#3

C’était une grande cité. 
Il n’y avait pas plus connue et plus convoitée dans tout le monde. De tous pays l’on avait entendu parler, un jour, une nuit de cette immense ville, si masculine et haute, si puissante et majestueuse. 
Quiconque avait encore des rêves songeait à venir y trouver moult fortunes, découvrir d’innombrables secrets enfouis au plus profond des mémoires encore chaudes des anciens, qui dans d’incessantes narrations vibrantes ouvraient leurs grimoires de souvenirs pour dévoiler ces contes qui faisaient fleurir toutes sortes de fantasmes aux plus jeunes. Il n’y avait pas de destination plus attirante que cette belle cité, que le destin avait choisi de baptiser Blossom. 
La ville fut fondée dans le rêve d’un homme et d’une femme. 
Un soir, le soir même qui suivit leur rencontre, ils s’assirent sous un arbre, s’enlacèrent du regard des heures durant, ignorant la douteuse pénombre qui s’était installée, ne respectant pas le calme de la nuit qui s’offrait, profitait de l’étreinte des rayons que la lune leur offrait pour s’aimer en silence. Cet homme et cette femme s’aimèrent une nuit, se caressèrent de toute leur innocence, d’une seule caresse à deux mains, pianotant ensemble la mélodie de leur bonheur si jeune et condamné, s’unirent une seule fois dans le silence hurlant de leur désir. 
Ensemble, sous un arbre qui offrait la protection de ses branches, ils s’embrassèrent une fois, et firent l’amour sous la lune, brûlé par cette incandescente ivresse de s’aimer pour s’aimer, de vivre l’amour quand on peut encore l’appeler amour, d’appeler la nuit sa propre nuit, leur nuit, nos nuits à tous, tant le jour qui peut suivre n’importe guère, si l’on puisse ainsi jurer avoir vécu ne serait ce qu’une seconde intensément. 

Cet homme et cette femme eurent cette nuit là un enfant entre leurs amours éternels d’un instant. Au pied de cet arbre, à l’abri du feuillage, sur ces racines émergentes, ils firent le vœu de la chair et de cette union jaillit alors un songe tissé de leurs promesses éphémères.
Ce songe eut le nom d’Oneiro, un fils, et pour ce fils ils bâtirent une ville. 
Pour eux, cette ville serait le berceau de tous les plaisirs, de tous les parfums, de toutes les couleurs, de tous les cours d’eaux, de toutes les montagnes, de tous les volcans, de toutes les graines. Une semence engendra l’éternelle floraison de leur désir de création. Pour le bonheur de leur fruit, ils construisirent palais et jardins, pour sa bénédiction d’immenses cathédrales, ils lui firent dons de musées somptueux garnis des meilleures œuvres, érigèrent d’interminables tours en hommage à sa mémoire encore vierge, surplombèrent le fleuve qui coulait à travers ce domaine avec d’imposants ponts suspendus, dissimulèrent pour son recueillement des recoins entre les bâtisses, cultivèrent d’innombrables fleurs et plantèrent des milliers d’arbres. Chaque fleur dégageait un parfum différent, se définissait en effluves dorées, sucrées, ambrées, aux tons de musc, de fruits, de paradis. En dehors de la ville, ils cultivèrent d’interminables vergers, de fécondes vignes qui donnaient des fruits gorgées de saveurs indéfinissables et  exotiques, produisaient du vin aux arômes divins, dégageant des notes de fruits rouges et respirant l’histoire de leurs maturations.

Il n’y avait pas d’endroit plus beau que la ville d’Oneiro. 

Je ne me rappelle pas de cette photo mais je sais que ce qu j'ai pris ce jour là, était magnifique.

#2

She walked up the stairs, to meet a man she met the day before.

He was sitting there, sipping occasionally on the coffee he had nursed for the last three hours.

She was wearing small black leather buckle loafers. Her ankles were covered with a white and simple pair of sock chosen out of boredom. She was wearing a black and white tartan skirt. And a shirt. With a knot, revealing her bellybutton. Her skin was a caramel eye-scream. 

They were on the fourth floor of a round down building on Pentonville road. 

The man, young, had a beard.
He was very handsome. She loved him the moment she saw him. 

He was this kind of man. Not a stranger to being the victim of a woman's sentimental confusion. 

Unfortunately he had the making of a seducer. 

But he did not know that. He thought he was a heart roamer. A knight errand in the lives of others. An enchanted parenthesis. 

