I was photographically investigating a fellow photographic investigator who was cursed with betrayal in her relationships and she always had monochrome summers. It was a repeating theme -karmic, according to her- to which she had resigned a long time ago. She was very rich but by then she knew not to show her wealth to people whom she suspected not to be sincere. This summer her life was full of them, as always. But she was blessed with a faithful helper, a mysterious creature who cared for her and always revealed to her what she couldn’t see. So I followed her to her summer retreat, a mysterious, minimal, monochrome dimension in the greek islands, where she went to be invisible. And she was.
My new assignment was to photographically investigate the lead actor of a movie that was been filmed on a greek ferry boat. I had 6 hours to find him and capture him -with my lens, of course… He was elusive, but when an experienced photographic investigator is presented with a similar situation, she just shoots silhouette. There were no instructions for the contrary, so everyone was happy.
It was the afternoon of a busy day and my photographic investigation was taking place without me being fully aware of it, surrounded by the beautiful sounds of blackbirds and the sounds of the birds that I could hear in Takashi Kokubo’s album “Jamaica” that was the soundtrack of this assignment. Zenobia was tired and lacked oxygen. I didn’t go to the Jamaica soundscape to investigate, but I did it anyway.
It was the 15th of August and I was photographically investigating the usual suspects, while preparing myself for a long trip to Rio. I was reading Neville Goddard’s “Prayer: The art of believing” and I found myself reading the same excerpt again and again: “Subjectively, the object of your desire is never far off. Rather, it’s intense nearness makes it remote from the observation of the senses. It dwell’s in consciousness and consciousness is closer than breathing and nearer than your hands and your feet”. Exactly like the objects of my photographic investigations…
Greek summers can be wonderfully minimal and when a photographic investigator gets called for an assignment from a caribbean to a greek summer, they better make the best of it. That’s what I did.
Her bags were packed for Guadeloupe, in the Carribean. So were my bags. The Carribean was the first stop in the new direction that her career as a romance/mystery novelist was taking… I met my subject the afternoon before her departure in a small coffee shop. She had a one way ticket so I had to book the same flight as her, as I wasn’t about to leave her sight. A long photographic investigation was beginning. But I sure wasn’t complaining…
I had 2 major assignments for the summer of 2017... Pink flamingos and beach vamps... I was lucky in both photographic investigations. You'll have to wait a little longer for the pink flamingo extravaganza though...
It's a freelance photographic investigator's -like myself- dream... Temperatures are ideal for photographic investigations, subjects are more open and the aloha spirit flows through everything... That's paradise.
And the living is easy... The leaving from Athens as well... I wasn't really investigating... Just enjoying that magical dreamy atmosphere, very characteristic of August... People getting ready for their summer vacation, other just coming back and others just dropping by before their next destination... Exchange of dreams, show of tan lines, friendly massages, bronzed legs, laughter, anticipation, the hope of the best holiday ever, impossible mathematic calculations in order to make money last... Just the old plain summer magic...
A photographic investigation in a parallel italian island-universe where every day is laundry day... everywhere. I was there to investigate laundries, obviously. Many of them go undetected by the untrained tourist eye... but they are lurking in the most unusual places as well as in the most obvious. An interesting quiz would be: "Try NOT to find the laundry".
Sometimes a Photographic Investigator finds herself in between assignments and they wander around observing. Everything is really amazing when you are silently observing it. Unfortunately, old habits die hard, so I ended up investigating two people… Luckily, it happened in Burano, so I did it in colour. So, one thing was out of the ordinary.
Having spend endless amazingly lazy summer days reading noir and mystery novels on the beach, I thought the beach should itself be noir, for a change…Thankfully, the few people that were around me that day, didn't notice… And like so many noir novels, that day started softly, warm and breezy and ended tempestuously, abruptly and lonely…
