New photos. Old things.

The first of some photos I’m sharing from the photoshoot about a month ago is this colour-saturated green, blue and pink photo of me sitting on a picnic table with my typewriter.

Those boots are so well-loved. They’ve walked me along the streets of Manhattan and London, probably also Bristol and Bath a couple of times. They are battered and broken in places, but they still feel fantastic. Which feels apt for the kind of comeback I’m going for in reengaging with blogwriting and ‘zhuzh-ing-up’ my website. (That’s a normal phrasal verb, right - “to zhuzh up” ?) 

This time of year makes me think about New York and how beautiful the autumn can be there. We got a taste of that this year in London because it took quite some time for the temperatures to drop and for the normal, rainy-drizzly weather of September to finally set in - about a month later than usual. The early autumn golden light against golden leaved trees was quite something.

It’s at this time of year that I find myself wanting to do more reading, curled up under a blanket, with some scented candles lit on my mantlepiece. I got so lucky when moving back to London from Manchester. I mean, not initially. Eight months was a long time to be looking for somewhere to live while hopping around in short term places, but it was worth it since I ended up finding a room in a house full of actors with space for all my stuff (a miracle in itself, believe me) and still room to dance around on beautiful pale wood floors. 

Sometimes things bring you right back to where you started. Or where you thought life was opening out to.

When I was 17, my family had all moved to the US and I’d stayed behind, living as a lodger with a family in a posh part of Bristol - Redland. It was an area filled with big houses and tree-lined residential streets and fancy lighting boutique shops along the nearby Whiteladies Road. I had a job as a waitress at one of the restaurants there and I remember having to wear a fairly horrible pink frilly-edged apron over an otherwise all-black uniform, serving big tables of families celebrating birthdays or business associates meeting up to, um, … associate. I also remember having to carry a huge soup bowl in my hand while also bringing a plate of vegetables and almost running to the table to put them down because it was so heavy and a second longer of holding them might have resulted in the soup ending up on my shoes. Or a paying customer’s lap. I got told to smile more. Which was hard when feeling like you’re having to work your socks off just to go home with a bit of pocket money and a couple of doggy bags of left over apple crumble or bread pudding. (English cuisine, eh?)

The details I recall about the house in Redland that I lived in for a year was that there were lots of plants (most draped over and dangling on bookcases) wood floors in the hallway and generally hints of middle-class style peppered about the place that I’d just not seen in my own home as a kid. I’d escaped the working class dark, patterned carpets (the ones that “won’t show the dirt”) and joined the cultural delights of the middle-classes. A bit like Rita’s first flat after leaving her deadbeat boyfriend in ‘Educating Rita’, it was a new world to me. I was envious of bookcases filled with books that weren’t hymnbooks or bibles. (Except the joke was on me - they were actually a very religious family too.) And most of all, I was enraptured by their piano. Because they had one.

Now, in very southwest London, I’m in an area that reminds me of that kind of wholesome, family-orientated, everyday affluence. The same kinds of wood floors, ornate windows, peephole-like attic or top floor corner windows and decorative porches and doorways. The rooms have old fireplaces with huge mantlepieces over them. Of which my room proudly has one, too. As well as a huge built in wardrobe which - thankfully - also matches the wood floors with its framing, structure and colour. It is the complete antithesis of the IKEA-like mass produced, white wardrobes that are essentially chipboard with a minimalist, clean veneer on top. I do like the characterful style of my room. There’s not one white wall in sight, which is the polar opposite of my previous white box, art-gallery-like unfurnished flat in Manchester. 

I don’t know what all this means. These waves of different stages of life in different cities and spaces, the passing fashions of interiors, affluent or not, and the timelessness of reading a good book at the end of the day wherever you are seem to be swirling around in my head like the stormy winds of this late October. Maybe I’m just too much of a luddite, or maybe there’s a bit of an old record player-loving hipster side to me that I haven’t addressed lately (and maybe this song reminded me of it). Who knows. 

Either way, Nina Robinson and I took some pretty fun shots in September and I’m pleased that I get to show them off now.

Here’s perhaps one of the silliest and yet I like the fact that without even thinking, I somehow ended up in an ‘I’m a little teapot’ pose. Surrounded by green. 

Now if that isn’t a perfectly silly but suitably childlike way to start from scratch again, I don’t know what is.

Happy Autumn.

If a picture paints a thousand words...

As the cliché goes, a picture can ‘paint a thousand words’. But isn’t the entire purpose of a picture to do away with words altogether? They don’t use words - they illustrate, not describe. 

