From the terraces inward

At the beginning of August I went to Athens to visit Aris, where we walked around in the blistering heat, stopping off to drink coffee with ice cubes floating in the glass. We visited open air summer cinemas, gallery rooftops for glasses of wine, the disused Olympic stadium, and bakeries for cheese and spinach pies. We drove to the beach, sat on his grandmother's terrace for the best view of the Acropolis in the city, and ate pieces of watermelon at a local market in the suburbs. 

I felt for a while that I could see little evidence of the Greek crisis, but derelict store fronts became more noticeable as we covered more of the city. I was amazed by how cheap it could be to eat out in the city, and many galleries had weekly openings until midnight free of charge. I was also surprised by how late everything operated until, with films being screened at 1am, and one bar that we went to closing only when the sun came up and it became too hot to remain in the open air. 

Uncover your locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers

I just found these pictures I took of Marley a few years back. She sat on the wonderful windows which open out from the bed stretched out beneath the sill while I crouched on the rooftop, with a pair of my stockings that I gave to her as the light faded fast.

He speaks in dreams, in visions of the night

The first day that I moved to Paris last year, Maciek and I spotted a huge derelict house on the hill just below the Sacre Coeur as we walked around talking about taking romantic, dramatic, violent pictures on rooftops with smoke clouds and the constant danger of falling.

After we found a huge church with intricate scaffolding and ladders up one side near to the Gare de l'Est, we planned and proposed the shoot to Vice, and then spent the following weeks scaling the church wall at two in the morning and breaking into the abandoned building on the hill, stepping over dead pigeons, whispering in the bell tower, and setting alight thick black 'fire paste' on Maciek's dining table.

I styled the shoot with Charlotte, and we spent days walking around the press offices in the 3rd arr. looking over and over for blankets and sheets to drape around the models. These are the pictures as they appeared in the magazine:








And some of mine and Maciek's references:






When we had taken all of the pictures at the end of the month we knew the way up to the roof of the church pretty well, so climbed up one last time with a giant bottle of wine we'd taken from a bar to drink looking over Paris. After that we started to climb up onto rooftops whenever we saw scaffolding in the summer, to sit in the sun and look down at other rooftops. These are some of the pictures mostly taken by Arturo of us climbing around in the weeks when we were shooting:

Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens

My first week living in Paris was filled with climbing up to high places, trying to create clouds from extinguishers, destruction and stupidity. These were taken on the roof of a tower block in the suburbs.

In My Father's House Are Many Mansions

Alice came round yesterday when the sun was streaming through the windows and it felt like a summer holiday in the flat. We bought ice lollies and flowers and put on hold-ups and t-shirts, and I took a roll of film of her around the house.












I have a few more shots that I filmed of us together, which maybe I'll put up later.