august 2023
Snippets and small iPhone moments from a quiet month. I’m shooting Silbersalz again which will all be developed in Germany at the end of the year as I refuse to post anything abroad from the UK ever again.
We went to Scotland for a weekend and goldpanned, crossed the loch and hiked some of the West Highland Way. We were lucky with the weather and the company, I shared some memories and pictures here. We volunteered for a romantic photoshoot for a wedding portfolio, and very much enjoyed it to our mutual surprise; if you’re getting married you should hire India Mae Alby. There were some birthdays and some great food, interesting art and a lot of work in the office and on my dissertation into the small hours. I hoped the heat was gone for good, alas it was not.
“My ambition was limited to wanting the smallest thing, to capture something what goes by, just something.””
I’ve come across a lot of quotes on photography as a route to acknowledging and capturing mundanity and minutiae recently. This one from painter Berthe Morisot at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, whose work I actually did not find that inspiring.
august favourites
book Seashaken Houses, on the history and architecture of rock lighthouses across the UK - a book seemingly written just for me and discovered by Haniah
art I saw loads of art this month, but Anselm Kiefer’s horrible immersive dive into Finnegan’s Wake at the White Cube and Jack Cheetham’s bread puppets at the CCA in Glasgow were both the most engaging and the spookiest
TV Season 2 of Big Little Lies, I would not have expected either Andrea Arnold or Nicole Kidman to take on a series about wealthy mums with secrets in suburban America but I’m glad they did
podcast an episode of Criminal about Icelandic criminal fiction, including an interview with their Prime Minister who has herself written a crime fiction novel
newsletter writer Brandon Taylor’s newsletter, in particular an installment where he explores the “necessity” of sex scenes in art, and indeed the idea of scenes that are “plot-adjacent” - really very good