The Somnambulist

Ralph Gibson, 'The Somnambulist'. I think the guitar stuff is kind of horrible though, like the photo equivalent of Paul McCartney's later career.

Light is like water

I read this story years ago and often think about it in relation to photography, especially at the moment trying to find words for the book which enhance it:


Light Is Like Water
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
as published in the collection of short stories 'Strange Pilgrims'

At Christmas the boys asked again for a rowboat.

"Okay," said their papa, "we'll buy it when we get back to Cartagena."

Toto, who was nine years old, and Joel, who was seven, were more determined than their parents believed.

"No," they said in chorus. "We need it here and now."

"To begin with," said their mother, "the only navigable water here is what comes out of the shower."

She and her husband were both right. Their house in Cartagena de Indias had a yard with a dock on the bay, and a shed that could hold two large yachts. Here in Madrid, on the other hand, they were crowded into a fifth-floor apartment at 47 Paseo de la Castellana. But in the end neither of them could refuse, because they had promised the children a rowboat complete with sextant and compass if they won their class prizes in elementary school, and they had. And so their papa bought everything and said nothing to his wife, who was more reluctant than he to pay gambling debts. It was a beautiful aluminum boat with a gold stripe at the water line.

"The boat's in the garage," their papa announced at lunch. "The problem is, there's no way to bring it up in the elevator or by the stairs, and there's no more space available in the garage."

On the following Saturday afternoon, however, the boys invited their classmates to help bring the boat p the stairs and they managed to carry it as far as the maid's room.

"Congratulations," said their papa. "Now what?"

"Now nothing," said the boys. "All we wanted was to have the boat in the room, and now it's here."

On Wednesday night, as they did every Wednesday, the parents went to the movies. The boys, lords and masters of the house, closed the doors and windows and broke the glowing bulb in one of the living room lamps. A jet of golden light as cool as water began to pour out of the broken bulb, and they let it run to a depth of almost three feet. Then they turned off the electricity, took out the rowboat, and navigated at will among the islands in the house.

This fabulous adventure was the result of a frivolous remark I made while taking part in a seminar on the poetry of household objects. Toto asked me why the light went on with just a touch of a switch, and I did not have the courage to think about it twice.

"Light is like water," I answered. "You turn the tap and out it comes."

And so they continued sailing every Wednesday night, learning how to use the sextant and the compass, until their parents came home from the movies and found them sleeping like angels on dry land. Months later, longing to go farther, they asked for complete skin-diving outfits: masks, fins, tanks, and compressed air rifles.

"It's bad enough you've put a rowboat you can't use in the maid's room," said their father. "To make it even worse, now you want diving equipment too."

"What if we win the Gold Gardenia Prize for the first semester?" said Joel.

"No," said their mother in alarm. "That's enough."

Their father reproached her for being intransigent.

"These kids don't win so much as a nail when it comes to doing what they're supposed to," she said, "but to get what they want they're capable of taking it all, even the teacher's chair."

In the end the parents did not say yes or no. But in July, Toto and Joel each won a Gold Gardenia and the public recognition of the headmaster. That same afternoon, without having to ask again, they found the diving outfits in their original packing in their bedroom. And so the following Wednesday, while their parents were at the movies seeing Last Tango in Paris, they filled the apartment to a depth of two fathoms, dove like tame sharks under furniture, including the beds and salvaged from the bottom of the light things that had been lost in darkness for years.

At the end-of-the-year awards ceremony, the brothers were acclaimed as examples for the entire school and received certificates of excellence. This time they did not have to ask for anything, because their parents asked them what they wanted. They were so reasonable that all they wanted was a party at home as a treat for their classmates.

Their papa, when he was alone with his wife, was radiant.

"It's a proof of their maturity, "he said.

"From your lips to God's ear," said their mother.

The following Wednesday, while their parents were watching The Battle of Algiers, people walking along the Paseo de la Castellana saw a cascade of light falling from an old building hidden among the trees. It spilled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the facade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to the Guadarrama.

In response to the emergency, firemen forced the door on the fifth floor and found the apartment brimming with light all the way to the ceiling. The sofa and easy chairs covered in leopard skin were floating at different levels in the living room, among the bottles from the bar and the grand piano with its Manila shawl that fluttered half submerged like a golden manta ray. Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, flew with their own wings through the kitchen sky. The marching band instruments that the children used for dancing drifted among the bright-colored fish freed from their mother's aquarium, which were the only creatures alive and happy in the vast illuminated marsh. Everyone's toothbrush floated in the bathroom, along with Papa's condoms and Mama's jars of creams and her spare bridge, and the television set from the master bedroom floated on its side, still tuned to the final episode of the midnight movie for adults only.

At the end of the hall, moving with the current and clutching the oars, with his mask on and only enough air to reach port, Tonto sat in the stern of the boat searching for the lighthouse, and Joel, floating in the prow, still looked for the north star with the sextant, and floating through the entire house were their thirty-seven classmates, eternalized in the moment of peeing into the pot of geraniums, singing the schools song with the words changed to make fun of the headmaster, sneaking a glass of brandy from Papa's bottle. For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded, and two entire classes at the elementary school of Saint Julian the Hospitaler drowned on the fifth floor of 47 Paseo de la Castellana. In Madrid, Spain, a remote city of burning summers and icy winds, with no ocean or river, whose land-bound indigenous population had never mastered the science of navigating on light.

