This post has taken a while to arrive. Our journey is not clear. The world is unpredictable, a wide pallet on which to leave a trail. Two years ago I was in Paris leading a group of young artists around the established galleries. One day we broke the orthodoxy of that path and jumped the Périphérique and headed to a gallery of modern art, a place not so much out of the box, but one that didn't care so much what the box was. The work was so present, so alive - inspiring stuff. It said: be brave in what you do. Fuck it. Make a statement.
It had been an incredible year that led to Paris that autumn. The early part brought a few photography jobs that had requested that I do just that - be brave. The clients wanted something different, something bold to match their experience. You have to go out on a limb, right, because that's where the fruit is. India is all they say it is - all of it, everyone. They're all right even if two opinions stand beside one another in complete contradiction. Someone said (I can't recall who) that India was the place where you can sit on the kerb and watch the street for an afternoon then go away and think about it for the rest of your life. They are right.
This blog, this website, could devote itself to India for years to come. It's tempting, there is so much to mine; but the urge must be tempered. I'll post some, but curation is a puzzle I haven't even considered yet. But back then the work was starting to flow in this new place of extremes. It didn't know what the box was, and that day in Paris I was certainly outside the walls.
My dad had been sick and was still tired. He was through the storm of cancer and its treatment. The scans saw nothing. It had been two years. We had all spent the most memorable summer as a family. Probably the most tribal, the most relaxed and together since we kids had grown and flown. The sense of growth in our lives was palpable. We basked in the unusually persistent good weather.
This was Enid Blyton, Miss Marple and Inspector morse. Small towns built on books, summer dips in the river, fishing, visits to castles, Scottish lochs, farms and fields. It had the lot. Dad was tired, something wrong with his heart they said, he would get to the bottom of it. It had been a rough spring, but the autumn was going to bring relief and solutions. Back to work for me, and back to the doctor for him.
Work was busy, and then work was Paris. Dad had a solution to his heart problem ( they got the meds right) and now he would feel well again. How could this year get better?
We left the MacVal and returned to the Paris of everyone's dreams. The day was falling. A Gary Winogrand poster looked down. We went inside. Those photographs: lives upon lives, mostly extinguished now, but they live on in these photographs, unsuspecting immortality. The technique, the composition, the light: it was a mind blowing series of images, of past lives - it made me think of my parents as teenagers, when they met. The hair, Elvis, the cars, the Beatles. Unbeknown to me, across the Channel, those memories came flooding back to my parents as well. We emerged as a group, appreciative, high, focused, looking at the street in a fresh way. The Tuileries beckoned winter, the sun cast shadows across the Place de la Concorde. We got a waffle. And then the little cheap mobile phone rang in my pocket as we entered the Metro, and as I shepherded the students into the labyrinth, I took the call.
It was my sister.
That day was my mother's birthday. I imagined that my sister was connecting my mother and me because I was unable to use the phone for personal calls and at that time my mother needed assistance in those things. I had sent an email but she couldn't read email either. But this was not a birthday thing; they had taken my dad back to hospital for a check and decided to x-ray his chest. I'm not sure why. Standard procedure? To this day I can hear my sister's voice. I ran to the surface and the world distorted like a push-pull zoom. What? Dad was full of the cancer the scan has just claimed was not there. How?
It was October. He left three weeks later.
The photo above was taken on the way to the pub for our last pint together during that summer. I knew that we would not get this time again for a year because I live on the other side of the world, and I knew he was still not well; remember feeling that I needed that time to speed up, that if we got to next summer, things would be ok.
That time did not speed up for us. It did for him, all the time in the world rushed at him and sped past and within three months of our drink, three weeks of that phone call in Paris, he had none left. For us time still stretches beyond these words and their ability to describe it.
The last morning I saw him alive was cold and full of luminous dark. The sky was half real, almost like a Klimt, the golds, the darks shiny. And still as if the world was afraid to breathe. Nothing but the trickle of water, the flow of the river below, like sand through the timer.
And that was that. He left and we carried on. The marching armies of small things persist in their governance of our lives took over as I relinquished control. The work stopped. I stopped writing. We travelled to the home of the Dalai Lama and found solace in the mountains. Photography work trickled in. Some here, some there. I made two films for the betterment of the (utterly) poor and shackled.
I keep putting off this post because I'm supposed to be over it and this should be about the photos and the gigs, an improved attempt at journaling; all about the photography. Yet the camera is inseparable from the rest and I guess before I jump this hurdle I better be ready for the landing. He was a good man, the most selfless person I've met, honest and kind, and consistent, oh so consistent. No duplicity, no games. His example of openness and acceptance is brighter than ever in these times of global falsenesses. The world misses him. We all miss him.