Writing a blog is nothing like writing for publication. There is no preexisting audience you have to please. The audience is created as a reflection of your curiosity. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
— Henrik Karlsson

“Your job as a writer is to imagine yourself into the lives of people who are not you . . . and, that way, provide a gateway for readers to also imagine themselves into the lives of others so that we can build up a community of shared understanding.”
—Caryl Phillips

I think this is what good documentary and portrait photography is doing too. You have to meet the subject as they are, without preconception or categorisation, so that your picture becomes a door into their world. The focus is on what makes them individual, rather than using them to illustrate a universal.

H/t Russell Davies

Beautiful work by Keita Morimoto 森本啓太 , via Alan Jacobs.

“Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.” —Bruno Barbey

Zen Didion

INTERVIEWER: There’s a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.

Photography, for me, is a spontaneous impulse, the result of a constant awareness, which captures both a moment and eternity. Drawing, by contrast, expands on what our consciousness has taken from the moment. Photography is an action, drawing is a meditation.
—Henri Cartier Bresson

A fun and opinionated set of rules for photography from photographer and former teacher Charles H. Traub — Do’s and Don’ts (found via Andy Adams newsletter, FlakPhoto).

And some of my own photography rules and advice from my (currently hibernating) newsletter here.

Meditations for Mortals and other Reading

“If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.” —Oliver Burkeman

I’m reading a chapter a day from Oliver Burkeman’s pragmatic and wise new book Meditations for Mortals. This has been an apt way to approach a book which suggests that daily-ish is a perfect tempo for the important things in life. It’s allowed me to hold each chapter’s core idea in mind as I move through the world — seeing if it feels true and if there is a space where I can apply it.

I like the central conceit: that it’s impossible to do everything that you need or want to do, and that accepting your finitude sets you free to act without drama, as and where necessary. You can give up the delusion that you will ever be ‘done’ — that one day the conditions will be right for you to do the thing you’ve been putting off. Instead you can look for decisions that you can take now, merely do a thing that needs to be done, and move forward without agonising or procrastinating.

As the chapters are short, I’m enjoying using any remaining reading time to rotate through a small collection of books, dipping in here and there. I’ve previously been someone who dourly ploughs through one book at a time, resolute about finishing, even if my progress has slowed to a crawl, but I’ve been reading much more since I finally took Austin Kleon’s advice to ditch books that bore you and flit around to keep things fresh. (I also like his advice about letting books talk to each other). The first essay in the Calvino collection (below) is about the quality of ‘lightness’ in literature, and recently I find that it applies to many other aspects of life. There is something about loosening your grip, a certain allowing, that makes doing hard things easier. In fact, perhaps the secret is that treating hard things as hard is a recipe for proving yourself right.

In the mix at the moment:

• Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
• In Writing by Hattie Crisell
• Six Memos for the New Millenium by Italo Calvino
• The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

View from the library at Cliveden House.

↑ LARGE PLANT ↑
Backstage at the Old Vic

Is it still street photography when you do it on a farm, but the farm is a city farm?

“Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it’s possible to walk like Alice through the looking-glass, and find another world with the camera —Tony Ray-Jones

Bonus link: lovely B&W pics of Brits by the seaside by Ray-Jones

Overlooking Coal Drops Yard.

William Eggleston at the piano on NTS

William Eggleston by Stefan Ruiz

A lovely confluence of three things that I love at one link: William Eggleston, NTS, and contemporary classical/ambient music:

William Eggleston 23rd July 2024 | NTS

William Eggleston by Jody Rojac

The colour photography legend is as steeped in music as in the visual arts (at times referring to music as his first calling), and makes exploratory compositions on piano and synthesiser. Eggleston’s music remained unreleased until 2017’s Musik LP and this is a delicate and rare hour of his music alongside work from Harold Budd, Karl Richter, Eno and others. It’s a finely textured and mellow set that is perfect for editing sessions or kicking back and dissolving into.

The images in this post show a few of my favourite portraits of Eggleston at the piano. He is a wonderful portrait subject — soulful and present, elegant and a little scruffy. Juergen Teller has also shot a set of him sans piano that are excellent too.

William Eggleston by Juergen Teller

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
—Rumi

Ade & friends, Primrose Hill, June 2024

I was walking back from the outdoor gym in Primrose Hill, feeling knackered from a couple of weeks of full days and late nights. I saw these guys squeezed onto the bench together, having a great time, and thought it would make a good picture, so I decided to ask them for a portrait. But as I got closer to them, and before I could say anything, Ade, on the left, called out to me and said, “You look like you could do with a hug…” And when I laughed and said, “Yes, that would be great”, he got up and gave me a bearhug. They were great, so warm and relaxed. We chatted a bit, I took a few pictures, and they asked what my ‘top photography tip’ was. Such a sweet and fun encounter.

Unfortunately, a huge rain storm blasted through five minutes after I’d walked on, putting an end to their chilled afternoon in the park. I jogged home and arrived soaked through.

“Listen to what your work is trying to tell you, because it is the mother of your next work.”

Anthony Gormley’s advice to artists, from an excellent interview on the Art Talk podcast. Lots of insight into his practice and all the wisdom about art and life that you would expect from such a deep thinker and practitioner. I also particularly liked his explanation for using his own body as a basis for much of his work (and interestingly, from very early on in his art journey):

“Can I use this bit of the material world that is closest to me, in fact the bit that I live inside, as both the tool, the material, and the subject of the work? Not because it’s special […] but because it’s the only bit that I can work on from the inside — from the other side of the accident of appearance.”

Lots of great stuff about his choice of materials and ‘the studio as a tool for artmaking’; as well as deciding early on with his wife, the painter, Vicken Parsons, on the life and art practice they wanted, and reverse engineering it to help them decide what to do in the present.