He had lovers. He broke their hearts. 
All wanted to penetrate this dark room filled with his agoraphobic memories.
To know him.
He left. Each time because he was not to reveal himself to them.
To keep the mystery alive. To prevent him from dragging the thought that he might admit he loved them.
He did not have enough space in his heart to love anyone nor anything apart from his loneliness. 

But not her. 

She was the youngest. The prettiest. 

She, who came from far away, had lived more already than what her heart could bear. There was not much to break. 
He did not see that.
Maybe he walked unarmed into the darkness of her affection. 

They sat and spoke about meeting each other. How particular it was.
He talked about himself.

He apologised several time about his lack of confidence and his hesitation. She asked him not to. 

The next day they were engaged.

He made her happy. For several years. Until he could not anymore bear the thought of happiness itself.
He remembered one morning, that his faith lays still and intact until his lover trusts him.
He tried to break her heart.
So that she would go away from him because he knew somehow that he did not want to leave her.
But she stayed.
She really wanted to love him. She knew how to listen to him.
He had always been a receptacle for fantasies and did not see what she was giving him.
She was taking his worries and put them with hers.
She was letting him take whatever he wanted.

He could not bear it.
She understood it but it was too late.

He grasped her and broke the bones of her hands then her arms. He clutched her tight and hard so she could not breath.
She gave a last sigh and died.
He chose a room in his house and left her there, locked the room and added the key to an egg shaped ivory key ring.
He kept a memory of her but held in oblivion the instants of happiness they once shared.

Who said that happiness had to last. Its taste is worse than the taste of sulfur to a mouth that has feasted on sorrow for too long.
Happiness is more dangerous for the one who has a reason to be unhappy. Because it arrives always too late.

I saw this man sitting, alone, at a bar one day. He looked miserable but was so beautiful.
I looked at him and took a picture of him. The lights in the bar were over exposing his face. His forehead disappeared behind a cloud of smoke coming from his licorice cigarette.
I remember thinking that his beard would appear blue on the picture.

B.

#1

Ivan Peter Shaw used to own books. One of them was about Charles X. After his death, his books were without an owner.
So what usually happens to orphan books happened. They were given to charity.

Ivan Peter Shaw was likely to be an accountant or a banker or in another situation that involves counting papers and numbers, dreading the negative sign and associating the colour red to a defect or a financial gaudiness, a sufferance shared by plenty, in silence.

But Ivan was unhappy.

Before he passed away, he used to love his books. His books were kept safe and he would forbid anyone to read them. He was also applying this to himself, allowing himself to only ten minutes of reading per night.
But every night.

How could a man of numbers be blamed for dreading to get muddled with letters? He, who was a mathematical mind, had nightmares involving Latin words written with Greek letters and whole books written without the vowel e.
He merely regarded Dostoevsky's work as an untidy alphabet.
His fear of lexical disorderliness became addictive.
Secretly, so he would not meet any opposition, he initiated a complete revision of the words order in the world literature according to his primal sense of calm and order. A gargantuan task that consumed his nights and challenged his own stability.

He gave up on the second week, facing a cruel reality. Power. Or the lack of it. He had power over the words but not over what was behind the words.
He understood that disorder was simply order without power.
This left him bewildered.

He was speechless and could not find the right words in order to get help, from eminent doctors and librarians or psychophonists.
Let alone the writers.

He researched every book he had that touched a bit of medicine, science or addictions knowledge, consulting journals and even an old addictionary, a collection of all the most absurd addictions that his great uncle brought back from Madagascar. He did not find a single reference to his misery.
Hopeless he grew. He could not find the answer and each time he felt he might have been close to putting his finger onto something relevant, it would be time to close the book, the ten minutes being up. His rare condition affected his perception of the words and gradually led him to mistrust them, more and more. He felt provoked by their strength and power and did not want to accept their authority.

In 1924 a friend of his wrote to him, a letter, on a Blick typewriter. I say Blick because the person who wrote the letter mentioned it in the letter.
He was grateful that Ivan advised him to take a two weeks vacation in the Cotswold and was speaking highly about the cottage he stayed in. He mentioned the name of a woman, whom most likely had also taken part in this vacation. The details made about the relation between the friend and this woman was very 1920's.
He wrote a whole paragraph to ask Ivan a favour.
He was asking him four hundred pounds. He gave a lot of details about how he would refund and at what rate of interest.

He could not stop reading the letter, as it only took him two minutes and twenty-six seconds to read it.
But the letter came to an end so he did.

In the post scriptum, there was this curious annotation:
'Please refer to Die Schoenheit des weiblichen Koerpers'

The nature of this book intrigued him. Also, he could not see why his friend, after having asked him to borrow some money, would then advise him to consult a book on the beauty of the feminine body.

