Art - The Story of Telling (Fri 18 Aug 2017)

Abstract - Glebe (Sun 30 Jul 2017)

The Story of Telling on Art:

Art allows us to be remembered for our humanity and make meaning part of our [life].

via The Art Of Customer Loyalty by The Story of Telling.

Teaching - Sigourney Weaver / Spectrum (Sat 15 Jul 2017)

Bike - Alexandria (Thu 06 Jul 2017)

Sigourney Weaver on Teaching:

Teaching art is a tough thing to do. It's a great thing to do and an important thing to do. But not everyone can do it with grace and generosity.

via Sigourney Weaver, kick-ass queen, swaps Ripley for granny, but don't expect nice by Sigourney Weaver.

Engineering - Alan Finkel (Wed 21 Jun 2017)

Untitled - Chippen Lane / Chippendale (Fri 02 Jun 2017)

Alan Finkel on Engineering:

engineering is the art of optimisation, it's not the pursuit of perfection, certainly not at the other extreme - the acceptance of compromise

via 'National Electricity Market reform – a blueprint for the future' National Press Club Address (Wed 21 Jun 2017) by Alan Finkel.

Belief - Abigail Forsyth / Simon Leo Brown (Mon 22 May 2017)

Make Art - Crossley St / Melbourne (Wed 03 May 2017)

Abigail Forsyth on Belief:

if people believe in you, they will help you if they can

via 'Stupidest idea ever': KeepCup founder Abigail Forsyth on how the reusable cup nearly didn't happen by Simon Leo Brown.

Words - The Story of Telling (Mon 12 Sep 2016)

words - I Won't Make Art - Chippendale (Mon 12 Sep 2016)

The Story of Telling on Words:

Our words communicate much more than the messages we want people to hear. How we use them shapes our thoughts and character—it shows people what we value and conveys the truth about who we are. Our every word has the power to provoke or reassure, draw people in or push them away. We get to choose how well and how wisely we use them.

via The Weight Of Our Words by The Story of Telling.

The Picture - Bruce Davidson / Jame Maher (Tue 02 Aug 2016)

Barry Humphries - Archibald Prize / Art Gallery of NSW (Fri 22 Jul 2016)

Bruce Davidson on The Picture:

I am in the picture, believe me. I am in the picture but I am not the picture.

via The History and Photography of Bruce Davidson, Subway Photographer Extraordinaire by James Maher.

Portraits - You can't ask more of any portrait - Reciprocity Failure (Mon 09 Jul 2013)

portrait - Deng Adut - Archibald Prize / Art Gallery of NSW (Fri 22 Jul 2016)

Reciprocity Failure on Portraits:

[portraits] gives us reason to pause, focus and reflect at the wonder and challenges of their lives... as well as our own. You can't ask more of any portrait. [previously here]

via Russell Frederick by Reciprocity Failure.

Entered this photo in the Art and About 2016, Australian Life Competition. A great quote about portraits and it is what inspired me to enter a portrait this year.

Discipline - Fawzan Husain / Anahita Panicker (Thu 14 Jul 2016)

waterfall - black and white - Wentworth Falls / Blue Mountains (Tue 12 Jul 2016(

Fawzan Husain on Discipline:

I want to bring in the discipline of the art and essentially want them to include the five Ws (what, why, where, when, who) in their pictures. So many narratives are often overlooked in this frenzy of shooting unnecessary, mundane things. And many times we don’t concentrate on the things we should actually be looking at.

via Street-savvy photography by Anahita Panicker.

"in the end" - William Robinson (Sat 18 Jun 2016)

flower / bloom - Vivid - Chippendale (Sat 28 May 2016)

William Robinson on in the end:

I just keep painting. In the end, my paintings are a trail of a life that's left behind – whether it's satisfactory or not.

via Natural Selectuon - William Robinson's paintings bamboozled art elite, and are now worth a fortune by Candida Baker.

A Story About a Camera - 2015 Inspire Award Reflections (Fri 27 Aug 2015)

Memories of Jenny - The Time of Your Life (youtube)

This is my 2000th post here at eljeiffel.

I always try to write something for the Annual Presentation of the Inspire Award. Most times it is just for me, but sometimes I share it with a few people. So here it is, unedited from the time it was written on the evening of Fri 27 Aug 2015. I think it is a pretty good way to mark the milestone.

As many will know, I have another obsession in my life - Photography.

I started out buying a small digital camera for our Dec 2000 trip to the Cook Islands to visit Jenny and Jo's Meditation teacher, Barbara, who had moved there to help setup a refuge for women . We didn’t know a thing about paddling back then.

I had bought the camera hoping I would be able to capture our memories. It was a tiny digital camera by today’s standards, 1 Mega Pixel and it cost $1600 duty free and a 64 MB compact flash memory cost more than $300.

I did not flinch and I thought it was all worth it, as my credit card was swiped at Ted’s Camera Store the day before we flew out. 15 years later I can tell you here that it was one of the best things I ever did.

My motivation for the camera came from that fact that Jenny had 11 tumours in her lungs and I did not really know how long we would have together. In the end we had just over 9 years of married life. Given Jenny’s condition, a miracle really ..

We were married on 30th April of that Sydney Olympic year and we honeymooned on Lord Howe Island for 10 glorious days in May 2000. Jenny had a film camera and she took many photos.

On our return flight to Sydney, I remember a conversation we had at the Departure Terminal with an older couple from Whyalla who congratulated us on our marriage. We had briefly met them at dinner at one of the small restaurants on the Island.

They told us they had been married for many years and the trip to Lord Howe Island was a way of creating another experience in life and expanding their memories. Better than [running a busy business or] sitting at home and watching the Telly, they said.

This conversation and piece of simple worldly wisdom has stuck with me and I remind myself of it constantly. It was my main motivation to buy that small expensive digital camera for our December 2000 trip to the Cook Islands.

I took many photos that trip to Cook Islands, even of the Outrigger Canoes in the lagoon at Aitutaka, we had no idea what they were – who would guess our future.

Shortly after our return, Jenny and Jo found Dragon Boating. And over the ensuing years many experiences and memories were created, dutifully captured by our cameras.

I documented the many dragon boat campaigns here and abroad, and ensuing holidays that followed each event.

In the process of this documenting I came to realise the power of photography, not only its visual power, but its ability to record our experiences and remind us of things we have done and who we were. We were doing selfies before the term was even invented. We called them “Holdouts” and I think this might be the main cause of Jo’s shoulder injury.

In those last few weeks at St George Hospital in Jun 2009, I captured the last moments of our lives together. They are the best I ever made.

After Jenny’s passing, It took me a while to pick up a camera again. I had lost my purpose and will. I was hurting and numb all at once but paddled through for a year or two – it helped a lot to be busy and in the company of friends. New experiences were created and I even smiled [for] a little [while].

Lost in the enormity of what had happened so quickly, though it was not a surprise, I found my first moments of comfort and hope, when I decided to start looking at some of the photos from our lives together. It made me cry, but it also made me smile. I was so happy that I had this archive of bits and bytes to remind me of Jenny, Joanne, myself and who we were.

It was only after Jo told me to organise my photos and my Mum said I should start making photos again, that I started to move forward. I was completely broken but I took up their advice and kept myself busy again, organising and photographing again. I am still broken but I live with it better now, it is part of me and who I will always be, but I am happy, optimistic, naïve and creating more experiences.

So I guess what I am trying to say is that we have to go out there and make our memories through the experiences we create for ourselves. And this is what I love about PD’s, we are always out there doing something. This time last year we were in Bologna on our way to Ravena, this year we are heading to Hawaii in the next week and month, next year Adelaide and who knows where after that.

Finally, in our lives we have loss, grief and bereavement. It is a part of living. You make a choice when it knocks on your door. And we have chosen to live in the Afterglow of our loss of Jenny – to remember and honour and be guided and inspired. Accept it and live with it and make the most of it, even let it inspire and motivate you. And that is what Jo and I have done, I would like to think.

“Believe in Hope” as the graffiti’ed wall in Cleveland Street said for a few weeks in July 2015.

Believe in Hope - Cleveland Street / Chippendale (Wed 29 Jul 2015)

With this post it is time to let go of a lot things, including the photos of another time and life. I have shed my life here (and Facebook more recently) like a snake sheds it skin and there is nothing left but to start over again. Time to move on, but it is hard to let go .. but I will.

