starting with drink

a day out in spatharei – time flew don’t know where – the back of the camera leaked light – even though i’d fixed the foam – o well – twas fun – beautiful bright blinding sunshine

sofia said - nice colour

talking to the residents

sofia's shot of the donkey

don’t see so many working donkeys around these days

we ended up in mili for dinner

ormos 1999

its strange how things appear so much bigger in our memories, a couple of weeks ago i returned here with sofia and natalia and the place was almost unrecognizably tiny – i was shocked though i didn’t take a shot of the yard as above due to losing light or perhaps my amazement – i would like to go back to make a comparison shot. needless to say the building is now collapsing and overgrown with weeds. though this broken glass image i took of sofia [below] i’m sure i have a similar image of john back then when things were bigger – perhaps its just a state of mind – or the way the lens records and overlays the memory.

sofia 2011

john lindus 1999

alexandros 1999

found this in the scans

whenever we found women, in temple or hut,
on boxes of spices, behind a barrel,
now dressed in gold and now in rags,
they cleaned the salt from our unhealed wounds.

nikos kavadias – sea study

concept - john lindus

For hours i looked at her darkened eyes
and thought i saw in their depths, stormy seas,
the islands that stud the waters of Greece
and the small ships which left with sails unfurled.

nikos kavadias – gabrielle didot

the light goes on forever

syros 2008

what creates good memories – a sense of infinite time – simplicity – the sound of her singing in the vineyard – then was all possibility – sometimes its beyond tears.

not quite summer

well i bit the bullet yesterday evening and finally immersed myself in cold seawater – the whole day was scorching – alex and i up the mountain had to suffer everyone else going for a swim – so when we returned in the evening we were determined to go – but by then the heat had passed – off for one now.

paris 1967

what makes a good memory? a photo – i have a very bad memory from one day to the next stuff and detail get erased in an arbitrary way – especially those short term ones when you go to get something but by the time you get there its forgotten – the past – vague patchworks of other peoples recall and some hazy images and senses of time and place. so in the case of the above photo obviously i don’t remember it – i have to ask when it was taken and i look down on an aspect of myself in the past and wonder to some degree what that moment could have felt like – however the photograph itself is good enough to have created its own existence – it does not need my recall it can create a whole world of fabricated memories in the capture of that moment that i was no witness to – it gives me place, sensation, smell, warmth – a myriad of shards and fragments of a time my mind and its faulty recall seems to have misplaced.
thats what i want in a photo, whether its been set up or has been caught. i want it to have that lifetime of memories condensed into a fraction of a second so it has some meaning beyond the time it was taken.

stavroula

despite what events conspire to govern your life that moment exists beyond it – distilled, isolated and pure.

sofia - june 2011

And the black tar, the rubber smells and oil stained driveways, the metal roofs and the ugly concrete porches… the dead end jobs, the tangled trees and the rotting leaves… are they there to reflect what exists behind the eyes or do the eyes tell the tale of these things, these places and the stories that speak from these objects. Perhaps they are interwoven and married to each other… perhaps they are one in the same… the surroundings, the objects, the eyes and the looks… the insides, the behinds, the violence and the beneaths. They must be made up of these places and they must share the time and exist together. Perhaps they are simply adjoined to the same fate and inseparable… unable to easily part ways.

mark steinmetz

thanks to guy batey – for a link to an excellent article on mark steinmetz by doug rickard on american suburb