Holly McCrea — Model — Poet — Creation Conduit.

My Mother’s Red Shawl — El Rebozo Colorado Holly McCrea — Model — Poet — Creation conduit.

Holly McCrea — Photograph — Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

A silver ring inlaid in a black cased box,

From it comes something precious and rare.

A moment that the machine soon locks,

Cellophane strips in gray-scale fair.

I admit it, I’m a mechanophile. Pistons, valves, rivets, and tubes. The places where one component locks in to another, like where a lens fits in to a camera. They make me tingle in the part of my brain only reserved for reaching long term goals, not the same flash as when I began molding my body in the way I wanted but a simmer of that heat,

It may be from my want to some day augment myself away from my current form of flesh to something more, post-human. “Replacing my meat with chrome,” as some cyberpunk offshoots are oft to say. A subtle, future bit of narcissism.

Or it could just be that a functioning, well kept machine is sexy as hell, with the oil slick movements flowing through my vision in the same way that good sex does. Like the way that H.R. Giger fuses sexual frustration in to paintings of labyrinthine machinery, his paintings do speak to me in the same way that I see some robotics in motion.

Ether way, my memory of shooting this piece isn’t what I came to do but what happened afterwards. Digital was traded in for this monster of a camera and after it came out it was all I could see. Well, that and what it produced.

From that sexy and old technology came something that some people of my generation may not have seen and may never see; instant Polaroid [Fuji Instant Film]. A little bit of physical magic that I’ve never actually owned before. The crisp gray-scale image and the changes that the medium produced were literally stunning. I felt honoured to both have my image burned in to it and to own something so lost.

I’m worried now, what to do with this? I’m afraid to touch it lest I ruin the crisp surface with the oils on my fingers and I don’t want to frame it because it defeats the aesthetics. For now I guess I’ll treasure this afterglow and become utterly entranced by it.

Link to: Holly McCrea — Model — Poet — Creation Conduit.

Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.