Thank You Rowan

It was about ten years ago that I stood a couple of feet in front of Rowan Williams to make this picture. He was about to take his position as Archbishop. He talked back then about the growing 'cult of celebrity' which really resonated with me as a young photographer, and since has helped inform the way I shoot portraits. 

This week I was invited to photograph the unfolding events at Lambeth Palace as Justin Welby is announced as the new Archibishop. I was pipped to the post by someone who was (as I am led to understand) not concerned with upholding industry standard copyright terms (as I am) - for the sake of what? He would have no right to use his own images under those terms, even in his own portfolio. And I really hope he didn't accept an inappropriately low fee either. 

My years working at Magnum photos really taught me a respect for our photographic pioneers who fought hard to ensure the skill and rights of the photographer are protected, which is why we have the laws we do. Perhaps this person has different views, but what he did this week is why it is so difficult to make a living out of photography now. This, and a common misconseption that anyone can take a decent photograph if they have an expensive-enough camera is eroding photography as a profession. 

As I sit at my desk in Bristol this morning rather than run around in Lambeth with the new Archbishop, I am obviously evaluating what I do this for, and how. So here it is:

As a photographer, I believe each of us has precious dignity that a good photographer knows how to capture. This involves having insight, wisdom, respect, kindness - travelling the journey together and caring to look after each other for the long haul. Approaching people with my camera with integrity and respect carries all the way through to how I run my business. I do experience David and Goliath moments in negotiations quite often, but I choose to stand firm and honour both my business and the people I work with. 

I lost this job, but I keep my integrity, which is what I'll still be shooting with in decades to come even if the photography industry has gone to pot.

So, back to Rowan.

Thinking on themes of enduring and wise love of our fellow humans, this man has been a role model for me. I treasure Archbishop Rowan for the careful measure he brought to serious debate, and his ability to thoroughly mix compassion and intelligent reasoning in the tough job of steering fiercely strong heads towards workable positions that involve all of us. He has an immense grasp on the fact that life is never a quick fix, and as a leader—for me at least—models beautiful courage, insisting on a long 'road to Emmaus' journey while we ponder our spiritual lives, rather than the blinding 'road to Damascus' hit that would only satisfy a superficial, short-term desire for good headline solutions.

Every time I look at this picture today I feel really sad that a very great and wise man has resigned his position at the table, and I feel we—as a church, nation, or society—are losing a dignified voice worthy of brave, compassionate comment on social and global issues. Archbishop Rowan stood with integrity for social justice (he was once arrested for demonstrating against nuclear armament by singing Psalms, and remember his criticism of the Coalition "for which no one voted"?). I wish I had listened to him far more than I did.

But I know for certain that I'm glad he did speak the way he did, and I'm thankful to have this photograph. If it should be any Archbishop, I'm glad it is him.

Thank you Rowan.

{Today's Soundtrack: Yo-Yo Ma and crew - Here and Heaven}

A Place to Sit

Lent; lenticular - a changing picture depending on which way you view it.

I'd forgotten about lent until a friend asked me last night what I was giving up. I replied with a question: do you give something up, put it down for a while, or rather take something up which naturally displaces the less healthy thing?

Last year I took up quiet space, and was enriched at the end of 40 days because of it. I committed to getting up a little earlier and having a contemplative quiet time at the start of each day, and wrote down my insights from during those times. I learnt things, and discerned the way to navigate problems and dilemmas that were current. I was steadied and stilled, and my breathing regulated again. I was able to identify choices I was making out of fear, and gently gather myself to stop being fearful and make choices from a calmer, more rounded, love-filled perspective. The important things—often the things that don't shout for attention—had my attention again.

I can't figure out what to give up for lent. There is too much else to figure out in life, and too many possible viewpoints to choose. Taking up a place to sit will do for now.


{Today's Soundtrack: Cashier No.9 - Make You Feel Better}

Seasons, Clearly

Just look at it exactly as it is. What might you appreciate about this encounter if you can stop wanting the rain to be over? Shape, colour, form, texture that is quite expressive, life-filled, moving constantly. Suddenly, rain is not so miserable.

*

It's all about seasons. We have Hockney to thank for this reminder at the moment.

Sitting in a room at the RA with his large, tessellated film works of nature metamorphosing through the seasons, I gasped with a couple of hundred others as the same scenes were presented through jaw-dropping, theatrical changes: first, the autumn reds, fade to black; second, minimalist snow blanket, fade to black; third, spring green leaping off the screens, fade to black; and so on.

Moving through the galleries around repeat woodland scenes rendered in conflicting light through the seasons and times of day, I knew what he was saying. This time it leaps off and jumps on you, and that time it is totally flattened out and lifeless. Yes, I can feel both of those things in the same place.