Photographs specifically, are a moment in time capturing light and colour and possibly movement shown in a blur, or halted in a fast shutter speed dead stop. But one image alone cannot give you a picture of a whole human being, no matter how many words it may allegedly replace. That’s why in a whole feature spread of an interview plus photoshoot with a famous actor or singer there are a number of photos, so that you get to see the interviewee in different moods, poses or outfits (or all three).

I have quite a mini-library style archive of glossy magazines and still love poring over images and interviews with people I find creatively interesting. Nonetheless, I appreciate the pitfalls of the fashion shoot concept and in particular, how women are presented and/or judged for their looks even when their work is all about how they sound or tell stories. My fascination with some of the pictures in magazines is actually due to the lighting or colours just as much as the outfits or expression in the model’s face.

In my recent photoshoot, I was reminded of the fun of making a music video, when an element of dance or more fluid movement can come into play. And when the sunlight streams in or seemingly joins in with the dance, it gets really fun. (Although not for the photographer, who’s desperately trying to adjust to the extra light…) I took this selfie on my phone just after finishing our shoot and while still in a free and frolicsome mood…

Photoshoot - thoughts and ideas…

“I like the morning. There’s so much hope in the morning. There’s so much potential, which is never realised by 8:30pm in the evening.”   

- Chris Lowe

I had told myself I’d try to get to bed by 11. It’s 23:21. And I haven’t managed to do any Gujarati homework even though my lesson is at 11am tomorrow. Sundays tend to play out like this. The freedom of a whole day off. Followed by the pressure to move things forward with my creative life, both in being inspired by others and generating the ideas and inspiration for my own work. I did at least get some much longed for reading done (some articles in the New York Times, a few pages of a memoir and a smattering of poetry) and then planned out an upcoming photoshoot a bit more - mainly by choosing outfits and shoes. But also by dusting off my typewriter and seeing if it still works. (It does.)

I’m working with a new photographer for the shoot on Wednesday and I’m playing around with the look and purpose of the pictures I want to get. I want to indulge in my love for colour as well as have some B&W photos, and I’d like to represent my writing and my slightly Luddite inclinations. I made some notes a couple of weeks ago to try to clarify what I’m going after:

PHOTOSHOOT IDEAS - the desolation of society as it stands at the moment is the backdrop - it’s either chaotic, desolate/barren or soulless in some way and then, there in the frame somewhere is the artist. Contemplating how to fight back or posing with a freedom stretch as a means of bringing strength and creativity back. We see the alternative in her: flowing fabric and/or bright colours, beautiful shoes against contrastingly bland concrete steps, this is her rebellion: creativity, fashion/dressing up and/or staring straight down the lens as if to say, ‘Record me. Take note. I am here and I will not let you break me.’ 

All in all, I think I’m trying to offer a kind of protest - putting colour and careful consideration of a ‘look’ before being pulled down by neglected or boring surroundings. Keeping creative expression first and foremost before consuming someone else’s brand visuals and ethos, or attending to their business’s needs. A kind of visual statement of the strength needed to fight back against the mundane, day-to-day minutiae of living.

The Dying of the Light

My natural response to the end of summer is to lament the loss of daylight as the nights slowly start drawing in earlier and earlier. This year feels different. After the gnawing anxiety of relentless heat with an unusual humidity and stickiness, the earlier descent of nighttime feels like being rescued. There’s something reassuring about life returning to a normal (habitable?) temperature, even though the grass has been turned to a brittle straw flattened onto a dusty ground.

There’s an old song by a folksy band that my Dad used to love, called ‘Red Rubber Ball’, which goes, “and I think it’s gonna be alright, yeah, the worst is over now. The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball”.  I kept humming it to myself the day after the eclipse and all the sunset photos of it, but the line seemed to contradict itself. If the sun is shining that intensely, maybe it’s not going to be alright at all?

However…

With the hunkering down of autumn and winter, the ‘batten down the hatches’ approach when wind and rain howl and bucket down outside there’s a chance to re-group. It’s an opportunity to seek out hope and examine it, make friends with it, hang out and discuss old times until there’s a glimmer of something valuable to hold and protect. That’s where the building from a strong foundation begins for me. I have to gather my things, sit at my desk in shoes I can’t walk in but that make me feel more alive and write lists.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh* put it as: 

“THINGS TO CARRY INTO THE DARKER PART OF THE YEAR:

feathers

Connemara

the moon,

the words

first light of morning

moths at sunset

rest

planets and stars

silence (nearly)

pink dreams,

the sea the sea the sea

flowers gathered from a small stretch of land

books

hope”

*in ‘Cacophony of bone’