Ho Voglia Di Te – but don’t take it personally

Taking a boat trip along the Seine, rounding the Île Saint Louis we spotted two hearts and, in huge writing, the words ‘ho voglia di te’.

The next day I walked around the lower walls to find it. It took a while because I got to the tip of the island and then went back to tell Vicki that it wasn’t there, went around the other side and there it was, about ten yards from the tip but out of sight of where I’d turned around…

I had no idea what the text meant, but it was clearly romantic and beautiful and intended either for somebody passing on a boat or somebody with extremely poor eyesight. Googling it upon my return I discover that it means ‘I Want You’ in Italian. A sexy phrase if ever there was one. If I’d known it when I was young, sad and single I feel sure I’d have used it.

I’d never been to Paris in the Autumn before, and I spent every day singing ‘I Love Paris’ either in my head or out loud. I’ve always loved the song, even when I didn’t love the city, and now when I sing it I think about my loves, one wife, two children and a dog, and how lucky I am, I’m a lucky, lucky man.

Every time I look down on this timeless town
whether blue or gray be her skies.
Whether loud be her cheers or soft be her tears,
more and more do I realize:

I love Paris in the springtime.
I love Paris in the fall.
I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles,
I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles.

I love Paris every moment,
every moment of the year.
I love Paris, why, oh why do I love Paris?
Because my love is near.

Cole Porter. Genius.

love | landscape

A Photo of a Photo of Photographers

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that there were almost too many hearts in Paris – up and around the Eiffel was where I started to feel overwhelmed this year.

Apologies if I’m place-dropping, but it was last year on the Brooklyn Bridge that I first got the slightly dizzying feeling that I was trying to achieve something that I couldn’t possibly do – I realised that I will never be able to photograph every heart I saw. That revelation (bloody obvious in hindsight) gave me the same sensation I used to have in my regular childhood Christmas nightmare, the one in which it was Christmas eve and I had to get home but it was physically impossible because I was half a world away. I stood there on Brooklyn Bridge looking at a swarm of hearts scratched and drawn onto the steel girder before me and thought out loud: ‘oh, crap, there’s a thousand of them’…

I knew this would happen when I went up the Eiffel Tower, and it did. There’s some work going on up on the first and second stages with some great hoardings around it covered in life-size photographs of people looking out over the view from where you’re standing, taking photographs.

There’s something wonderful about standing with your back to the view photographing a photograph of somebody looking at the view and taking a photograph. I got some funny looks.

In case you’re uncertain, the Eiffel Tower is here. Have a look at the ‘street view’ there, and at the lovely shadow on the satellite image on the map.

Graffiti - Art or Vandalism?

Whenever I’m in France, Italy or Spain (which is not nearly as often as I’d like to be) I do find myself shocked at the sheer quantity of graffiti, almost everywhere.

I don’t like to see graffiti as vandalism, but let’s face it, on this scale it really is. Still, there’s always a positive, and here it is the fact that the vandalism does have a large degree of artistic merit. And a heart opposite.

I think I’ve blogged about this before, probably after returning from Barcelona, but mostly what you see are tags. There’s something surreal about seeing huge urban graffiti on bridges in rural Normandy as you drive down from Cherbourg towards Paris. I hope somebody’s documenting them – I wish I had the time to. I’d pick a route and would stop and photograph every bridge along the way. Many of them are simple crossings from field to field, some with a footpath, others there perhaps for livestock.

Driving into one particular town (off the top of my head I forget where it was) we drove beneath a huge overpass with at least two levels, and on the lowest level was a heart along with some text. My instincts told me to stop, but the children were asleep in the back of the car, the entrance to the bridge was in some location unknown to me and it just wasn’t possible… sometimes I have to let them go.

This photograph was taken here in Lisieux, where we stopped for breakfast. We took a stroll – rather a long stroll as it turned out, as the Basilique Sainte Thérèse is stunning and we couldn’t resist walking up to it – and this was on the way back to the car, in a covered space between two buildings. I love the juxtaposition (but hate the word) between the traditional French window and the elaborate and bizarre graffiti.