Startling, large-scale canvas work pieced together on the biggest wall available and viewed from a distance moved me to tears - striking encouragement to keep going.

I have come to be enthralled by seasons and what they teach of patience through repeated cycles over years and years, and more years. Seasons take their time, and sometimes slow time. This is about the agony, serenity and exuberance of seasons passing, and how you can be moved and held in place all at once.

See it exactly the way it appears, and be held in place while it does the moving.

Seasons of yours. Ours.

Still moving. Still, but moving.

*
'hard times ain't gonna rule my mind'


{Today's Soundtrack: Gillian Welch - Hard Times}

Gifts : 2012

There will always be a horizon. A day set apart for making extravagant displays of love—St Valentine's—may appear to be a horizon in itself, but it's really only a vantage point from which to view the various glimmers and glistenings happening everywhere and everytime else and other. 

Looking out to horizons in the coming year, my slowly focusing lens keeps on with its fixation on scruffy glinting objects at my toes, distracting from the unwieldy temptation to skip today and grab tomorrow; or the temptation to forget about tomorrow and be restrained by what failed to happen yesterday. 

Forget about the horizon for a minute - what do we have in the frame today?

This year, I'm trying not to make goals so much as be glad of my gifts. If I treasure these little blessings everyday, then perhaps the goals will make—and realise—themselves.

"The heart bears indentations of yesterday's child"

Oh yes, the heart really does. These hearts really do. Hearts bear indentations, and they are all gifts. Dirty, messed up, grubby and flawed gifts, the lot of them.

A post-Valentine's post, because as I suggested this time last year here and there it's not all containable in one day, but rather all the small gestures in every other day of the year where love is really found.


*
I've been singing this song all night long.


{Today's Soundtrack: Lucy Rose - Scar}

Gratitude : 2011

The happiest of new years to you friends! Time to peer through a reflective lens on the year past, yes?

Well, I can't reflect adequately this year just gone without remembering where it began. That's always a good lesson isn't it; to fully appreciate where you are, remember where you came from. 2011 began from a relatively dark place, an exhausted position, but one of survival.

Summing up the adventures and new life that followed in 2011—and these were huge—I wonder what it was about the year that characterised it differently. I think it's partly about the opportunities that are lined up ready to happen, but it is also about you, your attitude and openness to learn, and how you choose to grow through pains and traumas which have the potential to sculpt you. Your fit with the shapes of other lives and events may depend on how you responded to those other happenings in the first place.

So my friends and I gathered at the cusp of 2011 and 2012, and we pondered our questions and gratitudes for the journey through 2011. For me, an unexpected outcome of doing this was realising a significant ignition of courage had come out of that determination to be thankful for all the crap that had happened previously. Somehow, claiming that position lead me to a new perspective on the age-old question, 'what's the worst that could happen?' You know you have struggled, and won, and and this inspires a bold grip on new opportunity and a strong fight in your heart to persevere and see right.

August 2011, there I am in South America at the end of a five-week trip when I had originally applied for a ten-day hike in the Rockies. I have delivered training programmes to local photographers, which makes real sense of my newly-achieved-through-hard-graft teaching qualification, and after travelling all around Peru I'm in the poorest district in Lima giving these school girls a go on my camera. These are Peru's future documentary makers, and it's a buzz to give them a glimpse of how it might work for them. Then just three months later I'm standing in a packed gallery in London talking to supporters about African street children and our photographs of them, and beginning to have the kind of conversations that happen because somewhere back there I managed to say 'yes' in the face of challenge, and maybe there was a glint I my eye because I'd survived something awful.

Battled, and won.

I am grateful for courage, which has produced a strength to really live life thoroughly through all its adventures. And yes, love comes with that, with bells on.

I hope and pray in this courage and new life for everyone I love, with gratitude.

A very happy new year. x

{Today's Soundtrack: James Vincent McMorrow - Early in the Morning}

In Any Doubt

Perhaps you may not believe me at this stage, but it's true; more true now than it ever was. I promise, promise, promise, I am not making this up - everytime I look at my feet. If you don't mind, I'm not going to try saying anything.


{Today's Soundtrack: Lanterns on the Lake - Lungs Quicken / Tricks}

Siblings

Okay, look. The point is, I'm as desperate to get back to writing as a Princess fighting through thorn and thicket to get to her Daniel in distress, but these recent weeks have presented way more than just basic events and I must attend to those first. But you must know, not a week goes by when I don't think of you and wonder how life is going.

While I've been beavering away on one of The Major Projects Of My Life, I have also—with detective powers of my siblings to thank—discovered family I never knew existed, and while their biographies read like a role call in a far-fetched novel their passions and achievements set a context for things I have experienced but never had a frame of reference for. More on that later.

