Trusting my gut
This one is about making and losing friends as an adult, Surrealists in bathtubs, and an upcoming photography exhibition in Scotland.
Sometimes when I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop, I survey my surroundings to locate pairs of friends catching up over a brew. Eavesdropping on their conversations is often more engrossing than my book. Not because their dialogue is more narratively compelling, but because I like analysing who is dominating, and who is nodding along, only able to chime to ask the other a question to propel the story along. Ah, I hate being that boring, silent person, but wouldn’t it be worse if you were reading this, and realising that you are the other person taking up all the air?
It’s from this eavesdropping exercise that I’ve learnt to be more selective with the people I choose to let in. I will not allow toxicity to fester in my friendships anymore. That’s not to say I don’t relish meeting or befriending new people. I just trust my gut nowadays. And my gut said “yes!” when I met Laura Prieto.
The first time I met Laura, she told me how she was just back from a trip with a group of six strangers she met online. Bonding over their mutual love of analogue photography, they travelled across Europe to congregate at an old house in the heart of Tuscany. They had little trepidation about how they might get along. Their first evening together was spent drinking wine and swapping stories. The following morning, they stripped naked and climbed into the bathtub, taking turns posing for each other’s cameras.
I think I must’ve latched onto this bathtub anecdote because it reminds me of the Surrealists’ frivolities in Cornwall, summer of 1937. Not the orgy part (though I haven’t been explicitly told that didn’t happen) but the fierce and purposeful artistic collaboration which occurred during their stay at a manor house. Locked in time, their Cornish expedition was memorialised in a photo album and discovered decades later by the son of Lee Miller, the extraordinary British photojournalist. Gathering his reflections on the chaotic and orgasmic holiday, the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard noted in his diary: “I remember watching Lee taking a bubble bath, but there was not quite enough room in the tub for all of us.” Of course, Miller took possibly the most radical baths of all time on 30th April 1945. (Anyway, I’m digressing too much - this newsletter was not intended to be about baths).
What bonded Laura and her new friends - Agnieszka, Angélica, Caroline, Ira, Maria and Sophia - was a longing for touch and experimentation which they’d been missing for two years. With lockdown restrictions lifted, Tuscany was their secluded, secret meeting point. I’ve seen the results - a mesmerising and mysterious photography series made by seven new friends. Somehow, I feel like I know these women through Laura’s anecdotes, and the seven unique sets of photographs which capture their Tuscany episode. They’ll be uniting again in November for their joint exhibition, Crossing Borders - A Journey to Sisterhood, in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’ll definitely be going, and I would love if you came along and supported them to. Details below.