On Past Photographs

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.

On Human Space

Today, due to a competition called Iron Man (the last Iron Man I heard of was Bismarck: times change) I took the old way to the city not the freeway. I hadn’t taken that route in a generation. I’ve reached a place in my life where everything reminds me of something else; my trip was a revival of whole sheets of my former life.

            Witnessing the industrialisation of suburbs I’d known, where I’d stayed, lost events enacted, shops, hospitals, schools, communities overwritten, signage in new languages, blocks of boxlike factory outlets over gardens and homes. At least the sad dusty pony rides by the highway now gone.

            Parts of life have enchantment such that living them blocks out time: passionate love, ambition, joys of parenthood. Time seems not to move while within them: yet finite. The Stabat Mater we sang today tells of a Mother facing such an end: Lenten sorrows.

            It’s of this mutability of human space that Paul writes, saying how we must be changed, the places of our lives like sets to be struck and rolled away, the dramas and traumas like joys and delights concluded, leaving us on the bare structure and stage of God’s Reality.