Letters to Distant Cities

In every antique shop, is a basket full of photographs. There is little practical use for them. They're not the large, framed portraits that adorn walls and mantelpieces, but snapshots – shards of time vanished in the fraction of a second, their ghosts only preserved on paper and collected in a wicker basket. Those to whom they meant anything have long since moved on, the context – the narrative – gone with them. All that remains is an ethos hovering over them like an early morning mist. In Letters to Distant Cities, broken images like these are collected, neatly wrapped, and presented to us to reinterpret and to reclaim. Here assembled are 24 poems of Mustafa Ziyalan alongside 24 photographs by Murat Eyubolu. Together they form not a narrative so much as four dozen glimpse into a solitary life lived amid the throes of an urban cacophony. Over the course of these passing glances and studied stares, the viewer develops a sort of voyeuristic attachment to the unnamed woman, modeled by Jamie Ansley. But, in the weightless effervescence of Ziyalan's poetry and the glistening starkness of Eyubo lu's photographs, the gaze of the voyeur drifts off course, only to be turned inward.

The intimacy of these intensely personal vignettes is further enhanced by the contributions of Music's Rob Moose, whose speech-like violin interludes, played with a poignancy one can expect from few others, ponderously guide the listener through Shara Worden's delicate recitation of the texts. Worden (My Brightest Diamond) is pitch perfect in her own right. Her sensitive readings of Ziyalan's poetry, at turns exuberant and resigned, become the voice of Solitude that echoes long after the recording has sounded its last note. Bookended by two new songs – My Brightest Diamond's "The Sea" and "Invisible" by Clare and the Reasons – what we're left with is a collection of collaborative lyrical snapshots: a body of images united not by narrative, but by the waxing and waning of a single ethos.