Wandering a haunted world

 

I don't know what this photographic style I'm obsessively working with says exactly about all these things we're seeing wandering the Europelands of today, but I am not only developing a kind of commitment (though I am aware these are always temporary) to this view of the world, but I am also finding ways to push it to the brink. You have seen these lurid hyper psychadelic versions of my photos a lot lately, but I'm starting to push them closer to the world of my imagination. Yes, of course these are mainly real pictures of four or five different cities I have recently wandered through, but they are also... clerkmanifestoland.

There will probably be more of these, but this is a ruined and wonderful world, with death and history some of its best parts, and the present doing sometimes more to ruin it than make it better.

Catching some strays

 

As I sort through my travels, which, now that I've decided to consider myself wandering in general, don't particularly have an end, I invariably come across some stray pieces from projects you have seen while I was on the road.

To start with I have a few night pictures of one of these medeival cities one can find around here. I love them at their most flourishing, although they can be very stoney and hard too. For the first time, unbidden, thoughts of Paul Simon's song come to me: "And each town looks the same to me..."  This really could be any city from Genoa to Nantes, but it's not, and I'd like to keep that in mind even is I blur through that here. Maybe: it's all one world, and though one forest may look like another, every tiny bit is its own thing, never to be seen again, and never seen before. Why not?

As for these below, you may have seen the vanilla posters last week, but I am too fond of the alternates and outtakes to leave them in some forgotten folder on my desktop, so here is the rest of this suite. It expresses a sentiment I am much absorbed in, feeling a disenchantment with the country that can also be shockingly obliterated in its virtues. So, probably more on this feeling as we go forward.

And a word here on these characters I have been employing:

It is amazing how these fables and fairy tales seem to be seeping through the cracks of old France, like one can see witches and trolls in the shadows. I am just trying to let them through, and, with no better options, making them my friends.

Postcards of Western Europe

 

Yes, we have been getting around.

And of course everyone wants to send you greetings from their travels.

Keep in mind everyone is entitled to their own feelings.

So here you go:

The return

 

We have returned home from our wide and rambling travels in the world.

And what were we doing in our travels in this great big world?

Riding endless trains?

Well, there was that, but...

No. We were looking for a home, of course. 

Although, maybe there is no home for us. 

Maybe clerkmanifesto is my home.

And the places of the real world? 

Language. Letters. Numbers. The building blocks of matter. A way to talk about home and the glimpsed farther shore, shining like a dream, but ever out of reach.

To my surprise there is something about returning to our apartment and laboriously unpacking my vast swaths of stories and photographs, all in various stages of development, that says:

What is the difference between the half wild urban beach of the upper Mississippi River and a thousand year old town in Europe standing like a rock on the edge of the muddy Atlantic Ocean? The old man looking for his library book and the one at a cafe drinking his day's precious beer at a tabac? What is the difference between the white cows of Bretagne and the goats of Wisconsin?

I don't know. Let's just feed them all into clerkmanifesto and see what comes out?

Scattered pictures of France

Still on the road, working with an almost impossible interface on my phone, I present for today’s lottery of wonder a basically unedited sampling of photographs from the past week:

 

Pictures of oysters

 

In La Rochelle, I ate a dozen oysters at the exquisite market there. But before I ate them, I took some pictures. Then I did a lot of things to those pictures, and that’s what I have to show for today.