Trying to make a new start here (arotlt.com) with photos from this point onwards. There will be the occasional post at eljeiffel to mark the odd moment in our lives that are relevant, but for now thanks for coming along for the ride these last, almost, 7 years.

symbolically the black rose suggests death, or the completion of a long journey (Trent Parke’s moving Black Rose photo exhibition at Art Gallery of SA ) - Black Rose / Fitzroy Street / Newtown (Sun 29 Nov 2015)

On Photography and the Ordinary - Adam Marelli (Wed 09 Dec 2015)

Untitled - Fushimi Inari-taisha - Kyoto (Fri 14 Sep 2012)

Adam Marelli on Photography and the Ordinary:

The more ordinary the better.

via What did Japanese art do to photography: Part 2 by Adam Marelli.

Another common term photographers use to describe the ordinary is banal, being the hallmark of my own photography. In Japan in Sep 2012 I was at my banal best.

On Street Photography - Ella Rubeli (Fri 20 Nov 2015)

untitled - Hyde Park / Australian Life formerly Sydney Life (Fri 18 Sep 2015)

Ella Rubeli on Street Photography:

the act of street photography relies on the presence of forces that are beyond human control: light, chance, time.

via Two cutting edge photography shows at Monash Gallery of Art by Ella Rubeli.

On Photography - Past, Present and Future - Joel Meyerowitz (Tue 27 Oct 2015)

School Holidays - Camera in Hand - Canberra (late 1960's)

Joel Meyerowitz on Photography and the Past, Present and Future :

We can never imagine the work we might make in the future – that’s part of the wonder of all art making – but when we are in the present and can look back, as I can, over 50 years of work, there seems to be a continuous path that unwinds in a way that sometimes seems inevitable.

via A Full House by Joel Meyerowitz.

On Art and Limitation - Mark Cohen / Samantha Melamed (Thu 28 Oct 2015)

Untitled - Molokai (Sun 11 Oct 2015)

Mark Cohen on Art and Limitation:

Limitation develops a very high aesthetic in your art.

via Mark Cohen brings his aggressive brand of street photography to Philly by Samantha Melamed .

On Photography - Saul Leiter / Sam Stourdze

Shadow - Chippendale (Tue 06 Oct 2015)

Saul Leiter on Photography:

I go out to take a walk. I see something. I take a picture. I take photographs.

via Saul Leiter or the art of going unnoticed by Sam Stourdze.

On Art - Streetshooter (Mon 21 Sep 2015)

Red, Yellow and Blue - Chippendale (Tue 22 Sep 2015)

Streetshooter on Art:

The beauty of art is, we are all in the same boat in the same place and yet those true to heart see things differently and attempt to make their art more of themselves then of and for anyone else.

via Streets of Philadelphia … A Visual Diary … Page 20 … Street …Finding Your Way by Streetshooter.

Street Art - Chippen Lane #4 / Chippendale (Fri 28 Aug 2015)

Street Art - Chippen Lane #4 / Chippendale (Fri 28 Aug 2015)

Ever changing. The latest.

On Architecture - Doug Anderson / The Guide (Mon 07 Sep 2015)

Dr Chau Wing Building - UTS / Ultimo (Wed 02 Sep 2015)

Doug Anderson on Architecture:

architecture is public art which, eyesore or triumph of taste and beauty, affects the lives of all. Unlike a painting in a gallery, the public doesn't get to choose whether or not to look at it.

via Show of the Week: Getting Frank Gehr by Doug Anderson.

An Insight to Insight - Sarah Perry / ribbonfarm (Thu 03 Sep 2015)

Street Art - Macdonaldtown (Mon 24 Aug 2015)

Sarah Perry on Insight:

A special type of intelligence is the organization of complexity into a simpler, less resource-intensive form. The experience of such a compression is what is called “insight,”

via Cartographic Compression by Sarah Perry at ribbonfarm.

On a Moment - Just Being There - Joel Meyerowitz (Tue 25 Aug 2015)

Street Art - Chippen Lane #2 / Chippendale (Wed 01 Jul 2015)

Joel Meyerowitz writes beautifully on a Moment:

These simple moments are precious, no attitude, no becoming something she is not. She's just there, rooted to the earth, part of the spirit of the place.

via Contadina by Joel Meyerowitz.