This digest revels in the in-between, the transitional, the presence of absence. My camera with its dials and knobs and sharp focus has taken me into the blur of things. It has taught me that because things can't be measured it doesn't mean that it isn't there. The spirit of things, the essence of our places is as real as my shutter button.
If you listen carefully, there are nooks that still echo the sounds of people that toiled here once. They are sounds that reside within the nominology of place. It is a prose wrenched from the ice, grit and shale of the valley.
Each and every building in Lavenham has a story to tell, either within the pattern of the dragon post or writ large within a wall.
It’s that time of day where the sun reveals and conceals. Pockets of light pepper gnarled and ancient surfaces. At times like this I get caught between my urge to date and categorise and the unadulterated joy of enjoying the pattern of things.
Who’d have thought a humble phone call might be so significant? That literacy, language and poetry might be key to underpinning our common humanity? Every English teacher and lecturer should shout it from the rooftops.
That such an exotic thing with Angkor Watt curves can be hidden within the ballast of a grim winter's day is quite remarkable.
The photographs act like wormholes into the time they were taken, and are often the instigators of the stories that I tell within this digest; but more than that, amidst bouts of punishing low self-esteem, they remind me that I’m not an imposter, that I’m worthy of the places I photograph.
Whilst I walk along High Street, the buildings are tinted with a golden hue. As the sky softens, I can sense the day turning in on itself, the light tempered, beaten and bossed into thinness. This golden hour is turning blue.
" ...there are magical places, curated by our forebears, that allow us to escape feudal time, to bathe in an alternative chronology."
I observe how they tied the past into the warp and weft of the present - a material act of not letting go; a way to preserve the thread of history, as if the world might unravel if they didn’t.