Last night I dreamed about my photographs from art school.
In the morning I gathered enough energy to go downstairs and look around for
them. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found others, that I’d
forgotten, that had an important effect on my aesthetic. There was the time a
roll of film got misdeveloped, producing curtainlike sheets of light. My
teacher thought it fascinating; I thought it bizarre. When I printed them out, they
were fascinating. There were portraits, and genre scenes at the school. The
passage of time: remembering images floating up through the chemicals, and how
they’ve changed by now.
When I got
to choose a major project, I decided to photograph Mont Albert Road. The school was in Box
Hill, and that road is notable for beautiful trees and autumn colours. The
buildings were changing. I caught it in the 1990s. And much has changed.
What I do
now owes a lot to what I did then. I was looking for the Mont Albert
photographs: no doubt I’ll find them. I find them in the pictures I take today.
If you take a photo on the street, you document a moment in the flow of
unceasing time. The light, the relationship to beauty, the evidence of where
and when. Then chemical; now digital: always changing.
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