For now, this is just me checking in with you, and also paying tribute to my brother and two sisters. It is very good to know them, because as nuts as life can sometimes get—even when they are part of that nuttiness—it's good to know who's in the middle with you.

* 
When I came home from Peru, I heard 'Atlas Hands' whilst walking around the shops during a fierce bought of jetlag. The lyrics struck me so much in a moment of totally inspired disorientation, so I wrote them down to search later for who was singing. This album is entirely beautiful.


{Today's Soundtrack:
       Benjamin Francis Leftwich - Last Smoke Before the Snowstorm}

Pretty Gentle

There are many worse ways to spend an afternoon than wobbling around the ancient walls of pretty Cusco while the sun lazes along its old cobble roads with you. Inca stonework fits together in perfect patchwork shapes—chunky, thick boulders sculpted precisely to match each other and snuggle together tightly enough to withstand earthquakes. It's amazing how they did it without hard metal tools, let alone moving the blocks without wheels.

This was very a soothing little time at the end of my trip, after all the heavy stories and long, exhausting bus rides. I found all the shapes and lines quite satisfying the way they lined up, although still a bit wonky in places. As I was feeling, maybe?

Here, the light seems to feel its way long the alleyways. I suppose in England our homes and offices are made of different materials, and the streets are wide, and interrupted by gardens, so the light does not bounce back and forth in the same way. Our weak light is diffused very easily. Here in the little roads of Cusco, the sun is quite strong even in winter, and there are reflections coming off all sorts of surfaces – polished cobbles, adobe plaster, windows, even from under eaves of houses by late afternoon.

If you ever find yourself in Peru, after other hectic or wild adventures, enjoy pretty Cusco. It is a very lovely, easy place to be and breathe in and out for a while. A gentle foot voyage along its roads can help you find a way through all the stirrings that travel in far off lands tends to do to a person.

Pretty, and gentle.

{Today's Soundtrack: Fanfarlo - If It Is Growing}

Revolutions

Revolving. 

It is really helpful to know what it is you revolve around.

• What do you revolve around?

It is possible to define certain axes – family, friends, people who are at the heart of things; beliefs which move you to action in the first place; dreams that stretch your heart out to horizon places. Revolve around the thoughts that you always have when you walk in a certain place; a prayer you say every day. Revolve around what you know of yourself, in the space you create so as to be yourself. Revolve around patience and kindness for yourself and your slowness to settle, and around love for the gentle others that give you shelter to wrestle whatever has come up on the journey. Revolve around a routine.

Necessary axes stop the wheel working itself off the cart. Revolving around these, you recall why you agreed to an adventure in the first place.

And there are also revolutions. 

• What revolves around you, cropping up time and again?

As you revolve, what things in your life come around with some frequency? A wise old chap once described the spiritual journey for me not as a straight line, but as an upwards curling spiral. You can expect to arrive at familiar points in life where the same issues or themes seem to crop up, but you have grown in the meantime so you have new perspective. Pay attention to these themes while they roll around with you. They exist to shape you up in a unique way and build your particular character, as you were made to be. That's what the wise old man suggested anyway.

And then there is breakthrough revolution. This is all about life appearing where there seemed to be none. 

• Where do you see breakthrough?

These children playing and smiling – knowing where they have come from, this is good breakthrough. In Peru, revolution looks like happy kids. They are safe, and get to revolve around loving people, steady routines of meals, singing lessons and playtimes. Those smiles are what keep the loving people going in their tough work. 

Home again after a huge and beautiful adventure, these stories are amongst the things I revolve around too. And of course, because the whole thing has sent my head and heart into a spin, I'm going around the revolutions with nearest and dearest who were there when the wheel started moving in the first place.

What are your revolutions all about?

{Today's Soundtrack: Me, slightly in love - My Funny Valentine}

Perspectives

Another heart, at my feet when I get home to England.

A mark at point A, and a mark at point B. Another heart-shaped mark, connecting to a long line of others.

Point A exists, implicitly different from its counterpoint; B as it is, imbued with the fragrances of everything growing on the path towards it. The journey takes time, and in time things grow and flower. Many things are expressed, and poured out - water on seeds and saplings, life where there was none. It is a sacrificial journey and the seed of A dies to give life to B, bloom and bower.

Perpetually moving on.

A wonderful transformation from a nothing to a something; a great, precious, shiny treasure of a thing.

"Mi precioso."

This 'welcome home' heart reflects something not in the picture, and as much as I move from point A to point B, on return from this amazing Peruvian adventure I rest with one conclusion - B is not the end, but it is a beautiful resting point. There is more to come, but right here B glimmers with a poor, yet delightfully romantic, reflection of whatever that turns out to be.

