see the moon?

On the far side of the moon there is a crater called Niepce, named after Joseph Niécephore Niépce, inventor of heliography and the oldest surviving photograph. It is a worn crater formation, ‘with rim features that have been softened and rounded by subsequent deposits of ejecta’.[7] It is a careful, patient activity, to observe the features of the moon: one must follow the border of the sun’s illumination, the thin region between darkness and light where the shadows are longest — the shadow terminator, this place is called. In Niepce, it has been observed, there is a small crater shaped like a teardrop, likely created by a low-angle impact.

Tell me again, I ask the stations — tell me again how nothing is as it seems. Show me how fine a thing it is to spend one’s time securing moments of illumination for safe-keeping. Convince me — I want to believe — that every twinkling trace, every glance of light is an inscription, a burnishing, a tiny percussion in the surface of time: a still life, memento mori, to its passage. Take me there.

 Section of the essay See the moon? The Celestial and the Circular in Photography by  Emily LaBarge. Read the essay in full over at The Photographers Gallery blog 

( J.W. Draper, The Moon, 1840. Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images)

the case for crying

"Salty tears have a communicative power beyond words and reason. But what happens when the waterworks are nothing but crocodile tears, caused by exhaustion, frustration or even a stubborn onion? 

In Roman times, when their husbands went to sea, sailors’ wives used to keep “tear bottles” to capture their watery woe. When the sailors returned, they could literally measure how much their wives had really missed them: It was a pretty, albeit controlling, idea. But what was to stop the women from filling the jar with the seawater their loves had sailed away on? It’s as salty as tears, and it would certainly withstand a taste test.

People don’t have to be sad to cry. If I’d been a Roman sailor’s wife, it would’ve been an easy deceit: When I’m tired, I can cry enough to fill a whole tear bottle without the slightest tinge of sadness. After all, tears can express the whole gamut of human emotion, and most of them don’t deal with despair: They can represent ecstasy and joy right across the spectrum to fear, frustration, shock, powerlessness, anger and empathy. But it’s exhaustion that brings me to tears."

Read the rest of the essay here 
Words by Romy Ash Photograph by Anja Verdugo for Kinfolk.