Hope… is the companion of power, and the mother of success;
​for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.
— Samuel Smiles

You can’t get enough of a thing you don’t need. 
​— Melissa Febos 

​Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done.
— Dan Albergotti

The desire of the man is for the woman,
but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man. 
~ Madame de Staël

what if:

woman = anyone who posts pictures online
man = anyone who enjoys said pictures

is this all about desire?

The female body is like an endless sentence that invites us to rearrange it.
​— Hans Bellmer

This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
​standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
​— Dionne Brand

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.
​— Norton Juster

or if you prefer:

if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
 — Lewis Carroll

a good poem results from both inevitability and surprise.
 — L. Shaw

so does a return after a long absence...

​I'm gonna play around with this image over the next week, reinterpreting it in various ways. Let's see how it goes.

love to all of you out there in the wild blogsphere.

If there's a truer quote about these times, I haven't found it. I feel like all I'm doing right now is exploring and discarding my naked feelings. 

It's also the first Sunday the month and the prompt is "unedited." Honestly, even though I came up with this prompt I had a hard time with it. These times are weird and I don't want reality in my self photography. I want hard edits to bend the pictures to my will. I've been creating stark black and white photos with harsh lines and clean clear distinctions in the light and the form. I've found satisfaction in that lack of color, the dramatic binary quality, the lack of vulnerability.  They make me feel all the feelings about how I wish the world would go right now... and if the world can't be clear and easy to define, then at least I can put a filter on my picture and make it behave.

But instead of an edit, I'm giving you this naked unedited picture from a set I took last fall. I've posted a few other pictures from that set, a couple that were dramatically edited like this one and this one. 

I look at this picture and I love the framing and that window was so badass. I was also in another country on vacation when I took it and I wonder how long it will be before I can safely travel like that again. 

sigh.

Love to all of you out there in the virtual blogsphere. I hope you are all staying safe and healthy. 

xo