The Red Shoes

"People often ask me: 'how do you define the ballet?' and I tell them that for me, it is a religion and like all obedient religious zealots, I am prepared to die for my art!"

Secret Cinema presents...

A Poem on the Underground

The last train is nearly due,
The underground is closing soon,
And in the dark deserted station,
Restless in anticipation,
A man waits in the shadows.

His restless eyes leap and scratch,
At all that they can touch or catch,
And hidden deep within his pocket,
Safe within it's silent socket,
He holds a colored crayon.

Now from the tunnel's stony womb,
The carriage rides to meet the groom,
And opens wide and welcome doors,
But he hesitates, then withdraws
Deeper in the shadows.

And the train is gone suddenly
On wheels clicking silently
Like a gently tapping litany,
And he holds his crayon rosary
Tighter in his hand.
 

Now from his pocket quick he flashes,
The crayon on the wall he slashes,
Deep upon the advertising,
A single worded poem comprised
Of four letters.

And his heart is laughing, screaming, pounding
The poem across the tracks rebounding
Shadowed by the exit light
His legs take their ascending flight
To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel

Ominous Skies

The clouds are becoming creepier everyday, but make for some cool photos. Do they predict a coming Armageddon? Does it mean an evil force has been born? You can make up your own ghost story while admiring the eerie beauty...

Love is in the Paint

I am not the girl who falls in love more easily in February or paints hearts on her face with pink lipstick on the 14th, but sometimes it's funny how the world encourages you to embrace some of the fun in the strangest of ways. I mean look at this paint I was working with the other day. It's a mix between watery purple and silver, which later rose to the surface to make this "love"ly shape...

 Not a broken heart, just an incomplete one... (am I going to deep into this?)

For the more abstract minded: it could also be clever shading...

A Favourite Photographer: Ben Hassett

Mystery, strategic color, contrast and drama. Those are the words that describe this fine art and fashion photographer's work. He brings art to fashion and fashion to drama...

Photos: http://www.benhassett.com/

The Mysterious

Paolo Roversi and the Meaning of Magic

Paolo Roversi was born in Ravenna in 1947 and started out in a cellar for a darkroom. Some of his first jobs included photographing a funeral and celebrities, but he moved to Paris in 1973 and after working as a journalist for the Huppert Agency, he turned to fashion photography. He has worked for a large variety of fahion magazined, including Elle, Depeche Mode and Marie Claire (who gave him his first big break.)

I love how he makes his subjects seem mysterious, intriguing, maybe even out of this world.

 "Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but was is no there. Every photograph is an encounter, an intimate, reciprocal confession."

- Paolo Roversi 

Photography is art, but in his photos, there is a romantic meeting between fine art and photography.

"Like any art worthy of the name, the most brazen lie can evolve into surprising and seductive truth."

- Paolo Roversi

For more: http://www.paoloroversi.com/

Ghost Bakery

You find this little, abandoned bakery or "Backerei" in the ghost town, Luderitz, in Namibia. However, instead of freshly baked bread and cakes, it is filled to the brim with desert sand and you never know if the baker will make himself visible when you visit...

Ghostly Street Lights

I have always had a fascination with all things mysterious and all things ghostly. I believe in spirits, but not in the usual perception or "stereotype" of what a "ghost" is. I believe there are things around us we cannot explain, but they are there to protect rather than harm or scare us. City streets carry an air of ghostly mystery and that's why I cannot live anywhere else...

Mystery Man

My grandfather, Daniel Retief, who was a filmmaker, writer and actor, took a photo of a man at a train station in the middle of the Karoo, South Africa and I based this charcoal sketch on that photo. The man was well-known at the station, but he never soke to anyone and no one knew who he was or where he came from. He just waited on the station plaform for a train that never came and witnesses described him as a "eerily calm and content soul." This was in the 1940's and 50's when my grandfather was a young man, but the story still circulates in through those lonely farm towns.