Breaking Free

I feel so much better after getting out of Melbourne. At the weekend I trekked down the Great Ocean Road with a coachload of wrinklies and backpackers, saw the twelve Apostles, proper surfing waves and some two-dimensional seaside towns. I took photos, nibbled buttery fish and chips on the beach and stared out at the ocean. Now I feel revived, reinvigorated, and I’m almost afraid to admit why.

Because it was beautiful. And Melbourne just… isn’t. Fed Square, Flinders Street Station, Crown Casino, the Arts Centre; all paragons of architectural ugliness. It’s all new and sharp, angles and concrete, blocks and sprawling roads, and – what I hate the most – the tram lines everywhere, dissecting the sky, like giant fishing nets to hold us in.

Swings and Roundabouts

I’m well aware that I’m not posting about very cheery things at the moment. I guess I’m just accentuating the negative because that’s what sticks in my mind long enough for me to write about it.

There was the creepy man rubbing himself on the bus. Groups of people that walk straight into me like I don’t exist. Jellyfish, talking into voids, pity, narrowly missing being splatted getting off the tram, being in a city I haven’t quite clicked with. Realising everything I can’t change. And nice as it may sound, living in a hotel starts to become not so fun after a while.

There are things that balance all of that out. The joyful op shop on Chapel Street. The guy on reception at my hotel who gave me 11 free days of internet instead of my usual hour. The surprise postcard from my best friend. The feeling of real responsibility at work. Realising I can make an impact. Pushing the boundaries of what I can do. Getting to know a couple of people that listen. The full moon, being able to spend days playing with Final Cut, finding a big pack of multi-coloured plasticine for $5, nice weather, cycling, warm evenings, the sea. I’m falling into postcard speak. But you get my point: it’s not all bad.

Why Better is Worse

I don’t have a problem with people criticising me.  Good job really, as it happens enough. Tell me to do something faster, make it longer, shorter, snappier, greener, cooler, smoother – yes, absolutely.  But better? Better in what way?  For who?  How?  To me, criticism is all about identifying problems and making improvements.  Constructive, if you like.  When criticism becomes destructive, a reassertion of power or just plain cruelty, well, what’s the point?

It’s like a coachman who whips his horses just to look impressive.  The horses are trotting along at exactly the right pace; if he wanted them to turn left he could tighten the left rein, to turn right he’d pull the right rein, to slow them down he’d pull gently on both.  They know the score.

But instead, every few miles he’ll give them a couple of thwacks with a grand swooshing movement of the whip, catching them square on the flanks.   He feels important, needed, in control.  The horses don’t have any more guidance or direction than before, but they sure know who’s boss.  And they know whose head to poo on when they get the chance.

Nature

p 16, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

There’s something odd about using a digital camera to photograph nature. It’s so man-made, so black and static and hard: everything that nature isn’t. The image isn’t even real in the way that film images are. Instead of light and molecules, everything depends on pixels and sensors, and the finished product often doesn’t even make it into existence like negatives and prints; all you see is more pixels on a screen.

Put a pixel under a microscope and all you see is a pixel. But put a leaf or a strip of film under there and you’ll see elements, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, energy. In this sense digital photography is a simplification of reality. How permissible is it to reduce the physical world we inhabit to a single dimension; to create something virtual from something so real; to condense all the richness of the world into blocks of light? Isn’t that doing it a disservice?

Capturing experience

j 20, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So often a camera falls short of capturing beauty, because beauty isn’t just something you can see with your eyes. Beauty is an experience, a feeling, a state of mind, an everything. Photos can only represent a fraction of all that; a single dimension.

When I took photos of a sunrise in Jersey, I was surprised the visual beauty came through as well as it did. Yet however it may seem from the pictures, a viewer still can’t grasp exactly what it was like to be there.

The bitingly cold air, the sand muddy and dense like half-set concrete, dipping and bumping, wet feet, seagulls screaming, the smell of seaweed waking up, but most of all, the neverending panorama that even a fisheye lens can’t take in. 360 degrees of stones and sea and sand. Eyefuls of sky stretching out to everywhere. Two hours of chameleon clouds, rising from navy to blue, purple, pink, orange, gold, lemon, streaked with steely grey, blinding white sun breaking through. Not just the sky; the sand itself, wet and receptive, took on every colour like a folded inkblot, punctuated by rocks and lumps.

That 120-minute-long movement, where every colour changes imperceptibly every second, is impossible to record in a single shot. The smells, the feelings, the sounds; they’re complements to that image that now exist only in my mind and in my memory and that no amount of words can equal.

What I mean is, if these pictures look like 100% beauty, the reality was more like ten times that. These images may look beautiful, but nothing compares with actually being there and experiencing it. But equally, experiencing it is nothing unless you see the beauty in it.

Diversity

nhc 19, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

So many worlds, worlds within worlds; absorbing and radiating, accepting and rejecting, opening, closing.

Where now?

ld 30, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

I guess the difference between me and other people is that they believe they can change the world. I just wish I could.

Sometimes I long for their blind self-belief, but instead all I see is a sad vision of what is to come; a looming horizon of disorder and corruption, death, money and selfishness. A landscape that’s spiralling drunkenly out of control and a future I have no power to change.

Instants

I often think how strange it is that the instant captured in a photograph can communicate more than an hour-long speech, a day of celebrations or a year of war. It’s fascinating, and sometimes frightening, to see the power that a fraction of a second can have. The instant the shutter releases, by happy coincidence or painstaking planning, a couple of inches of film records a set of shapes that will never be there again. That moment, that light, those people, that movement, those emotions, your camera… all of that will never meet how it did for that 1/60th of a second, and that snapshot can never be relived.

Places, people, feelings; captured ageless in images. My quest for photographs that mean.