a thousand words? How would we know this, if those words are not spoken?

Dan Milnor over at Shifter did a write up of Map-Making, the book that Eileen and I collaborated on. It’s always special, and a little harrowing, to have Dan’s discerning eye look over my handiwork. I did the layout for this book, and those of you who have a copy, will know that it is extremely simple. I am no designer and my goal for the layout was equally simple: to give each of her poems all the space they needed to breathe, and allow the same for each of my pictures. We might not have had that luxury of page count and negative space, had we gone the traditional publishing route. More than anyone, getting an indication from him that Eileen and I didn’t …

Guanajuato, Mexico, 2016 When I first stepped into Mexico City, 5 years ago now, I came across Matteo, a Finn who regularly spent 6 months of his year there. When asked how he managed to talk his way through customs, he said the first thing he learned in Spanish, was how to express his appreciation for the country. México es el país más hermoso del mundo. It really is. Beautiful, I mean. Mexico. For more than the facades sold to you by travel ads and this blog post. In my photo archives of the last few years, it’s always those pictures I come back to, again and again. I think some of this attachment is owed to milestones. I never traveled before deciding to become …

You know, i really like Instagram. It’s a conducive platform for bite-sized writing. That isn’t the point of IG, but the expectations of the platform make sharing offhand, barely cogent text… well, ok. Most of my writing happens during lulls these days: the hours on public transport, breathing moments in the middle of a work stretch, or the 15 / 20 minute periods waiting in line for something, which happens a lot over here. The space to pick my thoughts apart and try to think critically about them doesn’t really exist in this context. I don’t read as much as I want to about issues important to me. I’m thrilled about the conversations about race and gender that are (rightly) getting a goodly amount of …