Photography Harvey Hale
Words Daniel Grimston
Featuring Delma
The eye of the photographer is the eye of the storm - it creates peace from chaos, finds the spirit in the push and pull of muscle and bone.
The lens, like a ray of light, casts clasped hands as praying, the taut body as a font of saintly ecstasy, the pull of gravity as the caress of the divine. It catches us, pastes us in memory, frames us for posterity to be gazed at, gasped at.
Delma. Fingernails burning like garnets. Like all-seeing eyes. Like drops of blood. Each finger, kissed, could be a rosary bead, could be a cipher for a hidden prayer. Harvey Hale, blinking like a camera, slips between worlds to catch them, takes chances by the waterline, under tree branches too thin to do anything but caress. And each photograph is a message sent that the spirit lives on - lives in us - lives out its life reaching towards us, towards us.
Will you gape when I look you in the eye? Will you hold me? Will you faint into shade when my shadow crown wilts in the last of the day’s colour, burn in the embers from my paper cigarette? We are all departing. We all need to be saved from time, from the hungry waters of the sea gnawing at the shore, making our dry feet wet as sin. Can you hear it gnashing its uncountable, invisible teeth?
