The Tears of Things XI, 2020

________ The blossom arrives More beautiful than before They say this happens as you age It’s kinda unfathomable in its beauty I cant get my head round it I look I touch I smell Some years I photograph London 2001 I had just come back From a little stay on the coast Now a different man (for a while anyways) I remember looking up At this explosion of pink Under the streetlights Glowing like an alien brain And asking myself how had I not Noticed this before How? Night Flowers Tokyo 2004 Land of the blossom lovers For real At night I walked in a bubble Of my own otherness My attention not punctured by recognition Of language either spoken or written And these are Blackberry days No smartphone fire fly pollution We will not know those days again One night jet lagged I taxi to the fish market And if ever I saw one thing In my life that said This cannot go on This was it Like every fish in the sea Had been caught And was there that morning And every other morning I shed a tear into my sushi But I digress New York Early 2008 I think My heart wasn’t in it Too much on my mind I did have a nice moon lit moment To myself in Central Park But no real keepers Just some bad behaviour and More regrets Sydney 2010 Reverted to type Leave a party off my face To find the flowers I had noticed On the journey there I stand in the road Tripod camera light meter The warm breeze and fragrance And self hatred And cars swerving London This year The year of the plague 2020 In this different world We are now living in The collective confrontation with mortality A world of masks And queues outside Lidl across the road And the blossom always told us This was a brief dance That we all must fall as petals to the floor But not like this Really? And the blossom says I told you That life may be eternal The expressions of life however Are not Polaroid circa 1990s Hence the blue Blue blue blue Dye levels faded with age Film from a different world. A full colour spectrum world of promise Promise and lies and hope and denial Mamiya RZ67 and polaroid back A camera system originally Designed for commercial use To tell the lies that needed to be told Lies I’ve helped to tell The Tears of Things ‘the pathos of things’ ‘An empathy towards things’ ‘A sensitivity to ephemera’ ‘the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life – knowing that none of it can last’ *Wikipedia ————————————- ‘Flowers are, of course, deeply symbolic of renewal. Their beauty is bound up in the knowledge that it is momentary. Beauty pierces your heart because it is painful. It is about loss, transience, and wonder at its very existence. Gareth McConnell’s photographs of his bed and flowers have to be understood with his other work in mind. The motivation and poignance behind the images in Meditations (2004–08), Night Flowers (2002–10), make little sense if you don’t know McConnell’s shocking and affective images in the series Anti-Social Behaviour Parts I & II (1995) — victims of paramilitary punishment beatings in his homeland of Northern Ireland, or IV drug users who were his friends and sometime community. This is true of beautiful things, isn’t it? Beauty is cloying and saccharine when it’s too easily granted. McConnell shoots Night Flowers in ambient light and with a long exposure. He takes the pictures during nocturnal walks, another temporal experience out of the workaday. Similar to the beds, the flowers become still, central objects, isolated from their context (they are not hothouse but urban flowers, growing alongside commercial strips and housing estates). In some, a spray is classically composed against a background, blossoms burgeoning; in others the image is blurred, or the light intensely artificial, acidic. They are the dusty, forlorn cultivars grown on the streets of any city, but they are prize winners, too. McConnell asks with these pictures, can you find hope when and where it’s least expected?’ Alison Green Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography