iRelle

Today’s Photoblog is an exhortation of the works of Man Kissing Bird on Flickr.

This girl is truly amazing. I have known her since grade 10 (or was it 9?) when we stumbled into each other in our high school art class. Since then our paths have crossed at random intervals… sharing bus trips, college art and english experiences and comparing taste in music, clothing, poetry and art styles. Our lives are pretty much poles apart, so we tend to clash on those things more often than we agree (with a range of interests as wide as hers, there had to be a few things that overlapped.) But then she moved to Brisbane. Since then, I’ve mostly been jealously watching her flickr as a very one-sided means of staying in touch. (or so I’ll know when she gets rich and famous, so I can boast about knowing her in high school!)

But the things she comes out with constantly amaze me. So much gladness, colour and youthful frivolity in one shot… a menacing, slightly disturbing out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye glimpse of something in the next. She doesn’t just capture a pretty picture or a well-composed frame, but there’s always something of herself shining through… some hint of her mind, her heart… her soul.  She puts herself into every photo (actually, she does that a lot in a physical sense, as well) and just from one glance you get a sense of her mood, her thoughts.

I love that these photos have so much hidden in them… and so much revealed. Colours are combined in ways that make me implausibly happy, and often shots are ripped apart or welded to each other in extreme and beautiful ways… and the key to how you interperet them is buried in what you bring with you.

The photos uploaded yesterday blew my mind away. She calls it being a ‘photoshop amateur’… …If that’s the case, save some awe for when she develops some serious skills. Also, the captions, the little explanations and almost-poems scattered throughout the photostream are well worth taking the time to read. Maybe they’ll let you in on the secret, or maybe they’ll just baffle you more. Read them, look at the photos…  twist your mind to fit them, because they’ll never just slide right in.

But definitely head over to Flickr and check out the incredible, fantastical stories  Man Kissing Bird tells.