Suns from the Internet

I had been looking and failing to find this for a while, but finally came across Penelope Umbrico's 'Suns from the Internet' project again:-

'This is a project I started when I found 2,303,087 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset on the Flickr site. I took just the suns from these pictures and made snapshot prints of them.

I find it particularly absurd that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D… and so ubiquitously photographed, is subsumed to the Internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit. Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window into the natural world'

Book Planning

Its kind of like playing pairs with cards, only better....

Red Eye

My optician told me that I had too many red blood cells in my eyes yesterday. Its difficult to explain the desire to stare at magnified dust on a computer screen solidly for a week even to myself at this stage. I'm longing for straight forward sensor dust right now.

The Nuremberg Chronicle

The first photograph is from a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle held at Chetham's Library, actually photographed at the window seat where Marx and Engels used to meet up, and that's the shadow of the window of the oldest medieval settlement in the North of England over it, that is! The Nuremberg Chronicle is one of the oldest printed books, an incunabulum. (I make no apologies for using wikipedia to reference to here, although I use to bollock my students for using it as their primary essay source, as it is like the giant index in the sky- a really good place to glean the general facts of something!) This copy of the chronicle is particularly interesting as it has been bound with a handwritten translation done in Warrington, in the North of England. I, like many in England, assumed that Warrington had been invented as a place at some point in the late eighties as its primary topographical feature are roundabouts and Ikea, and there used to be this advert trying to persuade people that it was a sensible place to house a business in (I think) with this guy with a Chinese accent going 'Warrrington- Runcorn, its the heart of the nation!

I digress, but it astonishing to learn that Warrington was an ancient seat of learning and almost had one of the first universities in the world. This early Renaissance period has become increasingly important to my understanding of the photographs I took at Saint-Sulpice on the day of the Equinox. The time was such a mash up of superstition colliding with organised religion, and the Catholic Church subsuming pagan beliefs. This is evident, for instance, in the very architecture of Saint-Sulpice, the second image (both of these quoted in 'Discovering the Vernacular Landscape' by John Brinckerhoff):-

'There is very little doubt that during the entire Middle Ages there existed the belief in a distinct relationship between stone and stars'

Peter Fingesten, The Eclipse of Symbolism

'Today when the original treatment of stone has disappeared, we are only occasionally aware of it, chiefly there where old stained glass windows still gleam and where their light transforms the stone. We should think of the Cathedral not only in terms of colour, but as being suffused with the atmosphere of light….the building should ‘shine’, ‘sparkle’, ‘glitter’, ‘dazzle’…it would however be false to say that the Cathedral denies its stone character. It keeps it throughout, only it idealizes it by giving it a gem like, transfigured, vibrant, crystalline aspect'

Hans Sedlmayr, Die Enstehung der Kathedrale

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The role of printing in the shift of understanding during this time is, of course, immense, and this particular copy of the book seems to me, to beautifully represent the transition.

David Alan Harvey

© David Alan Harvey

Some of the posts on David Alan Harvey's Work In Progress detail his process when putting a book together, or rather the many different ways of putting a book together:

'well, the first thing is the idea or the concept...this is the hardest part (and where i am now on this one)....the second thing, is the actual shooting....this is the hardest part...and the third thing is editing your work down to something that works...this is the hardest part....and the fourth thing is the securing of a publisher and the control over the layout....this is the hardest part.....and the fifth thing is the distribution, the creating of exhibitions and the pr "selling" of the book...this is the hardest part (because by this time you are totally tired of these pictures and are moving on to something else)...'

Tanning Salons

© Caroline Edge

I’ve been hanging out in tanning salons lately; in fact I even went on a sun bed the other day, all in the name of research, of course. Trying to create a contrast to the more ‘spiritual’ photographs that I have taken at the eclipse, solstice etc. However the sun bed photos have a spiritual atmosphere all of their own, if I don’t sound a wanker saying this about my own work. This is because of the light; the eerie glow of the blue, the unusual effect by having this enveloping light source, and the shorter wave length of UV. Mostly though the pictures remind me of mortuary slabs in TV police procedural dramas. The light makes the body seem lifeless. Being on the beds is akin to being slowly roasted in an industrial cooker. Surprisingly hot and really claustrophobic. I only managed about two and a half minutes but now I feel really good for having a dose of sunshine- so begins the slippery slope! By January I’ll probably have full scale tanorexia. My beloved, being a man, insisted on going on for twice the recommended time and now has sun burn. I feel a bit guilty, for me the whole idea of going on a sun bed seems wildly exotic and massively irresponsible, yet for masses of people, particularly in the North of Britain this is normal. The list of tanning salons in Manchester extends into the hundreds. The owner of the salon showed me older beds which were more powerful and looked even more 80’s factory. Apparently people travel from the other side of Manchester for the sake of this additional radiation. I only they took Melanotan II instead, after they got over being violently sick from the injections, they could be horny as well as brown! There’s nowt as queer as folks…..