Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

[/caption] A giant camera stands on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. Its blue and yellow exterior echoes the city’s fairground nostalgia. V expects it to be shut, but finds a woman wrapped in a blanket behind the box-office entrance. Reciting its history, she takes V through black double doors into the camera’s belly. V walks into darkness, eyes adjusting to the change in light whilst the woman describes the apparatus’ mechanisms. The lens in the centre of its conical roof focuses the image outdoors onto the mirror, projecting it upon the concave circular dish in the room’s middle. By the time the rehearsed explanation is complete, her eyes have adjusted. The eggshell-lacquered projection bowl now holds the most exquisite image. Tiny crystalline waves break silently over jagged cliffs, water droplets spray in minute detail. Its circumference would fit a curled-up body almost exactly. She could sleep here, waves crashing upon skin, dancing across eyelids, covering her with their continual circular motion. She will come back here one day and he will stand behind her. Together they will inhale the image in silence, breath suspended, waiting for that moment when the late afternoon sun hits mute waves, flooding everything inside her in an overexposed glow of too much light. V takes him to her room above the cliffs and the sea, surrounded by a thick jungle garden. The evening light enters in horizontal rays, bamboo clangs softly. When the wind stops, her curtained boat-bed is entirely silent. He sleeps arms outstretched as though crucified, wrists up-turned, chest exposed. V watches him, tracing his veins with her eyes, until they disappear beneath flesh. She thinks of the bodies and skins that have been as familiar as his is becoming, the strangeness of intimacy. Her gaze falls upon the fractal scar that spreads across his chest. It begins at the base of his throat, in that soft indentation between two arteries. It glistens a coral pink, like the inside of the seashell she holds to her ear, listening to the ocean inside to fall asleep. From this tender point it spreads out and down like the finest of seaweed, fossilized upon him in one violent moment. She touches his lightning scar, reading this strange map etched upon him. V keeps a thicker kind of seaweed in her bathtub, the brackish salty smell reaching her boat-bed when a breeze moves across the room. She keeps these washed up branches of slippery leather, so as to bathe within their drowned mermaids’ embrace. Filling the bath with warm water, V lowers herself into their tentacles as he sleeps oblivious, a few feet away. As is the sea beneath them, so is she: swelling, roaring. She tastes her saltiness in his mouth, the taste of the ocean, the sweet smell of swamps. Deep-sea diving, eyes open, swimming from luminous turquoise into dark blue towards almost black waters. Unafraid, she swims down, through ocean caves, under waterfalls, no longer needing to breathe. Past and with all the women who are a part of her. The soft downy hair of his armpit feels like the cradle next to her mother’s breast in which her head still fits exactly. She wraps herself around him the way she and her sisters used to sleep entwined, slowly realizing she is no longer homesick.