[Guelph, April 2013]

“Your eyes may be in good condition but do you know it?” - You Are Here: Thich Nhat Hanh

[March 2012 routine eye test of my own eyes getting ready for the summer, paid an extra $5 for the eye doctor to email me these]

To be followed by:

“A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unttainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married women’s wallet, the poster of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent’s bed, the campaign-button image of a politician’s face pinned on a voter’s coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor – all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality”

- Susan Sontag.

This is the first of a weekly blog series meant to bring the bits of  literary gems I find into context with my own photographs. I’ve been doing it for some time here on this blog but now I have a clever name, and weekly post expectancy. I’ve created this slideshow not to start this series, but to compile more than a year of my life and travels into one place. As this new series and the idea for this slideshow came together in fusion it just seems fitting to start by releasing both at the same time. I hope you like it.

February has been cold.

Today I said it was bitter.

But the weather, that I complain about to an endless degree is countered by warm coffee, a visit to my sister, a few day dreams. It is countered by the few minutes where I thought about how nice it is that my roommate and I park beside one another when we can, and that the sun sets beautifully through the kitchen window of a friend’s home in Montreal, and his cat (which probably knows more French than I do) knows a good sunset too. It is the smily face with the jar of honey in the morning that is getting me through winter.

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[February 2013]