Snow doesn’t look like the idea of snow, not during a snowstorm. During a snowstorm the sky becomes a void churning with insensate bees, bees that sting & bite. Snowstorms are neither pretty pictures nor charming holiday romps—snowstorms are winter.
Winter unvarnished by the domesticating tendencies of sheltered human eyes.
The silence of grammar. The silence of morning fog. The silence of a tiger’s paw. Wandering silence. The I told you so silence. The silence of violence. The silence of the catacombs contained in a sheet of paper. The shimmer of summer night stillness silence. The ruins of love silence. The silence of God.
It’s raining at the moment. Calling it rain might suggest a downpour or perhaps a steadiness of purpose, but this rain is too ambivalent for any of that relative cheeriness. This is slacker rain. This rain drizzles on and off all day, turning the landscape into a listless void. It’s hard to even tell the color of the light in such rain—is it grey, or is it a lurid shade of green?
I’ve never been sure, yet I know it well: as I child I stared out of myriad windows into this rain—into the glistening trees that slouched with waterlogged branches—and tried to imagine the sun. It didn’t work, of course; the rain had seeped into my mental eye. Instead of sunlight, the inside of my skull grew lush with moss. Forests sprang up, haunted by arboriform spirits and carnivorous umbrella monsters. Predatory ferns infected my temporal lobes and burst outwards in Medusa-like fronds, marking me as forever coiled, an absurd Beardsleyan grotesque.
The sun is out of reach. Continue reading “The Fire, the Eclipse, and the Spiders”
“London was cloaked in a strange orange glow after Storm Ophelia caused a dust phenomenon and turned the sun red.”
* * *
Continue reading “‘Strange Light’ – London 16th October 2017 – photo-essay by Miggy Angel”
The city was Boise, Idaho. The year was 1995. I was 17 and taking photography classes at Boise State University. While hovering over trays of chemicals in the darkroom one afternoon, I wound up having a three-hour-long conversation with one of my classmates, a gifted artist named Ronny Joe Grooms. Flash forward to 2017. I message my friend Ronny Joe – who goes professionally by the name of Narayan St. Jude – and ask him to join me in photographic conversation for Burning House Press.
He agrees. Continue reading “A Conversation in Photographs with Narayan St. Jude”
Note: Creators, would you like to be interviewed for one of my Burning House Press blog posts? See the details at the end of this post.
I woke up thinking of you,
and the word, Komorebi
Japanese, for the light
that filters through the trees
I woke up and thought of the sunshine I found
in your arms
in your eyes
Thank you, Alexis, for submitting your works to be featured on Burning House Press! You mentioned in our email exchange that you don’t work in themes or projects, rather that the images arise in their own time – the same goes for the works’ titles. Is chance a huge factor in your photographic process?
Thank you, it’s my pleasure!
It depends what you mean by “chance”, if you mean events that happen by forces that are beyond the control of the individual consciousness then yes, chance is very important. My practice is deeply connected with this surrendering to the flow of life; this is why I mostly conceive photographs as happenings rather than doings. Today I wrote this small note which feels relevant to this question: Creativity is not a doing, it is an alignment with the cosmic unfolding, in which there is no separate doer. Continue reading “‘Variations of Presence’ – an interview with photographer Alexis Vasilikos”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
Visions Of Morandi
By Fredric Nord
I realize how this obsession has gone too far. I’m on a bus cutting through Stockholm, it’s a smug city but easy on the eyes. I’ve dressed up for this. I’m on my way to see Morandi at Artipelag, beautifully situated in the archipelago. My expectations are high, feeling a bit too happy for paintings, a bit nervous. I’ve seen so few of his works in real life, only once before, and they affected me so profoundly that the big painting next door, some ceiling job by some dude named Michelangelo, left me cold and meh. I seem to have something at stake here.
And for this text, I will be Don Quixote de la Costanza.
Continue reading “Visions Of Morandi” →
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