I have more images to add but I've begun work on a photo gallery titled the Yoga Series.
I loved working with these guys. Light conditions varied wildly and the series was created over a couple of months but I'm pleased with the end result. More to follow in the days to come.
My cousin and I were up early one morning in Rome. And we wandered, cameras in hand, in love with the light.
And we crossed the River Tiber and I caught this reflection ... this blur, and looking at it today it seems like a beautiful abstract painting. The kind I would so love to paint. I am hungry for colour in these days. The winter was long.
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools.
She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California.
Based on her feelings of connection to, and solidarity with the Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French and shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art. She became a painter. But it was with her participation in the poets’ movement against the war in Vietnam that she began to write poems and became, in her words, “an American poet”.
In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976.
In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the “France-Pays Arabes” award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of War Literature. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris.
In the late seventies, she wrote texts for two documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab, on the civil war in Lebanon, which were shown on French television as well as in Europe and Japan.
Extract, the website of Etel Adnan
Searching for information about Etel Adnan also led me into an interesting world that left me wanting to stay and read a while. And there was another book too, Sea and Fog.
I took this photograph of her at the TASWIR Exhibition. I was off to one side, taking photographs while she was interviewed.
My camera was filled with interesting people during those months on the project.
My 3 days in Cairo were magnificent, occasionally disturbing ... an honour, a privilege, an experience.
This might be my favourite image from the working side of the trip.
The Cairo Notebook, present at every discussion, always a work in progress.
I wanted to come back to documentary photography once more and just say, never stop watching. For me, it's a little like hunting ... perhaps.
I don't go in with a plan beyond the attempt to capture the story. To tell it true. I picked up a 3-day documentary shoot, over on Flanders Fields, working with the New Zealanders a few years ago.
The image that follows is one of my favourites and I have to confess, it really was about swinging round and capturing this exquisite moment without thinking too much about settings. A hongi ... a Maori greeting, was being exchanged.
I had been traveling in France with the New Zealand veterans the day before and so they knew me a little. The New Zealand London Rugby Club were playing a commemoration match in Zonnebeke.
Moments like these make documentary photography a big love of mine ...
