A Rainbow of Happiness

To celebrate the International Day of Happiness, I have made a little slideshow of some of my travel photos, taken in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Portugal, Morocco and my hometown of Melbourne. I call it a six second rainbow of happiness!

I hope you have been able to do something that makes you happy today.

The Exuberance of Cecil Beaton

First edition of The Blessing, by Nancy Mitford with cover art by Cecil BeatonRecently I started reading Nancy Mitford’s book The Blessing, which, a few chapters in, is proving very entertaining. I first spotted this first edition book on a shelf in an op shop (thrift store), my eye caught by the author’s name as well as the colourful though tattered spine.

I had heard of Nancy Mitford (1904–1973), but I didn’t know much about her life. One of the famous Mitford sisters, she was a novelist, biographer and journalist. The book The Blessing, is considered one of her best, and was dedicated to her very good friend Evelyn Waugh. He told Mitford he found the book, “admirable, deliciously funny, consistent and complete, by far the best of your writings”.

My eye was caught by the illustration; the cover artwork of this first printing in 1951 is by Cecil Beaton and through the rearing horse, and tilting angles evokes a madcap adventure with the heroine’s young child (the ‘blessing’ of the title) at its centre.

Portrait of Coco ChanelCecil Beaton (1904–1980) was a prolifically creative person: ‘a fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Oscar-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre’. [Wikipedia] I have always admired Beaton’s dedication to detail in his drawings in particular: what patience he had in faithfully depicting the intricacies of interior décor in his portraits of the wealthy! The wallpaper patterns especially impress me, and it is no wonder after all, for he was also a textile designer, and his fabric designs were used by Balenciaga, Dior and Lanvin. (Read more here.)

Here is a small collection of Beaton’s exuberant illustrations that show a joyful sense of colour and playful riot of pattern and texture.

Images from Pinterest

Portrait of the Duchess of WindsorBeaton's accessories for Vogue magazineVogue cover, June 1935Vogue cover, July 1935Front cover of one of his personal scrapbooks, full of society photographsBack cover of Cecil Beaton's scrapbookWraparound book cover (click image for larger version)

Windows to the Soul

Rue de la Viarmes cote de la rue VannesPeople say eyes are the window to the soul, but the camera’s eye is the window to the soul of a place, a time, a subject, as well as to the soul of the one who first looked through the viewfinder and chose what to photograph.

That is why I am mesmerised by old photographs; I am fascinated by history and the way people lived before us, what they thought and said. Of course still photography does not give as much information as video, but usually it is a distillation more poetic and poignant. It allows us as the viewer to pause and reflect, to hear the echo of the photograph within ourselves; to wonder and remember.

still photography … allows us as the viewer to pause and reflect, to hear the echo of the photograph within ourselves

Colour photography was first attempted in the 1840s – much longer ago than I imagined. Varying methods produced beautiful prints of washed out colour that certainly appeal to my personal aesthetic, but there is still something wonderful about antique sepia prints. There is a warmth and softness to sepia not found even in old black and white photographs. Sepia prints are created by applying a toner to black and white photographic prints. The metallic silver in a print is converted to a sulfide compound, and different processes result in variations of tone.

Versailles, coin de parc, 1902Born in Bordeaux, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) began practising photography in his 40s, after first working as a sailor in his youth, switching to acting (with indifferent success) and then briefly dabbling in painting. He finally found his métier and pursued it until his death. He was not experimental or progressive; he worked in techniques that were already old-fashioned – obviously because he liked the result. “He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered.” (Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski)

Atget catalogued Parisian life and culture with simplicity, honesty and a clarity of vision that did not waver for thirty years. Szarkowski continues: “Atget's work is unique on two levels. He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century. He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a benchmark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself.”

Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1910I remember working in a darkroom in high school, and later in my parents’ blacked-out laundry over the summer (it got hot!). All the manual work of traditional photography was so satisfying: fiddling with an enlarger, dipping prints in chemicals, experimenting with all kinds of techniques to alter prints somehow, clipping the results up to dry. Now digital photographer seems so antiseptic! There are no wonderful surprises that are the result of chance.

Scroll through this small collection of Atget’s pictures, or visit the archive at Atget Photography.

Marchand de paniers en fil de fer, (merchant of wire baskets) 1899-1900Impasse des Bourdonnais, 1908Organ-grinder, 1898–99Boulevard de Strasbourg corsets, 1912Tuileries, l’Aurore 1907luxembourg, 1923-25Parc de Sceaux, 1925Parc de SceauxUntitled (link broken)

Tropicana!

Click the image to jump through and buy this posterOn this rather overcast (although sultry) day in Melbourne, I bring you some tropical relief! Aren’t these two pictures – a PanAm travel poster and a Tahitian painting by Paul Gauguin – awesomely colourful? They make me want to immediately book a tropical holiday, but alas, my bank account scoffs and I must merely hope to visit there in my dreams …

Where Are You Going?, or Woman Holding a Fruit, by Paul Gaugin, 1893

Evening

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL #1

Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;

and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs—

and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in and now embracing
grows alternately stone in you and star.

—Rainer Maria Rilke
(From The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow, North Point Press, 1991)