Beauty: A collaboration with poet Brandi MacDonald

I recently showed these photographs alongside a poem by Brandi MacDonald. The photographs were created as a response to her poem, and together the project represents the long discussions the two of us have had about ideas of beauty. The photos are mounted on foam core and project at different heights out from a fur-covered canvas. Below is a photograph of the finished piece, detail shots of each image, and Brandi's poem. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the subject...

Poetry by Brandi MacDonald

I am 33 years of not beautiful--

I should be used to it, but

I'm not--
My mother never wore heels, so I wore my dad's boots and my Wonder Woman Underoos,

jumped off the couch in flights of fantasy,

no stopping me from believing I could fly,

if only I wanted it badly enough--

I had a huffy bike, blue, not pink, with

white tires, and I didn't cry when I slipped

at the bottom of that sandy  hill

in front of the people sitting on their porch, because

it's ok to cry--

but only in front of people who already know how strong you are--

I walked for 2 blocks with bloody knees

and ripped jeans, wheeling that bike

in front of me, pretending

it didn't hurt--

Scars on both knees, and legs that were

bruised so often

the doctor asked if my parents hit me, but

how do you explain that sometimes

it's the freedom of not worrying about Beautiful--

that what he was seeing was actually

a girl healing from the inside out, not

bruising from the outside in,

that would happen later--

He should have asked who hit me when I turned 14,

but by then the bruises were invisible.

Puberty hit me, I hit me, you hit me, once--

but I let you--

I was only a few years of Not Beautiful then,

but you held me there--

pinned by my wings like a butterfly

in a boy's bedroom--

I had 2 years of Almost Beautiful

when I turned 18--

I wore rhinestone costumes and they

called me a showgirl, but

Burlesque was already dead,

I was a stripper, plain and simple.

I let men who didn't want to go home

teach me Beauty like a foreign language

with poor enunciation, stressing

the wrong syllables

but I committed every phrase I learned

to memory and murmured them like a prayer--

this is Beautiful, you are Beautiful, I am Beautiful.

Beauty smells like beer and sweaty high heels,

like baby wipes and red door perfume

It's what happens when the pink spotlight

touches your skin, it's letting dollar bills

prove that you are worth something, it's

becoming an ideal that almost didn't exist--

at least that's what I thought it was.

I speak a different language, it

comes from the soul--

If you close your eyes and run your hands over me

like braille, I tell a story

From the scarred knees sticking out

over my dad's old boots to the face

that you might not recognize unless you were

already looking for it.

My eyes perceive beauty, I just don't believe

it exists in a language I speak

I am 33 years of Not Beautiful,

I should be used to it, but

i'm not--

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

I was recently given a beautiful book of photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and I have been drooling over it ever since. The tonal ranges of his images are insane, especially knowing he was mostly photographing under an intense Mexican sun--not easy.



From John Banville's essay in Manuel Alvarez Bravo,

"The realization that the seeming reality which the camera shows us is an impossibility, since, in the blinking of the camera's shutter, time is stopped. The world in pictures is a world of being, while in the real world, where time is the unacknowledged legislator, everything is a ceaseless process of becoming."

"[Bravo] hated excess, the picturesque, the commonplace, cliches of beauty, affectation. As all real artists do, he managed to draw out of the stolid surface of things something of their true and ineffable essence, and in doing so he at once confounded the philosophers and became a kind of philosopher himself."

Showing photos at the Uptown Lowell Music and Art Festival

UPTOWN LOWELL MUSIC AND ART FESTIVAL
Saturday, July 25, 6pm, Lowell, MA
21+

I'll be showing some of my photos at this new festival, which takes place right after Lowell's Folk Festival. Come down to hang out and listen to some rockin Lowell musicians, watch live painting, and see some of my new creations.

Music and art by Roll the Tanks, Los Wunder Twins del Rap, Melvern Taylor, Jen Kearney and the Lost Onion, Haley Norris, Mike Dailey, Writous the Radiant Child, and others. See the flyer below.

Darkroom prints!

I finally got around to some spring cleaning and posted a bunch of sale items in the shop. There are 4x6", 8x10", 11x14", and 16x20" darkroom prints on sale, all ranging from $10 to $75.

Take a peek here: the Lunar Tide photography shop.

Photos from the TRIPLE FEATURE 3 event

The show, titled 1000 Miles, was about traveling. Not so much the mechanics of it, but the inward thought and self-discovery found on a long, lonely journey in a foreign place. The show featured photographs by Sarah Coughtry and me, along with a poetry reading by Brandi MacDonald.

