Photos: A Rainy Day in Venice (Wed 16 Sep 2009)

A Rainy Day in Venice - Wed 16 Sep 2009 (picasa)

A Rainy Day in Venice - Wed 16 Sep 2009 (picasa)

Just a couple of simple photos to remember a Rainy Day in Venice. I like the colour, scaffolding, the graffiti (it's everywhere which surprised me for such a historical city) and in particular the umbrellas in both photographs.

Really enjoy Jonathan Walker's writings on Photography and have learnt a lot from him.

In particular, I have really enjoyed his writings of his experiences of taking photographs in Venice. The resulting series of photographs, titled Let us Burn the Gondolas, is fantastic.

Grief is concentrated in the face [take2] - The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Grief is concentrated in the face. It makes the flesh sodden and unresponsive, dull with blood, like when you are drunk and heat comes off the skin like vapour off water, as if your vitality is evaporating into the air. The muscles go dead around the mouth and eyes. It almost hurts when others smile and your own face remains inert, held down by the drag and weight of the blood. The memory of grief stays in the flesh. The body recalls it, feels its weight, moulds itself automatically to its shape as the loss is remembered, the mask becoming tighter as the memory becomes clearer; not the memory of the dead person, but the memory of grief itself.

Page 24 The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

Geoff - "an early start for the first day of the rest of my life - 'where do you start?'" - Alexandria - 7am Wed 01 Jul 2009 (picasa)
Took this photo of myself the first morning after Jenny had died. I slept OK, all things considered and was up early - I had no idea what the day would bring. All I knew there was a Funeral to organise and many people to be contacted. No stranger to all of this, so I headed up to my usual Coffee shop (Cafe Sofia) so that I could have a few quiet moments to myself before the onslaught of the day.

Not sure why I took the photo - maybe so that I could remember that moment of numbness, despair and initial grief. I did a similar thing when my younger brother Tim died (see here).

The words above by Jonathan Walker (he reviewed one of my photos that I took in Newtown - see here) seem to match up with what I now see of myself in the photo.

The following gives some context to his writings on Grief - The Art of Grief - and its relationship to his new Novel - Five Wounds. It is complicated, but Grief is a long drawn out and complicated process. I am still trying to work it all out myself.

Five Wounds: An Allegory by Jonathan Walker

Five Wounds is a parable as well as a fairy tale. Throughout, it refers to an invisible, suppressed source: ‘The Art of Grief’, an abandoned essay on the deaths of my parents. This essay is never acknowledged directly within the novel, but it will be made available in March or April 2010 as a free download on my website for those who wish to investigate.

[..]

‘The Art of Grief’ is a key, which unlocks hidden meanings in Five Wounds. However, the relationship between the two texts is more complex than that of a riddle to its solution or a joke to its punch line, because Five Wounds has an independent life of its own. Its characters act according to their own natures, and make their own choices. They are not mere ciphers, condemned to act out episodes of my biography in a disguised, pathological form. The characters may be fantastic, but they are real within their own world, even when they unknowingly refer to events beyond its borders.

In this case, then, one text does not solve the other. Rather, Five Wounds places stolen fragments of ‘The Art of Grief’ in a new setting, which transforms their meaning, as the Venetians studded the façade of the church of San Marco with pieces of marble looted from Constantinople. Here, however, the arrangement is reversed. It is not the loot that shines brightly, but the container, within which the quotations are safely hidden away, like bones in a reliquary.

UPDATE: To download a PDF version of 'The Art of Grief', go to this part of my site

[Geoff: A repost of a version I was working on that somehow got posted on the 10 Apr 2010 - subsequently deleted and this is the remaining version.]

The perfect moment of grief is when .. - The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker

[..] The perfect moment of grief is when the need to speak is balanced by the desire to be silent, and when the shame of past sins is balanced by the need for dignity, to honour the dead as well as yourself. Within this moment, the only responsibility is to endure until it passes and it becomes possible to act again. This is why it seems perfect, because all that is required to be absolutely right and correct is to take the strain and wait for the checks and balances to break down somewhere. [..]

From Page 2 The Art of Grief by Jonathan Walker. More here.

Joanne and Geoff - Spreading some of Jenny's Ashes on the River near the Charles Bridge just down from the Kafka Museum - Prague - Mon 01 Sep 2009 (picasa)

Favourite Photos: Wilson Street Newtown 2003 - Milk Crate Swingers

Wilson Street Swingers (Cropped) - Wilson Street/Newtown - Sat 01 Feb 2003 (picasa)
I had noticed this piece of graffiti for a while and quite liked it - always amazed how a few brushes and rolls of paint can be produce something so evocative (am I allowed to us this word for graffiti). Had my camera one Saturday morning (was well before my paddling days) and took a few photos of this wall and the surrounding area.

A few months later the wall was painted clean and I was reminded of the photo I had taken there. Prompted me to take another look at the photo (titled it 'Gone') which I straightened a little and cropped (see below - I felt the crop removed the distraction of the Garbage Bins, though when I look at it now I think I prefer the raw uncropped version - this often happens with photos with time) and put it up on my fledgling photo.net portfolio here.

Occasionally, I would receive a comment on my uploaded photos and it would take a few months to receive a comment for this particular photo. I was pleased to receive the following comment from Jonathan Walker:

'Oh, I do like this, largely because of the addition of the milk crates, which provide a quirky splash of colour and sense of depth to what would otherwise be a straight record shot. And in Newtown too (home of the quirky)!' jonathan w., December 08, 2003; 02:49 A.M.

Wilson Street Swingers (Full Image) - Wilson Street/Newtown - Sat 01 Feb 2003 (picasa)
The best thing about the Internet is that it connects you with people with similar interests (photography in this case) and you have the opportunity to learn new things very quickly. When I noticed Jonathan (he was a recently arrived English Academic working at the Uni of Sydney), I signed up so that I could see when he made contributions to photo.net. He had some great photos of Venice (not your usual ones, but they definitely appealed to my own way of seeing things) and other places. Most have now been deleted along with the great discussions they generated. I learnt much from his photos and words. There are some fragements of his writings remaining at photo.net.

When we decided that we would visit Venice for 4 days in September 2009 after our Prague Campaign, I decided to track down Jonathan, since he was a Historian with a great knowledge of Venice. Was pleased to find that he had his own blog - jonathanwalkersblog.com. and had republished many of his photos [I am a Pilgrim (more here), Venice, Let Us Burn The Gondalas - this work definitely helped me form my own photographic vision when in Venice in Sep 2009 - see here and here ] and thoughts on photography there. As well he had published a book - Pistols! Treason! Murder! - and is now just about to publish his first novel - Five Wounds.

In part, the purpose of this post and my photo above is to introduce Jonathan. I hope to write a little more about him, particularly when his first Novel Five Wounds is published in May 2010.