10 April 2012

Mark Tipple’s name is no stranger to these pages. The Sydney-based photographer has mastered – if that term can be so brazenly applied to art – underwater pictures, and his beautiful images have deservedly graced far wider-reaching publications than these.

Savvy to the end, the young Adelaide-born snapper is now selling collections of his Underwater Project prints, each painstakingly printed, hand-bound and signed by Mark, the ‘run’ limited to just 250.

Where Blurb.com and professional publishers could have made life easier, Mark took two weeks to experiment with scores of different binding techniques – and another few weeks testing paper types and a way to make each page of the Collectors’ Edition handmade book potentially frameable.

Designed to be loved and torn apart for framing – or left as a coffee-table trophy – the $315 compendium features an extract from a feature I that wrote about Mark’s work last year.

Customers and fans of his often-eerie, commonly extraordinary and always beguiling shots include surfers in California, energetically supportive Brazilians and Bronte Beach dedicates, the foaming clear waters of which are home to many of his experimental images – and the swimmers who fill his lenses.

Visit theunderwaterproject.com to order a copy.

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Beauty map, part 1 // 4 April 2012

The plastic surgeon who gives his 16-year-old daughter and her friends boob jobs, Botox and lip fillers. The New Jersey parents who spent $45,000 on their son’s first birthday. The woman who lost 500lbs. The 45-year-old who claims that every time she has plastic surgery, she gets a promotion at her Wall Street job. The manorexia, celebrity adoptions, diet fads and sardonically ubiquitous therapy. I wrote about all of them.

I’m pondering my nine months in New York City. Not long enough, to be sure, to really understand a country, but more than enough time to be struck by jarring differences in approaches, culture and consciousness.

Where is America (though they are by no means alone) going wrong – economy and food systems aside – to produce such a heady cocktail of image-obsessed insecurity when it comes to ideas of beauty? In certain lights, celebrity, fame, money and everything in between come together under the guise of opportunity and to the obfuscation of so much that really matters.

Nine months is all it took to feel bombarded to the point of frustration by the lemming-like procession of identikit politicos, the carbon copy TV anchors, the whitened teeth, blow-out hairstyles and the very same pout, nose and chin shape – ‘God’s gifts’ – adorning a frighteningly large number of prominent women… and, more often, men.

But what’s caused this freakish take on beauty?

It’s a huge enough topic to warrant (another) book unto itself. And, for now, a mind splurge over a drink… More to come.

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These hands // 26 March 2012

I’m en route from Manhattan to Bondi via Zermatt, Melksham and Dubai. As ever, I’m taking commissions, writing features and working on ditties and projects along the way.

My hands look old today. My wicks are curled and that scar from a freezing November astroturf collision is brighter pink than usual. The skin is translucent, milky in areas, folding, like a crust on drying mud, as it rolls over chicken bone fingers and sinews.

But it’s strong: the pillowy muscles and meandering puffy veins push between tendons as they rise to meet the flow of force from the authoritative arm.

I mean to have manicures, I do. But a meal, a drink with friends, a run in cool rain on a clatteringly alive bridge across the East River wins, time and time again. It chips, anyway.

They’re the same hands that wrap around the yellow poles on the 328, gripping as we lurch on the bend to the Great Western Road. They’re the same hands that wobblingly held a mascara wand, aged 12, coating lashes too young to understand for whom the paint was directed. They’ve cooked mezze feasts – spreads of love and hungoverly high ambitions – and swung bats. They’ve gingerly pinched rolled notes and furiously attempted to unpick, bash and then wallop down locked doors.

They’ve tenderly stroked, lingered on that part of the neck where the softest down merges into the hairline and they’ve tightened, rubbed and naively wandered… and wondered. They’ve punctured rolling domes of fresh powder and pricked needles through resistant belly skin, sliding into the buttery flesh below.

They’ve been lifted from sweetly swinging motion – coated above by layers of wool and waxed cotton – and they’ve been taken into yours, and held.

A burn mark and two red knicks into the surface of the right. A pink gold serpent ring, a speck of dirt under a nail to the left. And those tiny, marching, riverine wrinkles.

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Bowery and Houston // 20 October 2011

They’re squirting that chemical cinnamon smell into Wholefoods’ fruits and vegetables section again

Apples, persimmons and celery, doused in fake Autumn

Is it possible to die of loneliness?

Orange and black and orange everywhere – and the leaves haven’t turned yet and T-shirts are still about and you can risk no jacket

If you want to

The beers curl on your tongue, empty bottles sit in brown paper bags

The empty fridge looks closely onto distant lives in yellow windows

They stare back, into the lost apartment, muffled in white noise

She steps out of the shower, her hair’s wet this time, her ribs catch shadows

If Halloween wards off, what brings in?

And the odd waft of cinnamon repeats, over and over.