The photos I exhibited were from 2003-2004, when I lived in Spain for close to a year. Below are a few of the images from the show, along with the accompanying essay.













My decision to live in Spain for a year was made quite casually, planned for some distant time in the future, an exciting idea but with no meaning to me in reality at the time. I felt bored and stifled by my life, and I needed to take a detour of some sort. I don’t remember where the idea came from--maybe it was an advertisement I saw or a book I was reading. Either way, I became obsessed with the idea of going to Spain and began planning the escape. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

About two months before I was scheduled to leave, a close friend committed suicide. I spent the following two months in a haze, fumbling around blind to everything around me. I didn’t come to until I was thousands of feet above the ground, looking down at a foreign landscape, and thinking to myself with horror, “What the hell was I thinking?” I was a total mess and, by that point, had forgotten all of the reasons I had originally wanted to leave. I felt more alone than ever before.

It was the end of August when I arrived in Granada, and the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. I wandered the streets, walking in the shadows of awnings and palm trees, inspecting every detail of the city. Granada was quiet—many families were away on vacation, and the students hadn’t yet returned to the city. The lazy, hot air was calming, and I began to notice that life had become interesting. The everyday objects I saw were different than what I was used to—manhole covers, tiled sidewalks, narrow medieval roads that barely fit one car, textures and colors, building materials, even hairstyles; I felt like a child, everything took on a new importance, as I pondered form and function with new eyes.

When many foreigners think of Spain, they imagine bullfights, sangria, beaches, and siestas, but what I see is the energy and life of its people—an energy that I have never been able to find or recreate here in the United States. Its energy came from a polarity, a balance, of life. Lazy, quiet afternoons, and long raucous nights; laid-back attitudes but a raging passion toward social injustice. A culture that, as a whole, places family, friends, and leisure above all else; yet a place where the people take to the streets, united, to protest adversity, instead of cowering inside their homes in fear.

After ten months living and traveling in Spain, I had only hazy memories of my previous life in the States. The me in that past life was someone completely different than who I had become, and the looming date of return made me feel uneasy and restless. A part of me was ravenous for stability--a home, with my own bed and a place for all my stuff, and where I could communicate with people quickly and effortlessly, throwing out words and ideas with sarcasm, subtlety, and slang. But I liked being an alien, it suited me. Every day was filled with new knowledge, every person infinitely more complex and interesting when I couldn‘t understand them. Each word and phrase was an adventure, filled with new symbolism, meaning, and history to learn, and free from clichés and small talk, which, in Spanish were still fresh and new to me.

The homecoming was not quite what I imagined it would be. I now know that they never are. Now back in the States, I was an alien again, but this time in a place where I should have felt at home. Everyone was the same as when I left, and they all expected something from me. I’m not sure what it was, but it definitely wasn’t what they got. Eyes glazed over when I told stories of people I had met, brows furrowed at references to the politics and pop culture of a foreign country, and conversations ended in confusion and silence. My mouth refused to make the transition back to English, and at times I found myself forgetting how to speak coherently.

Within the first week of returning home, I had gone through all of my old things and thrown half of them away. I was overwhelmed by all of the clutter. Not surprising, since I had lived out of a suitcase for close to a year. One of my friends told me that was a normal reaction after returning from such a long journey. I just thought it was wasteful.

All the experiences throughout the previous year were intense, emotional, and eye-opening. I had a gnawing fear that time would take them away from me, dulling the memories and leaving me to slowly forget. It had been an uncomfortable life traveling, living day to day with uncertainty and instability, but it brought with it a raw energy and feeling of purpose that I had never felt before, and I work every day to keep this energy with me.

--

Click here for the slideshow of the Triple Feature event. (Photos taken by Tim Cheney)

Photo "Plant Food (When I'm Dead)" used on fashion design website

One of my photos was recently used in designing the new website for StyleFirm, an event and fashion production boutique located in Beverly Hills: http://www.style-firm.com/site/services.html.

New Items in the shop!

A couple of 8x12" images are now available at LunarTide.etsy.com, as well as a 4x6" darkroom print of "Plant Food (When I'm Dead)."

I have begun my spring cleaning, so a bunch of sale items will be going into the shop very, very soon. All will be silver gelatin darkroom prints, most will be 16x20", and all will be cheap!