Cape Cod
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
Lake Mead, Nevada
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell
Twenty Nine Palms, California
photo: Twenty Nine Palms, California, 2010. ©Graeme Mitchell
Speaking of Twenty Nine Palms. A really great great great photograph by An-My Lê was taken at the marine base there. It’s in the MOMA collection.
photo: 29 Palms: Mortar Impact ©2010 An-My Lê
Happy Valley, Oregon
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.-from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
photo: Happy Valley, OR. 2010. ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: Happy Valley, OR. 2010. ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: Happy Valley, OR. 2010. ©Graeme Mitchell
photo: Happy Valley, OR. 2010. ©Graeme Mitchell
Portrait: Emily VanCamp
The actress, Emily VanCamp.
photo: Emily VanCamp, St. Barts, Feb 09. © Graeme Mitchell.
St. Barts, London, Home, Vorticism, Away, Love, Great Books
Got to shoot in St. Barts for 5 day, a friend’s wedding. Amazing time.
Also read Beckett and chain smoked on the beach. No, not Camus, but still…
yay
Then to London for some of their fashion week parties, meetings with mags. Tried to spend time on the street shooting, but the streets of that city: stoic (read, snore), so I began to wonder if there ever was a seminal London street photographer? Other than the bit of work Robert Frank did (in Wales?), but I couldn’t think of anyone…? Anyone?
photo: from the book Robert Frank: London/Wales, © Robert Frank.
Then home, I hit Penn station out of Newark on Monday eve rush hour and the train station was like firecrackers going off everyplace, felt remarkable to be back in the crazy. Never satiated with that, never ever. Gluttonous for the madness.
IN THE STATION METRO
By Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(That’s a well known imagest poem that was part of a one of the more short lived art movements dubbed, Vorticism, which also had it proponents in photography. The photography bit. though ambitious in theory, was to not such great effect I think. The best part was what it was called, Vortography, which would not be, I imagine, an easy moniker to live up to…yeah, in retrospect, the name may have been the origin of the movements failing.
photo: Vortograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn
).
Update, I just confirmed a job on the W. Coast for next week, fly out today, so I’ll be gone again for a week…maybe two. The blog goes neglected again. Golly.
I guess in the meantime, cruise to the newsstands and take a look at Katie Grand’s (formerly the force behind POP) new mag, LOVE. Maybe not amazing yet, but most certainly promising.
photo: cover of first issue of LOVE magazine, Beth Ditto, photo by Mert and Marcus.
That or – going back to Beckett – read his trilogy if you haven’t. I’d tried twice and never made it much further than Molloy, but I guess I’ve come to a place where I can read it and be absorbed by it, absorbed. Someone said once, I forget who, that you really can’t read/enjoy/understand the greats until you yourself have lived for awhile, lived the things that the books are about. Not that I’m old and wise, gawdnoiamnot, but suddenly the long long winded Russians seem exciting and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the close of Ulysses seems, uhhh, doable. I do hope by my 40s I’ll be able to get to Finnegan’s Wake, and even develop the patience for poetry.
[...]you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have caried me to the threshold of my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
-from The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
That takes me to a different world. Yes it does.
Umatilla, OR.
If you drive fast straight east from Portland for approximately 3 hours you’ll pass within about 9 miles of this place. It’s the kind of place that conjures absolutely nothing in the imagination. It’s a desert of sorts.
“Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucination of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death. -DE SELBY”
Epigraph from The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.
photo: Umatilla, OR. © Graeme Mitchell 2008
photo: A Road to a Prison, Umatilla, OR. © Graeme Mitchell 2008
Bolivia Photographs
These many photographs are from a trip I took recently to the Alto Plano of Bolivia to visit my sister, Erin, who lives there.
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008
Where I grew up
Over the years I watched as street lights were added.
Funny how easily we adjust. I can’t remember what this town was like growing up, or what memory there is is like a dream I remember having but can’t remember what it was about.
All of a sudden I have the notion that much of what we take for granted is vague.
photo: Canby, Oregon, Dec 2007. © Graeme Mitchell 2007.
Covet, Spring ’08
Some snaps Covet’s creative director, Tara took whilst we shot her spring ’08 line. It was hard not to feel a sadness there at Coney Island; neglect was apparent, and you could see that it’s long life was coming to an end. There was also a mood of bitterness, nostalgia and heartbreak amongst the proprietors, people who’ve lived and worked there their entire lives, and who were now watching the boardwalk fall into disrepair.
On another note: Tara did a great job on this season, some great pieces to photograph!
Location: Coney Island, NY.
Hair: Sarah Potempa w/ Wall Group.
Make-Up: Kehla.
Assistant: Aaron Modico.
And a big big thanks to J.T. at Cha Cha’s on the boardwalk for staging the shoot.
Las Vegas, NV.
You try so hard to displace the place in order to understand it or to make it more an obtuse phenomenon than the ugly actuality it is, that it is so perfectly; you do this in an attempt to justify or excuse it philosophically. But it takes heavy amounts of drink, drugs, regression just to make it bearable let alone excusable, seeing through eyes that won’t focus b/c in this place they don’t need to focus – focus is actually discouraged. It’s the premise of a child’s ball pit in the back of drab and tired fast food restaurant in the middle of the desert; it’s this premise expanded infinitely: padded surfaces, rounded corners, a cattle pen. Just when you attempt approach at clarity, some sort of recognition or disconnection, it dissipates, the clarity that is. It’s like running in a dream: the harder you try the heavier you become in a foggy futility. And there’s not even any redeeming giddiness or hopeful moments of expression, at all.
It is void.
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.
photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.