Solange Noir

Let me introduce you to Solange Noir.  Soli. Sigh.  A fully-signed up member on this madcap Journey.  Found behaving blissfully badly on Twitter.  How?  Hmm, was it via Sessha Batto or Frankie Sachs (I’ll introduce you to these two properly at a later date)?  Anyhow, whatever.  She’s always worth talking to – funny, responsive, kind, wickedly naughty, real.  Here's how she describes herself: photographer, documentary film producer, poet, hula hooper, cat worshipper and sake pusher.
I'd add madly talented to the list: I am officially in love with her images. 

She doesn’t ‘take pictures’ btw; she lets her camera ‘give’ her pictures – I like that distinction, don’t you?  She calls her work/play ‘optical telepathy’ using it "to stop time, to trap shadows, to reveal hidden things." 

A blank-faced knight stands guard by a stairwell, silent amidst acid bright. Would you dare ascend? Would you risk the creak of dark armour?

The everyday is made otherworldly.  A girl stands, her back to us, staring down a corridor of scaffolding.  A dark shape waits.  Dog?  Beast?  Monster? We tell the story we hold in our own hearts and minds.  Nobody else's. Nobody else is.

Guardian. A psyche-delish sky –  burning trees branching ganglia into sky blue. Stone Bast, haunched on orange spine.  Pet-rified. 

Worlds reflected. Glance into the gutter and see sky revealed – clouds and space in a sea-puddle.  What is beauty?  Where is beauty? 

A crack in the pavement becomes a threshold; a manhole a portal. Liminal places. Litoral spaces. Without walls as interstices.  The blurring inbetween places. Where elements uneasily meet. 

Time is liminal too.  The precipice – the moment before stepping into the void, sun-induced vertigo. A coat left on railings.

Shadows walk the streets.  People march brashly from or into fairytale, from nightmares, from hinterworlds without passports.  Assaults of colour in a world bleached monochrome.  Shrieks of edible E-number buildings.  Fade to grey.

Colour.  Light transmitted or reflected; wavelengths.  Interest, variety, intensity.  An outward appearance that may be deliberately misleading.  To modify, deceive or distort; to affect in thought or feeling. The characteristic of quarks; the timbre of sound.

See, this is why I sometimes despair of words.  All that verbiage and you probably haven’t a clue what I’m on about.  Yet in one nanosecond an image can say all that – and more, far more. Because everyone sees differently.

You can buy prints of her images... And, damnit, she writes a blog too... wittynoodles.blogspot.com  and she’s producing a film on Gothdom.  Take some time to make her acquaintance.  While you do, some music, I think...a brace of tunes that popped up and demanded to join this post. J

Forgot to say, all the images on this post belong to Soli and are reproduced here with her kind permission.