March 02, 2016

What Lies Beneath: Exploring the illegal Catacombes of Paris

March 02, 2016/ Anna Hartley

There’s a world you don’t see. Under your feet. A dark, wet, scurrying world. A muddy, candle-lit, labyrinthine world. Of immeasurable interconnected tunnels, dislodged boulders, vaulting galleries. Private dens, stone-carved temples and sprayed artworks. A world of pit-pat drips and natural springs, sagging electrical wires and bones.

A burrowing, endless honeycomb of a world under the huge, light, airy city you walk through every day. And one evening, this girl fell down the rabbit hole.

October 02, 2015

Anna's Adventures: Brewing beer on a 40°C day!

October 02, 2015/ Anna Hartley

Published in PRIMOLife Magazine October 2015

It’s more than 40°C inside without a hit of a breeze, and I’m standing over a cauldron of bubbling broth, wrestling with what looks like a giant, hot tea-bag. Sweat pours off me as I press and squeeze the precious juices out of the sopping, heavy mass, labouring to get every last drop. My arms tremble with the fatigue. I need a beer.

And I’ll have to wait another eight weeks to get it.

August 31, 2015

Anna's Adventures: Cooking authentic French cuisine

August 31, 2015/ Anna Hartley

Published in PRIMOLife Magazine September 2015

“Turn it! Turn it!”

Oil spits out of the sizzling pan, splattering my white apron and everything in the vicinity. I stand back, wielding shiny kitchen tongs like Steve Irwin fending off a particularly aggressive snake. Amid the encouragement of my companions, I flip the excitable chicken pieces one by one.

I like to cook, but usually without an audience so I can hide the chaos, the panic, the improvising and the fact that I’ve used every single dish in the kitchen. Yet here I am, in the beautiful Parisian home of Paule Caillat, aka, a proper French cook.

August 28, 2015

Rediscovering Russia, one vintage Soviet lens at a time

August 28, 2015/ Anna Hartley

When Valentin Tchoukhounine returned to St Petersburg for the first time in ten years, to sort through the home of his late Grandfather, he discovered a box of dusty Soviet-era camera lenses, last used in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Drawn to their unusual design and archaic features, he decided to adapt three of them, a Zenitar 16mm f2.8, Helios 44 f2.0, and a Helios 40 f1.5 to his own digital camera, and use them to document and reimagine the city of his childhood, which had changed so dramatically in his absence.

The romanticism of using these vintage lenses appealed to Valentin, as did the irony of literally viewing Russia through Soviet glass, but what he quickly learned was that he was in the possession of no ordinary lenses.