Reflections

I went by my favorite local used bookstore recently and found Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus.  The text seems very familiar, so I'm pretty sure I read it originally just before we went to Greece nearly twenty years ago.

I first became acquainted with Durrell's work through his Alexandria Quartet which I read while in school in the 1960s.  That seemed revolutionary then to me in its style and content.  Looking back on it now I'm thinking maybe the issue was more my own literary naiveté at the time.  Durrell was in the employ of the Foreign Office during his time in the Dodecanese Islands and his views and opinions seem to reflect a now stale colonialist viewpoint.  To be fair I should probably go back and re-read the Quartet which he put together a decade afterward.

Thinking about Durrell and Greece got me thinking about pictures I had made there.  I posted a few on my photography blog over the years, but most were archived on Photonet.  When I looked at them there recently I found that the text of the photo essays I did had disappeared and accessing the photos was a slow process which augurs poorly for their preservation there.  So, I collected the lot and posted them on my Photography & Vintage Cameras blog in three parts labeled Rhodes, Symi and Athens.