Betting on a three legged horse

Only a fool or God would bet on the weather and perhaps an englishman. Three times I traveled across Berlin and waited in vain for the snow that had been promised to materialise. It did in parts but nothing to the extent I was looking for so left each time empty handed with no shot. Then yesterday comes my dream snow from nowhere and I am nowhere to be seen near my snowing picture location. I think I'm better at guessing the colour of the next car that comes round the corner than the next 2 days weather. We haven't had so much of the white stuff this year and I sense a part of me looking forward to those first marks of spring. But the snow brings with it a new twist to the view one has and even as it melts and fades, it's dirty ridges and layers make an ever changing architecture.


heavens shadow nr. I+II.  2012 (rooftops of Berlin)

Stille Nacht

.... heilige Nacht. That I can't say with any certainty, but the snow that came this late December to Berlin brought an undoubted peace with it. Looking out of my window late evening the picture presented before me held such a stillness, a complex and infinite dance of moment and mayhem played before me. The snow twisting in silent swirls of petticoat lace too remote to crave but so deep and close as the deepest depths of forgotten pockets newly explored. It held me suspended for how long I do not know but now I recall scenes from the film - Powaqqatsi - from Godfrey Reggio that had the same endless stillness in motion. This is all a rather long way round to saying I could only eventually step outside and sink myself into the very same darkness. It's corney to say but if there is any such thing as a church, in the real meaning of the word, then the all absorbing silence under those heavy stained dark skies was the ceilling of such. 

Maybe more human than we think.

We are moving towards a general election here in Deutschland but I as an auslander have no say it what may follow. That sense of being mute is paralleled and reflected for many including myself in the seemingly uncontrollable maneuvers of the banks and international corporate companies. I hear it often said that the real power houses of modern europe are not found in elected chambers but in the boardrooms of corporations. Can and do these institutions have a conscience, a human perspective on what is right and wrong? Or is such a thing not fundemental to any of us instead only inherited and crafted by the environment we install. Emotionally I would find it perhaps easy to answer this but I fear it is far more complex. It was in and around these questions that I took the following images very early on the morning of the 1st May – my father always said, "actions speak louder than words" so maybe there is something human about such institutions....