Mo Blog

Monday 31 October 2011

Hanging On


All under way!

After all the recent talk of the frame, 34 brand new frames have just arrived for your viewing pleasure at The Hub, home of the Festival 11: The Big Picture.

This is the long anticipated culmination of my work with the EIF for the duration of the festival in August. This solo exhibition "lifts the lid" on all things EIF, but really it represents the cream of my image making and taking for a full-on august and weaves the subtle 24 day story of Edinburgh's most breathtaking festival.

A real struggle to edit down our selection. A huge thank you to all our Facebook voters. You are all welcome to come down and take a peak under the lid yourselves! The exhibition opens this Thursday 3rd November and remains so until next year.





Friday 21 October 2011

Frame On



Whoa- ho! Here it is, the blog's 101st post. A new chapter, a new story, a fresh gust of air. And all that.

But behold! Apart from the mania of moving flats, reshuffling my possessions (to the bin) and settling downtown in sexy Leith, i have finally honoured one of those great ideas put before me by a great mind. See the frame! This is the new shrine of self improvement. No gruelling lunges, no spinach milkshake, simply the frame. Every month i will update it with a print of my best photo of the last 30 days. Not my favourite, this blog here is the shrine to all of those, but my best image. Brand spanking, all singing...brand...the best.

The world is still turning after all, i'm still taking pictures. It just so happens in the last while i've been taking a lot of exciting pictures that i'm not quite ready to share. Hence, the frame. This months image has had to lie dormant behind a sofa and travel in a box over the last 2 years. It takes me aways back. It is a photo from my first exhibition , before i was properly able to take a photo, certainly, before i studied. The wonderful S had an idea to expand traditional Icelandic recipes and baking  into a full event. We baked and photographed like mad and exhibited our 25 photos in the Grassmarket for the month of June 2009. This delight is the Blueberry Cheesecake, and while it represents a brief and maybe imperfect foray into food photography, it also symbolises a brave effort of doing something we never had. And long may that continue.

F r a m e.

Thursday 13 October 2011

Memory





At the moment the posts aren't exactly ten a penny. It has been all festival over here for the last two months (you may have noticed) and what a joy it has been to be able to lift up the carpet and show the insides and my own take on it. And the feedback....i won't even begin. Just the experience of doing the EIF was life changing enough, i can barely take into account the great ripples in motion for my life in the aftermath. It makes me have to close my eyes.

I have not really stepped aside and laid down my thoughts since the festival ended. What actually happened was a a very abrupt stop. One minute i was taking pictures hell for leather, the next i was not. All was still in the air but my ears were ringing. And on cue the wind whips up and winter settles in again and Edinburgh tries to  remember what it did before the commotion and puts the good times to the back of its mind. That brief, eerie silence before the pace is picked back up. What to do when you cannot keep pace with the machine. I'm still dwelling on the good times. Four years of them. 

You can't talk about memory without talking about time, and sitting on the edge on my bed i feel let down by both. To try and crystallise the last four years of us together in my head: an impossibility. You only draw attention to the great void of forgetting. And it is only when something has changed for good that you fear the obscuring of all the luscious moments that became it in memory. You would desperately discard all the facts and insight and sophistication, all those numbers and dates in perpetual oblivion, to feel the old weight and hear the familiar notes. All that bloated rumination for a seconds glimpse of a humdrum scene. To surrender all the world's knowledge for just the vapour of a scent. Of her.

Our selective memory is not without mercy, even if it is without control. Tiny fragments connect. In the smell of rain, or burning toast, or a warm quilt, or seeing old handwriting, or the sun on your neck:  orbs of the past that unlock the treasure chest. Like a snippet of conversation, a glimpse into the past. Without warning, you are elsewhere in a younger body. Back at the start, back to the anchor. Hand in hand in the sunshine, carelessness on the air, with nowhere to go.

Four years under the microscope. I can only shake my head at the scale of it. Like yesterday and forever at the same time. These are the things in the foreground when change is on the air. Beyond the lists and inventories. When your boxes are packed and groaning, you sweep your old floorboards and switch off the lights for the last time, before heading out into the dark. You panic about the nuts and bolts falling off on the move, the great material convoy to a new pasture. A situation as old as the world.  The ensuing grapple with memory as it gradually withdraws the old scenes that buoy me on. Only to realise that it is doing a packing of its own. Saving the most precious and private things, encrypting them beyond retrieval, for when they are needed.

For now. For our old flat together. Where my ears are still ringing.
















e

Monday 10 October 2011

Washout



Huge apologies all. I haven't forgotten about our corner of the web over here, it is long in need of a dusting though.

Like all troughs, there is a huge crest of activity coming this way. Stay tuned for info and some footage on the Edinburgh International Festival Photography exhibition, and the launch date this month. Not just that, there is a fully fledged, upholstered website on the way to soothe your eyes (and ruin my brain). An unearthing of neverbeforeseen personal as well as commercial work. It has been an exciting month and there are some very cool projects emerging but there is also a proportion of personal woe that, no doubt, shall all be shared in due course.

Anyone living down in Leith, all i will say is look out. Its time to batten down the hatches.

e