On Alana Bread and Food Photography

Meet Alana. She is the wonderful photographer behind the Australian food and lifestyle photography blog alanabread. Armed with her camera, she hops around Australia (and other countries) documenting the myriad of cuisines and the mad people obsessed with the art of food. The tone of her photographs is just sublime. All photos are taken by her.

Coffee Cravings (Part 1/?)

“I’d rather take coffee than compliments just now.” – Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Coffee Poster

Bread & Cocoa

It’s one in the morning, I plowed through Heart of Darkness today and reading T.S. Eliot and Bukowski gives me an intense craving for strong, black bitter brew. Joseph Conrad employs beautiful rhythms and lyrical turn of phrase, almost poetic in his execution:

And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witchmen, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, halt-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscoutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance.

(To be very honest, I want to hear more about this wild queen, someone write something like Wide Sargasso Sea for her!)