PortFire

Archives from 2011-2025

Tag: fashion

  • “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”

    “The dream has gone
    But the baby is real
    Oh you did a good thing
    She could have been a poet
    Or, she could have been a fool
    Oh you did a bad thing
    And I’m not happy
    And I’m not sad”

    —-the Smiths, “This Night has Opened my Eyes”, from Hatful of Hollow, a compilation album released 12 November 1984, Rough Trade.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatful_of_Hollow

    featuring Model: Liz Walz wearing a handmade dress by Susan Hickman for Crocker House FashionShow
    Photograph by Michelle Gemma

  • Seventeen Seconds

    1.   “A Reflection”
    2.   “Play for Today”
    3.   “Secrets”
    4.   “In Your House”
    5.   “Three”
    6.   “The Final Sound”
    7.   “A Forest”
    8.   “M”
    9.   “At Night”
    10.   “Seventeen Seconds”

    Photo Narrative
    “Seventeen Seconds”
    featuring Model: Titus Abad
    all Photographs by Michelle Gemma
    Eolia Mansion at Harkness Park, Waterford,  CT  USA
    Photo Captions  from the album “Seventeen Seconds” by the Cure (1980) Fiction Records
    I picked up this album in 1992 at the Heathrow Airport in London on a trip with my friend Matthew Hannan, on our way back from a visit to Megen Cox in Scotland.
    An important trip as I brought a camera along and shot my very first roll of film, almost completely damaged by the airport x-ray. But the remaining frames, developed with assistance by Matthew Mclaughlin at the first Greenman Collective at Alice Court in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, led to the cover shot for Green, the Red Beard, a book of poems by Hannan, on Hozomeen Press.  Full Circle, here we are, together again at PortFire.

  • Long Day’s Journey Into Night

     

    “The fog was where I wanted to be.”
    “Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here.”
    “Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead.”
    “I didn’t meet a soul.”
    “Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.”
    “That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.”
    “Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land.”
    “The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea.”
    “As if I had drowned long ago.”
    “As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”

    featuring Model: Kathryn O’Reilly
    all photographs by Michelle Gemma
    Photo Shoot for Aquarius:
    Personal Universe series
    24   August  2018
    Bluff Point,  CT  USA
    Eve of the Full Moon
    script:  Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night excerpt:
    https://michellegemmaphotography.com/
    https://michellegemmaphotography.wordpress.com/

  • The Balance of Power

    The woman is perfected.
    Her dead
    Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
    The illusion of a Greek necessity
    Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
    Her bare
    Feet seem to be saying:
    We have come so far, it is over.
    Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
    One at each little
    Pitcher of milk, now empty.
    She has folded
    Them back into her body as petals
    Of a rose close when the garden
    Stiffens and odors bleed
    From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
    The moon has nothing to be sad about,
    Staring from her hood of bone.
    She is used to this sort of thing.
    Her blacks crackle and drag.

     

    a new photo narrative featuring Model: Jane Alice
    as my LIBRA
    for the new series: Personal Universe, an astrological study starring the model stable of Michelle Gemma (2017-2018)
    Photograph by Michelle  Gemma
    27 July 2018
    Stonington Boro, CT  USA
    Full Moon Lunar Eclipse

    https://michellegemmaphotography.com/
    https://michellegemmaphotography.wordpress.com/

    featuring the Poem:
    Edge      by      SYLVIA PLATH

     

     

     

     

  • Something has Ended and a New Cycle Begun

    “New Moon in Gemini”

    featuring Model: Liz Walz
    2 November 2017
    Stonington,  CT   USA
    Photograph by Michelle Gemma
    from the new series: Personal Universe, an astrological study starring the model stable of Michelle Gemma (2017)

    https://michellegemmaphotography.com
    https://michellegemmaphotography.wordpress.com/

  • Don’t Take The Ring

    “Don’t Take The Ring!”

    from the “Don’t Take the Ring” series
    featuring Model: Piper Meyers
    April 2016
    Mystic, CT  USA
    Photograph by Michelle Gemma
    https://michellegemmaphotography.com/
    https://michellegemmaphotography.wordpress.com/

  • Dark Fantasy

    “hey, teacher, teacher
    tell me how do you respond to students?
    and refresh the page and restart the memory?
    respark the soul and rebuild the energy?
    we stopped the ignorance, we killed the enemies
    sorry for the night demons still visit me
    the plan was to drink until the pain over
    but what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?”

    featuring Model: Kathryn O’Reilly
    Mystic, CT USA
    Photograph by Michelle Gemma

    https://michellegemmaphotography.com/

  • Take Me With U

    Don’t care where we go
    I don’t care what we do
    I don’t care pretty baby
    Just take me with u

    featuring Model: Morgan Vail—from the ongoing series “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl”—
    a timeline of photographs over 17 years with the same model
    June 2015
    Mystic, CT USA
    ‪Photograph by Michelle Gemma

    ‪https://michellegemmaphotography.com/