Sunday, May 31, 2009

Isabella Charlesworth



London based Isabella Charlesworth has a deep-routed passion for the macabre, the poetic, and the sensual, which is clearly suffused throughout her art. Her work holds both visual-immediacy and narrative, with a clear emphasis on texture and elegant movement. Charlesworth works as a veil rather than a mirror; and it is beneath that veil, in the shadows, that real and penetrating intimacy is found.
And while her style continues to develop and shift, one thing is certain; her shutter will most likely never hold still, and her desire to pump her images full of raw emotion will never diminish…- Malcolm Pate [video director/photographer]


A few years ago, I found a photo (the first one at the top) by Isabella Charlesworth. It was electric and haunting in its subtle, eerie lit beauty. Looking at her photography makes me feel unlike I usually feel with other photos.


While many other photos lay out the story for you, tell you everything you need to know, Charlesworth's work gives you a bit of the story, a snippet. It's up to you to piece together the rest and create your own tale.
I look at her photos and immediately my head begins to string together sentences, a backstory, a foreshadowing of the future of those in the photograph. I know just by looking at the people their greatest desires, their fears, their favorite flavors of ice cream (though, you know, not what the actual living people in the pictures favorite things really are). These thoughts come together and I see within my mind's eye a story and everything that led to that photo being taken in that space of time, why they chose that spot, etc.


The true gift and beauty of life is the mind. Because we all have minds like snowflakes in the sense that no two are alike. No two, no matter how similar in response and ideals, can ever produce the same imagery. My mind has people in it constantly, all day and night. People who do not exist except in my word documents. People whose lives I check up on with as much consistency as the real ones in my life.
Sometimes I am scared of death not because I'll die but because everything in my mind will conpletely vanish. Wiped away like chalk off a chalkboard. I wonder if all writers feel that way. If they value the lives of their characters, of the figments of imagination in their heads, far above their own. I cannot imagine my life without writing, without these imperfect images in my head. It has its good and bad days but without them, I would just wander through life in a daze, never really sensing or being aware of much.



Listening to:
-Dario Marianelli (I'm on a composer kick right now)

Love to you all,
Heather

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