7 Quotes & Sayings By Marlen Komar

Marlen Komar was born in 1948 in Vienna, Austria. At the age of 12 she joined a circus and worked as a trapeze artist for six years. As fate would have it, she fell in love with a photographer and had to leave the circus. She moved to Strasbourg, where she studied Cinema and TV, then studied photography at the National School of Photography in Paris Read more

After working for two years as a photojournalist and shooting lots of images on film, Marlen decided to go back to school and became a painter. In the 90s she took up photography again and has been living and working in New York City since 1995. Her work has been exhibited at Berlin's Galerie Martin Werner, the Philhps Gallery in New York City and Artspace Gallery in Los Angeles.

Marlen teaches photography at Hunter College and is a member of Magnum Photos and The Center for Photography at the International Center of Photography (CPI). You can see her work on her website or view more on her Facebook page: http://www.marlenkomarphotography.com/.

1
I like the disaster of the night sky, stars spilling this way and that as if they were upturned from a glass. I like the way good madness feels. I like the way laughter always spills. That's the word for it. It never just comes, it spills. I like the word 'again'. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I like the quiet sound a coffee cup makes when it's set down on a wooden table. So hushed. So inviting. Like morning light yawning through the window and stretching out onto the kitchen floor. I like the way girls' lips look like they're stained with berries. I like the way morning light breaks like a prism through the empty wine bottles on our dusty apartment floor. Glasses empty except for the midnight hour. I like the way blueberries stain my fingers during the summer. I like the way light hits your eyes and turns it into a color that doesn't exist anywhere else other than in this moment. I want it all. I want the breeze to call my name as it rushes down my street, looking for me. I want to feel grass underneath my bare feet and I want to feel the sun kiss freckles onto my cheeks. I want to hear you yell hello as you make your way towards me, not goodbye as you have to go. That's just a little bit about me. Marlen Komar
2
If you stand right at the edge of the night sky, some place where one o’clock leaves to meet two, the breeze will carry your words up to the stars. And they’ll swallow your secrets until its time to hand them over to the truths in the sky- the ones that draw maps in the black. They carve their answers into the backs of my hands, the grooves of the words running deep in my palms. Marlen Komar
3
And me, standing under the splintered night, catching fractured glimpses into the black behind the black, hearing the prayers of stars, the angry whispers of the dark summer night. Its voice cracks, on your name. My eyes close, on your name. Marlen Komar
4
You know what I love? The spaces between I love you. The tap of your fork against the plate and how my cup of wine clicks against our table. The scratchy voice coming from the radio in the other room. The quiet sound of your hand reaching across the table and whispering over mine. How your voice sounds like your mouth on the back of my neck. The soft murmur of our easy conversation. Between these quiet Tuesday night routines, following every comma and right after every pause for breath, is I, love, and you. In the middle of every I love you is a sink full of dishes, whisper of socked feet tangled in white sheets, and gentle kisses against curved cheeks. We lyric ourselves into the laundry that needs to be finished, into the ends of every smile that follows me repeating your name. We write ourselves into the grocery bags we need to carry, the cracks running up our rented walls, the sides of the bed we choose to drag up the sails of heavy eyed dreams. Like the spaces between our fingers, in the spaces between I, love, and you, we wait. The in-betweens have always been my favorite. Marlen Komar
5
Speak to the breeze cautiously during those lonely summer nights. Marlen Komar
6
The stars, like the hollow eyes of a god forgotten, marry the sadness of the exhausted hour and inspire a little chaos, a little gentleness, to those below. I look up at the sky and see everything I’ve ever lost, waiting for me. Marlen Komar