Ella Rose Muse: the story: A Rainbow

Tuesday 10 June 2014

A Rainbow

Some unashamedly blissful, classical, romantic and girly images today, from my latest (lucky 13th!!) shoot with Jeremy Howitt. Jeremy recently wrote a 'retrospective' feature about our history of shooting here, which was such a pleasure for me to read through. It's really nice to shoot over and over again with the same people (and Jeremy is an absolute stellar fella), which is something that tends to happen a lot; I take it as a compliment that I must be doing something right, to be so frequently re-booked for various projects.

Our very first shoot, several million years ago, involved bluebells and so we thought it would be nice to shoot some again, in the exact same place (the woodland near where I live in Oxfordshire), but not before first seeing what we could do in one of the beautiful Oxford parks Jeremy had scouted the day before, having a boat ride along the river and stopping for hot chocolates/teas in between... I'm always very bossy (as anyone who's shot with me will know; but only because I care!!), and demanded we also put a metaphorical middle finger up to those photographic gurus who think that rape fields are too cliched to be done well; and as I wrote on facebook around the time, if you're bored of bluebells, you're bored of life!!

Jeremy pointed out on the day that in this one shoot we pretty much covered a whole rainbow of colours, and what I love particularly about these images is how vibrant and sweet those colours are! It's interesting to see Jeremy's style changing, too, and I love the bokeh in these and some of the other shoots we've done recently (and the left hand side of the frame in the second image here is just beautiful in itself!!).

Without further ado:

(My favourite is the one under the willow tree.)

I had a brilliant time in Kent recently with friends; 17 girls in a huge house by the sea - what could go wrong? The weather was ridiculously beautiful and I am now completely in love with Margate (we went sea kayaking, had massages and danced until 4am in a funny little gay bar, having followed the sound of Michael Jackson and crashed what appeared to be, unreasonably given the music, a jive dance class). I'm keen to see more of Kent. I keep meaning to go there for a few photographers who've expressed interest in shooting me there, my only problem is finding the time. (Ah, the usual whinge!!). Seriously though, I had to smile at a recent spam message offering me opportunities to 'work and travel!!!![sic]' If there's anything this job doesn't lack, it's travel - I'm going to Norway, Cornwall, Wales, Germany, Ireland, Portugal and Scotland all between now and September. :-)

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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Tuesday 10 June 2014

A Rainbow