This book had been written by a man of medicine from Stuttgart, called Dr. C. H. Stratz and a copy of it was sitting still on the shelf of a bookshop in Croydon.
He visited the bookshop one rainy afternoon and found the book. And decided to read through the book. For ten minutes.
As he opened the book to read through, he found himself looking at a picture of a young girl for a bit longer than he thought was acceptable. He reprimanded himself but that was not enough to blot out the silhouette that was now drawn onto his mind.
Ivan Peter Shaw was a kind of man who spend most of his life hiding behind a curtain of good manners. He knew he would not return home with such a book in his possession. He had to keep a good image of himself in front of his wife and his children. But he also knew he wanted that book to be his.

He turned around to see if someone was watching him and after judging it being the right moment, he tore the page and tucked it in his pocket.
He felt content but also corrupted by the power of this page and the caption he read at the bottom of it.
He left the bookshop feeling a bit like a strawberry thief.

He kept it secret all these years.
He hid it in a book he had on Charles X. Along with the letter his friend sent him. He concealed all evidence of the very existence of his knowledge about that book and about Dr Stratz.

I happened to find that book on Charles X.
When I opened it, it was there. The picture and the letter.
That day, I had just put a new film in my camera. I was in a charity shop looking for a hat or maybe a lemon juicer.

I saw the picture that had been there for more than forty years. I put it on the floor. I took a picture of it myself, in black and white.

B.

#0 - revealing -

This is the story of a film. A black and White film. An unwanted artefact. A relic of technology.

This is the story of a  Pentacon Praktica BC3 and a 1: 1.8 lens, focus 50mm. It was lent to me by a

friend who has recently managed to capture a shooting star on film.

This is the story of a journey. Through London. Through people in London. Through my imagination.

And my memory.

This is what happens when the world goes faster and analog photography is not enough.

This is a strip of plastic film, with gelatin emulsion on one side and crystals on the other.

This is what we used to use. Everyday. Before our telephone starts taking pictures.

Before.



This story will unfold. These twenty-four pictures will go to the darkroom. These pictures will be released. And revealed.

This is also my story. But only this part will be autobiographical.

The rest will draw from elsewhere.

It starts because I moved house. And packed boxes. Again.

I moved houses several times in the last thirty-one years.

Fourteen times.

Many houses.
Five villages.
Three cities.
Three countries.
Two boats.

These days, living on a canal in London town, I don't stay long in a neighbourhood no more.

I am a mover.

I always carry a bag.

I am happier with the weight of the essential belongings on my shoulder, feeling the sweat of the weight running along the spine, salt-whitening my black tee-shirt.

Always on the move.

What comes to my mind now, is the downside of moving.
Losing things.
I have lost many many items. I can still picture in my head the toys I never found after I moved from the Auvergne region to the Rhône valley. I was nine.

So when I moved to my first boat, after I left my beloved flat in Hackney, on Lower Clapton road, I was expecting it. Losing things.

Nay!

I found a black and white film. An undeveloped Ilford black and white film, ISO 125/22°.

In a box. I did not remember packing it at the time. It must have been there a while, I thought.

I forgot again.

And I remembered. So I took it with me.

I went to different places. To develop it.

The answer was always the same:

'No Sir, kits of chemicals for black-and-white reversal processing is no longer available'.

Snappy Snaps on Upper Street, Islington.
'No Sir, kits of chemicals for black-and-white reversal processing is no longer available'.

Jessop Photo Video Center on New Oxford Street, Bloomsbury.
'No Sir, kits of chemicals for black-and-white reversal processing is no longer available'.

The ID photoshop on the Strand.
'No Sir, kits of chemicals for black-and-white reversal processing is no longer available'.

Lomography Gallery Store, on Newburgh Street, Soho.
'No Sir, kits of chemicals for black-and-white reversal processing is no longer available'.

The chemist on Russell Square, borough of Camden,  amateur darkroom enthusiast, recommended by the previous deceitful film revealer.
'No Sir, kits of chemicals for black-and-white reversal processing is no longer available'.

I kept the film then; intact.

A few years have passed now. I am ready to develop them. Without chemicals or artificial exposition.

I'll just open the box and see what comes out.

A miniature Pandora's box.

I am looking at it right now. It is mysterious and black and white.

I must tell the tales of these twenty-four pictures taken one day or another, showing something clear or blury, a landscape, a friend or more, a place, a moment, a woman, a band...  recalling an instant in the history of my eyes.

B.