Floral Mini Dress
The dress I wore in these photos is now for sale.* Snap up a piece of photographic history here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/100964050/floral-peter-pan-collar-mini-dress-small
*Has been washed since horses!
Elizabeth.
I shoot film
and write too much.
Shop vintage daily, listen to music continually, bake occasionally, imagine constantly, adventure excitedly, love longingly.
Flickr
Portfolio scrapbooks and photograph albums
I shoot film
and write too much.
Shop vintage daily, listen to music continually, bake occasionally, imagine constantly, adventure excitedly, love longingly.
Flickr
Portfolio scrapbooks and photograph albums
The Crescent
I think I have the most photogenic stairs in the whole of Edinburgh. I wonder if it’s acceptable to admit you rented a place because you fell in love with the stairwell? I live on the top floor and what really makes them wonderful is the huge skylight we have up here. It floods light onto our landing so much so that climbing the last flight is like reaching the top of Jack’s beanstalk. No giant, just a small girl with large eyes. Expect to see more of my stairs very soon. (I can’t believe I’ve just written a blog post on stairs. Oh, thrilling life!)
Vintage Bathing Suit
I’ve told everyone my latest hobby is swimming but the truth is I’ve only been once, despite their now being a pool in my street. I’m a little self-conscious when it comes to swimwear, you see and so have been avoiding the water, or parading around it, at all costs. I’m unfortunately all skinny limbs and snow white skin and look like a fish out of water (pardon the pun) in a swimsuit or anywhere near a pool or beach. The first time I went swimming I wore an old hand-me-down swimsuit I’ve had for years. It’s an oddly, ill-fitting navy with white polka dots and frills affair that makes me look and feel like an 11-year-old (I’ve been having a age/clothing crisis where I started feeling like certain trends, such as polka dots, peter pan collars etc were too young for me now) and decided I wouldn’t be seen in public wearing it again, no matter how nice anyone said I looked. So the search began for a figure flattering, age appropriate bathing suit… and abruptly ended. I searched every nook and cranny of Etsy and eBay looking for the perfect solution and came up with absolutely nothing. And then - my absolutely favourite and ever-so-slightly-out-of-my-price-range Etsy store, Allen Company Inc came to the rescue with this wee sixties beauty. It fits, it’s flattering and magnificently vintage. Here’s to a warm and welcoming pool, free of children and not drowning (more of a possibility than you’ll ever realise!)
Marianne Breslauer
The saving grace of my miserable trip to Amsterdam last summer was the Marianne Breslauer exhibition at the Jewish Museum. I’d seen her pictures on various vintage fashion blogs but knew very little about her, other than she was German and briefly studied under Man-Ray, and couldn’t find a huge amount of her work online. The same pictures seemed to get recycled from blog to blog (and now here!) The exhibition included hundreds of her photographs I’d never seen before, notebook entries from Marianne herself and information on all the beautiful subjects she photographed, most of whom were her friends. Despite her career being brief (the second world war was almost her full stop, as it was for many artists and their many forms) she captured late twenties and nineteen-thirties Europe through a lens of magical, decadent androgony no one could have bettered. You almost expect W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood to pop up in one of her shots, looking dapper, smoking a cigarette. If only I could capture a tiny piece of what she saw through her lens, I’d be a much happier artist.
The stupidest thing I ever did
Eleven months ago my then-boyfriend’s birthday was coming up and he was being annoyingly elusive when it came to giving me any kind of idea what gift he wanted. When I say annoyingly elusive, I don’t just mean he was indecisive, he flat out refused to say anything to the point of disturbingly weird rudeness. After a while I managed to get a brief list of things that, to be honest, were more like gifts you’d receive from a distant aunt or work-mate than your girlfriend. One day, whilst wrapped around each other at a bus stop, he affectionately requested a gift of something small, to remind him of me, that he could carry everywhere in his bag. An odd request as he now claims to have been questioning his feelings for me at the time. Anyway, I was extremely touched by this simple yet deep request and immediately set about driving myself crazy trying to think of something to do it justice. Several years earlier a similar request had shamefully led to the presentation of a chewed biro top. After much hair pulling and nail biting, I remembered the old Victorian tradition of placing important keepsakes in glass lockets and how moving it was seeing pieces of Charlotte and Emily Bronte’s hair at the Parsonage museum. I cut a piece of my own hair, placed it in a glass locket and tied it to a piece of string and was pretty pleased with myself for rising to the challenge and creating the most beautiful gift for the one I loved and adored. Unfortunately the relationship ended a few days before his birthday and the locket now resides in a box under my bed, but even more annoyingly, eleven months later I have a piece of hair significantly shorter than the rest, that doesn’t reach my ponytail and refuses to grow at a rate of more than 1mm a month. We are now tracking its progress with a ruler and camera. Lesson learnt.
