/ Naomi /

Naomi Morlan | Photographer I post about photography, film, and sometimes music. London, UK

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Jacques and Agnès.

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Mark Hollis' piano room

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“His voice was a powerful conduit to other realms. The lyrics for the last three Talk Talk albums are written on the inner sleeve, reproduced in a facsimile of Hollis’s own handwriting, but they sit uncomfortably on the page: terse, disjointed thoughts and phrases. It’s awkward poetry. It is not until you hear the way he sings “take my freedom, for giving me a sacred love” on Wealth – a devastating slow-dissolve into spiritual surrender – that the overwhelming catharsis floods through.

It made sense that by the time of his final work, his 1998 solo album, Hollis’s voice had become simply one of several acoustic instruments, his singing a quiver in the grain, a tonal blip, a north London blues incantation. The words had become almost wholly subservient to the mood, and often impossible to discern – which seemed at least half the point. His creative journey involved a gradual sloughing off of established notions of clarity, meaning, sound. His last album has almost nothing to do with any strand of popular music; it seems to exist in its own world.

When I spoke a few years ago to an executive at EMI, a man who worked with Hollis on compiling the 2013 Talk Talk compilation Natural Order, he recalled that Hollis put almost as much thought into the gaps between the tracks as the songs themselves. “For Mark,” he said, “as much as anything, it was about how it flowed.” You sensed that Hollis had reached a place where the only meaningful statement that remained was stillness. Silence was his final song. For 20 years he sang it beautifully. I’m so sad that it has ended.”

- A sacred voice: Mark Hollis sang the English gospel. 4 January 1955 – 25 February 2019  

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Mark Hollis

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Mark Hollis  4 January 1955 – 25 February 2019

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Joel Meyerowitz, Kiss Me Stupid

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John Bulmer. Woman and a cat walk through a cemetery in Wakefield West Yorkshire. 1964

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Sally Mann

From At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women 1983-1985

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Gerhard Richter, Wolke, 1971

[observando]

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

Erin Bow

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Cy Twombly, Untitled, July 1970

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Vivian Maier

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When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.

Alexander Den Heijer 

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Nina Leen, 1961

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Masao Yamamoto

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So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me because I, too, am fluent in silence.

R. Arnold