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| John Chiara |
7th April, 2011
Whilst leaping Lee Friedlander shoots famously from the well cushioned drivers seat of his car, there's this Californian chapee called Chiara who does it from just in behind his own cumbersome conveyance (take photo's that is).
Using a camera big enough to house a family of four, John Chiara exposes directly onto mural sized Cibachrome positive paper, dodges and burns during the picture taking process and develops in an old sewage pipe. The end result is purely aesthetic in nature - you know, big, limited edition of one, moody vistas fit for the discerning inner city feature wall.
I would probably love JC's work however haven't had a drink now in 53 hours and the head, well it's just a tad too unfuddled to swoon. See I reckon work like this needs accoutrement - and without, well it's like spag bowl without Parmesan - the magic I think lies in the coupling. So the next time I tumble from the wagon I'll head straight for Chiaras monoliths and experience the holistic hubris in it's heightened hentirety.
And the big trailer camera thing did have a definite Crocodile Dundee correlation...
Pondering Chiara quite favorably, my train of thought, despite being on a bus was abruptly truncated. Two adolescent females boarded with full metal trinkets jangling and a collective swagger brazen enough to undo any baggy panted Italian Prime Minister. Sprawling themselves just in behind Nowhere like some public performance piece for the latest Lolita lounge pose, I instantaneously lost control and felt my 'big camera' thought bubble pop ... arrgghh teenage girls - the scourge of the mild mannered, middle aged contemporary male. You see I was traveling south from Manly on the 143 last Sunday morning when the pair of semi naked 'like' parrots began leaning aggressively into my curious head space. A tinny noise maker up on high began cranking it's aural outrage - spitting the usual misogynistic, African American bling rant from it's shameless cathodes, you know the stuff ...
"Bout my giiirlll and the dark streets of her inner boottee,
Huh huh, hee hee, yaaarrr,
Haven't smiled since grade skool,
Huh huh, hee hee, yaaarrr,
My momma was a user my dad a real tool,
Huh huh, hee hee, yaaarrr,
I'm cut like a God aint nobodies fool,
Huh huh ... etc"
And as the bus crawled through the rapacious avenues of Neutral Bay, the hood looked kinda shiny, a mean 150K the word on the tree lined streets. The musical interlude was accompanied by continual convo's shouted into the non crooning phone ... "Yeah so like f**kin get to like Chatswood ya mole - you like banned from Chatswood ? Well like f**kin get there ya bitch !"
Nowhere Man gritted his splintered incisors knowing far better than to take issue. Gripping the arm rest I stared out towards an imaginary mogadon dispenser, my mind drifting to mass murder, Victor Meldrew and ultimately Dostoevsky's Idiot,
"He was in a state of nervous excitement and perturbation; he noticed nothing and no one; and he felt a craving for solitude, to be alone with his thoughts and his emotions, and to give himself up to them passively. He loathed the idea of trying to answer the questions that would rise up in his heart and mind, 'I am not to blame for all this', he thought to himself, half unconsciously."
Hopping off up beyond the Crows Nest, the ordeal had finally pushed into the annals of the past tense. Naturally I headed straight for Facebook to vent my kidneys and the lower half of a somewhat addled pancreas, reasoning soundly, 'why should ones spleen be the only organ fully aerated ?'. Before sundown I'd joined the worthy Facebook groups -
"I can't stand teens who play music (no wait) noise at the back of the bus"
&
"The I can't stand teenagers playing music on mobile phones on the bus group!"
The latter of these included an insightful quote from Lidja Peel of Dorset who noted, "this week there were two chav girls playing the new Rhianna song over and over and over and over ... as well as talking really really loudly ... I wanted to slap them !"
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| Photo - Andrew Stark |
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