I've finished college. While an easy sentence to write, I'm finding the content of it hard to connect to.
Finished college.
People ask what my plans are for the summer, the rest of the year, "the real world". My answer is usually some variation of a nervous joking laugh, talking about how my focus was primarily on finishing my graduation project so long term hasn't been in my field of vision, finishing with general buzz words around travel.
And travel sounds amazing. I would love to run away. But what happens to the books and prints I've collected, the boy I've been with for two years? And how does a person with €300 to their name run away, exactly?
I have no resolution to these questions at the moment. Maybe I'll start waiting for a sign. I'm sure that's a realistic way to continue living my life for now ...
Last summer I walked 1,100km through France and Spain.
Over the past few months I've made a small book of the photographs I made while away. Who knew that the walking would be the easy part!
I spend several morning, afternoons, and evenings in college staring at different line-ups of similar sequences, trying to understand how exactly it is you make a book. Deciding on one image can take all day, and a week later that same picture is in the trash pile and there's a completely different and possibly better flow to the piece.
I learnt that time away from your own work is very necessary. Some images that you love realistically are not the best for the piece. There is still one (and a half) photographs that I wish had made it into the book.
For the printing of the main book I worked with Ex Why Zed, a zine printers based in the UK. The information about InDesign and types of paper, folding, bleeds, etc. on their website is fantastic. It gave me the power to work through everything myself. Who knew an image changed so drastically when you convert it to CMYK?
The wrapping around my book contains all the stamps I collected as part of the Camino pilgrimage. Finding a place that could print affordably onto tracing paper took some time but eventually I had a light-bulb moment - a blueprinting lab.
The blue band holding the book and tracing paper wrap together is card I had cut and glued, with embossing from the thesis printing centre down the road.
If you feel like buying one, go over here!
Here's a flick-though of the first few pages:
A week and a bit ago, I had the pleasure of shooting some film stills for The Screaming Scull, a grad project for Film & TV at IADT. Shot as a live TV broadcast (one continuous take) the drama is based on a supposedly true ghost story from England at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fearing he is being haunted, a retired sailor calls on the help of his daughter, a detective's secretary, to solve the mystery.
I've walked passed the coffee shop above a number of times, but always feel like I'm not supposed to actually look at it.
Hello!
For a while I've been feeling like this site is getting a little cluttered, and so I am super excited to say that this morning I built a separate sit for all 'Climbing and the Outdoors' photography I do. That's not to say a small bit won't still crop up on this side, but now everything is starting to feel a little less claustrophobic.
I chose the name allezberry originally as a twitter handle; because 'allez' means 'go', and is a very popular climbing phrase of encouragement in the climbing world. Also, it sounds a bit like 'ellie'. Now I use it for multiple platforms, and so I thought it fitting name for a new website.
This website isn't going anywhere. It's going to remain my 'personal' site, with all the non-climbing work I create on it. The only changes will be me finishing the spring clean so the place has a flow to it.
So go flick through the galleries on the new site (click the image above) and tell me what you think!
... and here it is! Now that that's over, time to remember how to make photographs.
(Thesis title: The Poetics and the Politics of Imagery: National Geographic's representation of place through Instagram)
A mini 24hrs in Belfast, where my camera died half way though ...
And here's to two years with this silly boy