And I’m sure the owners of the house were delighted with it.

love | landscape

Paris, je t’aime again

I’ve fallen in love with Paris again. A couple of years ago we came home feeling irritable after a rough and clichéd encounter with a ticket inspector on the metro, but this time there was nothing to fault bar the weak pound.

Since starting this project I’ve been to Paris three times and each time the hearts have been plentiful – this time they were set beneath blue skies and autumn leaves. Paris at its most beautiful. I even got to the point this time where there were so many I grew sick of seeing them – more on that in a later post, I imagine.

I’m rushing this post as it’s Halloween and the children are downstairs looking and sounding grotesque and I am hiding upstairs with neither wine nor permission. I’ll have to go in a mo for pumpkin soup and noise.

The heart shot here is not well composed (the heart is too low for my liking) but put together I like the way it works. It was taken from a train window as we passed, the second shot taken a second later as we picked up speed. I’d seen it the day before and sat ready to shoot as we travelled into Paris again from our eco-cabin in Versailles (of which more later too).

It was almost precisely here, but from the train. I think the text in the heart is a name.

 

love | landscape

Cracked

I spent this morning in a long meeting trying to explain to a bunch of education officers that schools are absolutely and totally fundamental to the society, community and economy that surrounds them and that in any plan to reorganise schools the bigger picture needs to be considered very, very carefully.

The people I was meeting with were trapped in a box of their own making, and were proof that joined up thinking hasn’t reached county councils yet.

I’ll post the positive link and you can try to work out who I’m frustrated with: www.educationswanage.co.uk

The photograph was taken somewhere near here, and for some reason the grey, broken surface seems relevant.

love | landscape

Where is the Love?

 

I like this picture, but what do you think?

It breaks one of my golden rules – it has people in it – plus the heart isn’t easy to see, though once you’ve seen it it’s clear enough. I like it because it builds a bigger landscape and it makes a nice change from the usual heart + location shot that I generally run with for this project. I’ve always liked the kind of hard-cut panoramas you get when you just piece them together roughly, and this has that effect.

It’s from Portland, Church Ope Cove to be precise, same as the last picture. You’ll find a map link in that post. Where smugglers once came ashore with brandy and tobacco there is now this scattering of eccentric beach huts and, on a summer’s day like this was, the sight of burning English bodies scorching themselves in the sun.

Putting this together I was reminded that I once photographed some hearts on a fence and went away and came up with another idea but found that the fence had been painted black by the time I returned. I’d wanted to re-photograph the hearts (there were at least a dozen) and then blow them up to life-size before piecing them back together on the wall. It was thinking about Hockney’s photographic collages that prompted the idea. Next time I see a whole bunch of hearts in one place I must remember what I was too late to do then… but the join on this picture makes me think of just a piece of a bigger image.

 

love | landscape

Barely There At All

 

I picked up the pictures that were left from my show at the White Stones Gallery on Portland at the weekend – there wasn’t a lot left. I’d had a fantastically successful show and it was great to know that people had really appreciated the work I’d put up. Over the six weeks or so that the show was up for I visited Portland several times, mostly to drop off more work. It’s an interesting place Portland – it is quite distinctly different to anywhere else along the Dorset Coast and has an air of wildness about it. I always feel that the villages on Portland have the feel of frontier towns, which is odd because they are on the edge, at the frontier of the sea I suppose, but a frontier that has long since passed.

I have a question: I’d like to know what weight of stone has been removed from Portland since they began recording what was taken from each quarry. I want to know how much lighter Portland is now to what it was in, say, 1800. Seen from a distance I think Portland looks as though it could lift up from the sea like a balloon if they take much more stone away…

This shot was taken at Church Ope Cove. The sun-bleached quarry-waste pebbles gleam beneath a wooded cliff and the ruins of a church, next to which are a handful of macabre tombstones faced with skulls and crossbones. The kids loved it. The heart on this stone is almost completely bleached away, but look closely and you’ll see it, feint in pink – it was in a pebble-built den with a stern warning against the ‘tresparsing’ of parents – maybe the long-dead pirates would be back for me if I’d stepped foot inside…

love | landscape