At last after a week of being indoors, I walked into the light! I went solo and had a photography day in Liverpool, just what the doctor ordered, as they say. I'm a bit out of words at the moment and was going to include a Philip Larkin poem, but I've been thinking that Alex Turner is my modern day poet hero and this is my favourite track on AM, tucked away at the end. He's in his twenties and yet the words suggest a time before he was born, filling my head with images and memories. I've included a link to the track if you want to listen to The Arctic Monkey doing their thing whilst taking in my pictures... UPDATE Well since writing the above it has been pointed out to me that the song is actually based on a poem by John Cooper Clarke, which makes sense of the time frame (being written in the early Eighties) and the fact that I responded to the lyrics like a poem. Apparently Alex Turner first heard it read by his English teacher whilst at school. So mayb...
It's always curious when you realise two separate trains of thought are actually joined up. I started the weekend thinking about how spring and autumn are like two bookends. Spring is about beginnings, colour and shape emerging from the slowly warming earth, autumn is nature going out with a bang, flaming colours falling as the earth starts to cool and the days shorten. I started experimenting creatively with ways to respond to the colours around me, in my garden, allotment and the streets that join them. I stopped, it wasn't working. Then I bumped into a good friend that had just bought a DVD called 'Advanced Style', a film made by photographer Ari Seth Cohen and film maker Lina Plioplyte. I bought it too. It's an inspiring documentary about women in New York aged between fifty and one hundred years who don't see 'maturity' as an obstacle to looking amazing. In fact they are all avant grade in their approach to their looks, wonderful characters in the autumn of their lives, explosions of colour and form cat-walking the streets of New York.I returned to my experiments and concentrated on colour and beauty in the seasoned.
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