Asylum
I don’t usually go looking for inspiration in other artists work, but whilst sheltering from the rain in Waterstone’s I came across this book by photographer, Christopher Payne. It features an enormous amount of black and white and colour photographs taken in former state mental hospitals across America. Now in various states of decay, these buildings are some of the most inspirational places I’ve ever seen. Following changes to mental health care in the US and indeed the UK, these places have gone to rack and ruin, to be replaced by care in the community and smaller faceless psychiatric units. Their degeneration and decay like a mirror to some of their former residents. It’s a sad state of affairs and an unwelcome reminder that in the days of the straight jacket and padded room, psychiatric patients were treated with more humanity and respect than they are today (at least in the UK.) If this book wasn’t large enough to dismantle my 1960s coffee table in seconds, it would definitely be a welcome introduction to my book collection.
Prints! Prints! Prints! (again)
I’ve added a couple more requested prints to the inventory. The nature related ones always seem to go down the best. The photographs I have in stock now will be the last to be (presumably) printed by a big machine operated by a man named (presumably) Brian or Nigel. When these are all gone and I’ve got my head around my new darkroom, all prints will be created the old fashioned way, which will make them extra special and me extra happy. Also, to anyone who wanted to know about photographs of the “cute boy with the glasses”, I’m not selling them without his permission. You can ask him.
Etsy Wishlist #2
I was offline for a while (in Edinburgh) so obviously the first thing I did when I came home was do an Etsy shop. I’ve taken up swimming and started walking everywhere to help improve my injured back, hence the above items. There are perks to broken bones after all.
Also, I’ve been trying to Twitter since I left Facebook. @phoebejosephine
Voight Kampff #2
They chose the photographs. I wrote the words.
Brighton Day Two
There’s a knock at the door. It’s almost lunchtime. A foreign voice shouts: “maid.” What are Do Not Disturb signs for? Morning sex is what holidays are about. No parents or housemates, alarms or deliveries; just the sweet sugary smell of sex and the warmth of his breathe on your neck as you curl your fingers on the soft skin of his shoulder blades. A sweat kissed brow on the pillow and a salty breeze through
the open window. Bliss.
For today Brighton is paradise. An oasis amongst the sands of time and normality, with an ocean as blue as the sky and a sun the yellow of sunflowers, that stings the delicate skin of your arms and shoulders like an army of invisible bumblebees marching in formation. We walk sweaty palm to sweaty palm along the endless seafront, searching for a place, somewhere deserted, away from the crowds of day-tripping Londoners, of calm and tranquillity, to simply just ‘be’.
Hove is regal and peaceful, the slow-moving old soul to Brighton’s young exuberant body. Lone souls litter the beach as if washed up by the emerging tide. Readers, writers, procrastinators and lovers, and in the middle of it all, us, marooned a mile from town and light-years from reality. My love rolls up his carrot cord trousers and strolls into the stony cold sea as I watch in awe. In awe as if watching a scene from a 1950s movie, and in awe at what appears to be my new-found capacity to love. I follow barefoot, the world at my feet.
My sun-kissed skin still stings as I lie between the soft white sheets of our newly-made hotel bed, staring out at the dark starry sky. Footsteps tiptoe nervously from the bathroom and ice cold limbs wrap themselves around me searching for warmth, soft mint stained lips kiss my neck forcing an innocent giggle like a carefree, perhaps careless, wide-eyed child grasping the unknown. He scorns and belittles his jealous friend for questioning our love and I giggle again, entwining my legs with his, a foolish sacrifice of unity over self. It never occurred to me that all isn’t always as it seems.
