.
Such sad news this morning : the death of Sue Ford.
Sue Ford: Self Portrait 1961
As a star, a mirage or a butter lamp,Sue loved swimming and being near water.
As an illusion, a dewdrop or a bubble,
As a dream, a flash of lightning or clouds,
All compounded things should be seen like this.
- from Praise to Shakyamuni
Through this merit, may all beings attain the omniscient state of enlightenment,
And conquer the enemy of faults and delusion,
May they all be liberated from this ocean of samsara
And from its pounding waves of birth, old age, sickness and death!
- from Praise to Shakyamuni
Sue Ford:Self Portrait 2004
Sue Ford's last exhibition, that I am aware of, was Last Light.
(at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne and Watters Gallery, Sydney)
These are the final paragraphs from
(
The pictures in this exhibition also easily transcend an enduring photographic cliche: the coastal sunset. With subtly added colours and people reduced to silhouette, they evoke virtual, imagined tourism, one step removed from reality - creating abstractions of the truth that the writer Norman Mailer, had he applied his wit to photography, might also have named factoids.
In perhaps Ford's most haunting picture, Silhouette 2007, a young woman stands in profile, photographing a scene in which five people swim in a curving bay beneath gently serrated hills that follow the line of the shore. Ford's composition gives the woman's figure enormous scale and mass against the psychedelic colours in the receding landscape.
Ford's achievement in Last Light lies in her ability to create such pictures - pregnant with imagining, rather than literal photographic storytelling. And by reducing the woman's face and body to a black, impenetrable profile, she enforces the absolute privacy of her experience.
( full review here )
Sue Ford: Silhouette 2007
Update :
On Monday 16 November a two hour memorial attended by several hundred friends and family was held at Tara (Buddhist) Institute, Melbourne.
Later, with chai and chat, we looked at photos of Sue, her family, her many friends.
On Monday 16 November a two hour memorial attended by several hundred friends and family was held at Tara (Buddhist) Institute, Melbourne.
Later, with chai and chat, we looked at photos of Sue, her family, her many friends.
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something . . .
LOGOS/HA HA