A beautiful collaborative work of two photographers & poets, this haunting combination of film, words, and voice was created on a camera obscura made of recycled parts.
An Obscure Field of Vision
Up Close and Everywhere
The human condition is ripe for contemplation, but it’s the kind of meditation that only yields results if undertaken honestly. Nature’s book is full of wisdom, but you can only get it if you read to the very end.
American Mythologies: Four out of Five Doctors Recommend
DO THEY THINK WE’RE MORONS? Do they think that if they slip the word “technology” into their advertisement we will believe that their product will miraculously turn back time? Yes, yes they do think we’re morons, but the truth is actually more cynical than that.
Ripples on the Nile
The idea, a loose brief, of following the Nile to Aswan, close to where the river enters Egypt from Sudan, I would talk to farmers and fishermen and those whose livelihood depends on the seemingly eternal flow of the longest river in Africa. I wanted to learn of the potential risks posed by climate change on rural Egypt. I also wanted a photo or two, and, an anecdote would be good.
Le Gamin au Vélo
We’re given music. (And it does feel like a gift.) We’re given, specifically, a small, moving swell of music, like a warm gentle wave; a few notes from the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto. And then we return to the quiet world of this ridiculously beautiful expressive boy, to the sound of his breath, and of his madly pedaling feet.
Sense Making and Intuition
“We are privileged to live at a moment when a new story is being written about how we understand ourselves in the world. The old story said we were all separate from one another, from the natural world; even our bodies separate from our minds. The new story is revealing something quite different.”
Artists’ Communities in the Digital Age
Some thoughts on solitude, connection, and the Internet’s influence on artists’ communities.
The World of Pat Perry
But these people are working on something, they’re building something that defies understanding. In rusts and greys, the vast spaces of dried grass and gloomy sky are weighed down by small clusters of human clutter. And by people operating on a singularly American level of absurdity to respond to the lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.
August Issue, 2023
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Letter From the Editor, August 2023: The Beauty of Dazed Ignorance
“There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”-G.K. Chesterton
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