I am so glad of this adventure, even though it has turned many things upside-down (how jesus of it). I went to Peru knowing nothing and come back bursting with thoughts and ideas. One thing's for sure - being on home turf (or tarmac) amongst familiar people and places is the best place to be, and I feel sure these are the best companions with whom to chart the next leg. That's home, and this is where perspective comes.


{Today's Soundtrack: The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build a Home}

My Heart in the Hills

So, some days of living in the mountians - what shall I tell you?

Maybe I could tell you about these Inca roads and their relentless steep ascents to 4000m through wilderness trails and gurgling jungle streams; subtle colour spectrum which seems simple but in fact leaves out no hue and changes with every cloud or gust. I could muse over reflected light from snow-capped mountains, rivers tumbling and washing away concerns far down the mountain. And I could talk about arriving at Machu Picchu's Sun Gate in time to watch a beautiful sunrise over the ancient city, spoilt by grating noisy tourists taking ages to make good their touristic vision in endless group photographs. (A place to engage in mystical serenity that was not.) Further, the ruins and their incomrehensible age against precision like a child's lego construction, all the while sun streaming hot through hazy atmosphere.

There would be loads of stories, our suffering limbs, lovely trek leader Poncho, Jacob and Jenny getting engaged, llamas, coca tea, incredible porters who made our sleeping and eating totally smooth by running with enormous loads all the way - they make us look so lightweight. And some of them run in sandals made out of tyres.

But apart from all of these wonderful experiences, for me the most pressing discovery was how much heart there is in the wilderness of those truly high up places. There is a perfect soundlessness in those breathless heights, where no wheels or wires exist and the only audible movement when you stop walking is air against rough mountain grass. Choosing to be apart from our so-called life lines, a new space for other, deeper life emerges. In the right company, we all found a better attention to life even if in solitude, just yourself.

Gentleness, kindness, patience, peace, endurance for the body to climb, mind to commit and the soul to encounter proper Creator love.

Space, and serenity.

At the top of each peak sits a cairn. We don't put our stones on top, but add them to the side - not conquering, but contributing. How can we conquer the hills when they hold our hearts so lovingly whilst we clamber hard, scrambling further than we've ever been? And how do we even dare to conquer? We are invited into the story, bravely offer whatever we can and discover this effort is worthy and welcome after all. It's difficult to explain, but it felt like things made more sense in a deep down way than normal. And it did not feel complicated.

Not sure if I left my heart in the hills, or discovered that's where it's been all along, safe and sound.


{Today's Soundtrack: William Fitzsimmons - Beautiful Girl}

The Mystery Machine

We have spent almost as much time on this bus as off it in the last few days. The american team arrived on Sunday and we came to a town called Anduhuaylas to work with Paz y Esperanza there. They chose this machine as our chariot.

(August 5th)
5am call. Bus for 5 hours to who knows where. We pass through a town, and headlights reveal men pissing openly in the streets and rats strung up from telegraph wires. Depressingly filthy.

8am. Trundling upwards through yellow ochre landscape as sun rises; reminds me of the moors except those don't have enormous, beautiful eucalyptus trees, and we just keep going higher, and higher, and higher. The road is rough, and the bus rattles like constant percussion.

9am. For an age we are under the cloud, then in it, and then breaking through. Little moments of sun happen on my face and it feels happy.

10am. Arrive in a village called Chaccarampa, which is so high up and draped over the top of a mountain, and does feel like a roof of some sort. We are so high up now, slightly breathless. The sky is deep blue again, with pure white clumps of cloud. After us and the bus have been rattled to pieces on rough roads, this village offers wild tranquility.



The Venture Expeditions team was helping build a wall in the village, and organise a small library that's been put in for the education of the kids. They also showed us a nursery they're pulling together on the side of the hill where previously there was nothing, while we gathered round amongst the kids to listen about the work, eat potatoes and drink agualita - a sugary herbal tea they cook up in big pots with whatever's available. The buildings are made of mud bricks, earth floors, corrugated tin roofing. It is basic.

The people here live a very simple life, but maybe because of that they notice something else that the rest of us don't. They have a sheen to their faces and a gleam in their eyes that I haven't seen anywhere before.



El Pastor of The Church at High Altitude (actually, I don't think that's its real name) looks like a campesino, but he spends so much time in prayer he is permanently smiling with shiny cheeks and tell tale crows feet, eyes always half closed ready to go.

"Gracias Papa."

Taking photographs of these people and the work Paz does with them I am feeling overwhelmed, and feel very far from home, not because of anything bad but because I've never seen a shine like it and it has thrown me. Completely inspiring, yet hard to digest because it's so raw.

I have nothing familar to cling on to whilst figuring it out, but as El Pastor may say, 'my soul finds rest in God alone'. Living simply in the most remote of places, able to see something we don't.

After our journeys in the big green bus, this shall forever be my Mystery Machine motto:

The more we learn, the less we know.