Facing South

The photography book lying open on the table by my north-facing window is called Facing South,  a collection of Teleri Williams’ photographs which she put together late in 2011. It is a distillation of sunshine and shadow, a compendium of “images changing within seconds when the light moves on.” (Her words, in the one paragraph of text she added to the photographs in her book.)

I’ve chosen this opening of the book because these are two of my many favorite pictures of hers, and here they are facing each other. I have the book because LocalFoodLover purchased the book from Blurb.com, enjoyed it for a few months, and then sent it on to me as a gift. My gratitude for the pictures, for the gift of the book, and for Teleri’s artistry in editing it is boundless. But even greater than all that is my gratitude for Teleri’s friendship. Her sudden death this past July knocked me completely off balance, and I have still not found my rhythm again since then. Whatever balance is, if I find it another time, it will be different from what it was during the three years of our friendship. For the three years I have been on Blip, sporadic though my being here has been, she was the audience I had in mind for every post. She still is. I have many friends here, and they all matter, but she was Number One.

We only ever met on Blip, an ocean and two continents apart. I knew her as Chaiselongue, and I never spoke her real name while she was alive. Yet our meeting was significant for us both. We shared feminist and non-capitalist politics, we shared reading and writing habits, delight in our grown children, delight in those we love and in human connection generally. We loved the spirit of rebellion in ourselves and others: in Welsh people, in people of the Languedoc, and in anyone who chooses an authentic but unconventional way of life. We shared a love for liminality, for peeling paint and aging bodies, for the well-worn layers of life that accumulate in our homes and in our memories, and most of all, for words and for images.

I just checked my statistics, and she remains the person I have commented on most for all time; and she is the person who commented most on my blips, all time. I don’t think she ever missed one of mine. I missed quite a few of hers, but never intentionally.

I am grateful too, that Giacomo has lent me his Fujifilm X100S (I was going to leave him anonymous, but the truth has come out in our comments anyway). I am learning much about myself and about photography as I try to use this camera skillfully. The wide-angle lens, so different from the 35mm I’ve long been accustomed to, allowed me to take a picture of the whole book, opened wide, with my damaged left hand visible to the world holding it. (Story of that hand is here with Teleri’s generous comment.)

Part of why I love that picture of Teleri’s on the left is that I have a story in my left hand. So I am grateful, deeply grateful, for what happens here: for the ways we get to know and trust each other, for the intimacy of daily (or sporadic) pictures, for the connection that happens in comments, and for the real friendships that develop from virtual encounters. Endlessly grateful.