MRAO, June 2005

“I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of sudden a thought occurred to me: ‘If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.’ I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.” Albert Einstein, ‘How I Created the Theory of Relativity’, Kyoto Address, 14th December, 1922 (trans. Yoshimasa A. Ono, rpt. in Physics Today, August 1982, 35, p46).

MRAO, June 2005

I was walking with some friends in Wales, near St Davids, late in the afternoon on New Year’s Day in 1994. We were on top of a hill, miles from the nearest village or isolated farmhouse and one had a definite sense of being on the edge of things, a feeling of existing outside society. The light was failing and it took a while for my eyes to make them out but before long I could see that the sky was filled with birds, about the size of starlings although I did not know what species they were. They were flying in a flock that stretched as far as the eye could see. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them in the air, if not more, as the huge mass stretched from the horizon in one direction in a vast sweep to the distant hills on the other horizon, snaking and oscillating in magnificent curves as it went by. An apparently endless column, the birds just kept coming until the dimming light made it hard to make them out and the sound of the wind and the fluttering wings became indistinguishable. They doubtless went on flying through the oncoming darkness, oblivious to the human beings that were straining to watch them.

Up to the Royal Canal again, trying to get a shot of the water.

As the wind was getting up and it was beginning to rain, a man was walking along the towpath on the other side. He shouted across, asking me how I was doing and if I’d got some good pictures. Walking off, he returned ten minutes later. This time the wind was really blowing and I could barely hear him. It seems he’d found a branch from an ash tree which was the perfect length for a walking stick. He offered to throw it across but I said he’d get better use out of it as I had a lot to carry. It was really starting to rain and the wind was gusting and I don’t know if he could hear me as he walked off again, possibly in a huff. Perhaps I’d offended him by not accepting his gift. For it was a fine looking stick.

Dublin, 18th May 2007

Yateley 1967

[photo | Vincent O’Riley]

Lyon, April 2000

London 2010

(Photograph bought in a New York flea market, May 1994.)

London 2010

(Photograph bought in a New York flea market, May 1994.)

Brooklyn, September 2009

[photo | Jenny Mercer & Tim O’Riley]

Oblique view of Antonello da Messina’s Our Lady of the Annunciation (1474-7?) in the Palazzo Abatellis, Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, Palermo. The gallery was designed by Carlo Scarpa and opened in 1954.

London 2007

(Coins flattened on the railway line running through Marfa, Texas 2006.)

London 2008

(Stamps issued by the Irish Post Office in 1943 on the centenary of William Rowan Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions. Hamilton lived and worked at Dunsink Observatory, near Dublin, from 1827 until his death in 1865.)

Goudhurst, July 2007

London 2008

(Photograph bought in a New York flea market, May 1994.)

London 2008

(Richard Hamilton, Epiphany, 1963-89; replica badge given away free to visitors at the Anthony d’Offay exhibition, Summer 1991.)

London 2008

(Lapel badge and schematic map of the road from Socorro, New Mexico to the Very Large Array.)

Berlin, May 2002

photo | JKM

Cologne, March 2006

London, November 2005

Hacked by Kaizen :: Team_CC