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workhardlyinprogress · 5 years ago

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handheld copenhagen

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK. 2018.

vimeo

We were keen to uphold a fledgling sibling tradition to beat the January blues with a weekend away together, even though Isobel and I couldn’t justify the ££.

We hosteled and walked, walked and subsisted on cheese, tomatoes and pastry. Walked some more. We felt like Peter Pan’s lost boys, let loose on the impossibly pretty, wintry city. It was perfect.

Song: If I Be Wrong - Wolf Larsen

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workhardlyinprogress · 5 years ago

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disposable algarve

TAVIRA, PORTUGAL. 2013.

Jerome.

disposable [ dih-spoh-zuh-buh l ]

designed for or capable of being thrown away after being used or used up

Grace.

Colette & Abigail.

Taking stock. Wasting. Frittering away. Time well spent ...

Now, right now, in this yawning, emotive historical moment, a lot of us have more time “on our hands” than ever.

We see it in monetary terms ... putting pressure on ourselves to “use it well”, “grow”, “be productive” as if time is a currency with a means to an end product, instead of just something that is, whether we are or not. Like the stars, like the wind. This is not a new feeling.

One endless afternoon in quarantine, I am using my time to produce more space on my laptop in order to feel like I am using it wisely, when I stumble across an old folder called disposable.

Assuming it is what it says on the tin, I take one quick look before moving it to trash. It turns out to be a forgotten phase in which I used only disposable cameras, thinking I was edgy and restrained and ahead of the curve. It was around the time Instagram was really taking off, with its first nostalgic filters.

Mum.

We crammed into my uncle’s blindingly white property in Tavira, a little medieval city in the Portuguese Algarve a few hours’ drive from Faro. We were all quite young. The uncarpeted tiles were smooth and smelled of alcohol from the insect-lethal cleaning products. On the upper floors, the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean was a gleam over the downslope of the terracotta-mottled hill.

We spent most evenings in the city’s tiny centre, a long concrete lick of harbour astride the mouth of the Gilão River, bustling with seafood restaurants next to a sleepy tourist-centric market. The thick summer heat zipped around in the night air like electricity, and we exalted in ourselves, large table of beloved in languid evenings stretching out forever. The mosquitoes loved us, too, the waiters not so much; a sprawl of little cousins with the red-raw eyes of British kids after too much sun and sea, overexcited and overtired.

We ordered king prawns that came dangling on upright rusted skewer-towers, tart with lemon and their own salt-molten flesh.

We ordered wild boar hot pot (it was 2013 ... ) and Mum, a vegetarian over half her life, couldn’t resist trying it. She was sick for 3 days.

Clementine.

There were a lot of us. We waited. A lot. And the town relaxed into the crawling pace - or rather, we relaxed into its own, our perception of place slowing and changing like a bend in a river.

Time became the weather, it receded. Ever-present but gentle, inevitable but acceptable in all its forms.

On the local beaches, situated on sandbank islands accessible only by ferry or, adorably, an old steam train along a thin, raised bar (rolling, romantic names - Praia do Barril, Ihla de Tavira), men strolled the white sand with huge wicker baskets of fresh-baked doughnuts.

“Bolinhas! Bolinhas!”

Little balls. Com creme. Sem creme. They are each the size of a baby’s head, the best ones stuffed to the brim with fresh custard. Always, still hot from the oven, the sugar granulated but half-crystallised. Wiping chubby cheeks and small hands from stickiness in the sea.

Isobel.

I remember the tacky blue plastic camera glued to my hand over the course of the holiday. And the tentativeness that came with pressing the shutter. Looking, really looking, at everything around before putting the tiny, distorted viewfinder between me and the world. 27 photos, that’s all.

No throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Looking at these photos now, the blanket settings, the subsequent shoddy scan, they have the charm of real memory - or, the act of remembering. Blurred, blemished. The darks too dark, the lights too light, as if already aged. Timeless is an apt word.

Abigail.

Thinking about it in retrospect, this was an exercise that really taught me to wait. It taught me not to reach for my camera every time I saw something remotely interesting, but to look with my eyes instead and experience it in the moment.

And the subsequent wonder, when successful, of capturing something unexpected. Something that barely existed in the world, caught forever in the single frame that it actually was, as it was, in time. All the more precious for having been chosen as a moment in the first place.

Maybe I forgot about this phase because it’s not, strictly speaking, educated photography. Not high brow enough for my pretentious/precocious teenage artiste ambitions. Our expectations of ourselves are often the thing that stultifies us most, they curb our ability to notice or appreciate any single good thing.

We’re living through a time when being able to notice or appreciate any single good thing is more important than ever. Like loving your loved, like a touch, like slowing down.

I’d do as well to remind myself as anyone, as I hurry my laptop archive to the trash and dispose of my free time, that instead of trying to take and make a million things from this moment, it might be worth trying to take one really decent thing.

Like precious memories of a better time.

Like surviving.

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workhardlyinprogress · 11 years ago

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