I have too many thoughts competing for my attention at the moment. Too much input and not enough output has left quite a few pots simmering on my cognitive stovetop. One more week and I can do a mental detox. Can’t wait.
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Pots Simmering On My Cognitive Stovetop
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A Cloudy Day On The Great Ocean Road
A cloudy day on the Great Ocean Road last year. I was solo road tripping from Melbourne to Adelaide and stopped in Portland, Victoria for some food before driving up to the cliff side lookout of the Bridgewater Blowholes. It started pouring rain just as I arrived, so I ate my sandwich in the car and hoped the weather would clear long enough for me to walk out to the ridge and have a look. I got my wish in the end and had the place – all moody and gloomy under clouds – to myself for a few long moments.
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You Wanted Me To Be Right
“Sometimes you sound like one of those precocious characters in movies who are wise beyond their years.”
“But I’m not always right.”
“You have been so far.”
“I’ve been wrong plenty of times. If you thought I wasn’t wrong in those instances, it’s because you wanted me to be right.”
“…you just did it again.”
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Moving On…
Moving on…
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Total Clarity
Yesterday I finished the hard part of my ‘pre’ data collection (this photo is, in fact, part of that data). For the first time in my PhD candidature, I can see the finish line with total clarity. 30 October, y’all.
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An Unusually Long Series Of Small Steps
Doing a PhD seems big when considered in the aggregate, but it’s actually just an unusually long series of small steps. One step at a time tends to get the job done.
Many of those small moments are thresholds, the crossing of which being worth celebrating. Finishing a draft, completing an article. Selfishly: the first time you cite yourself 😂. But there’s rarely time to stop and properly soak it in. The next step is always waiting.
From today, the next three months will be the busiest such period of my life. Along the way there will (hopefully) be much to celebrate, but I’ll have to contain my excitement.
For now.
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Ghosts And Forms
[Arrow across for the full panoramic]
Ghosts and forms, or maybe the other way around.
This is three ten-second exposures stacked and fused. I’m starting to have fun with this technique.
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Summer, Y’all
Summer, y’all.
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Transcending A Lack Of Movement
Sometimes – even as I move downstream through the ‘infinite scroll’ of social media – an image catches my eye and I immediately know that I love it. Less often, closer inspection leads to that image becoming one of my favourites. This is a story about one such image; an instant favourite.
I find that more often than not, the images I like best are those of the subject caught in motion[note]Click here for a post I wrote about one such image captured by Alice Gao.[/note]. The perfect photo is something of a miracle in these instances. It transcends a lack of movement in the image by suggesting the time passed and the time to come. Of course, video can show us the moments before and after a critical, focal moment, but a still image can – if it is captured not a moment too soon or too late – be more powerful than such a video. For while a video relays reality as it happened, the perfectly-timed still image outsources the construction of contextual reality to our imagination.
Such is the case with this image of Australian tennis star Ash Barty preparing for her first match at this year’s Australian Open:
“Australians are hungry for sport. They love it. They’re addicted to it…they’re looking for an Australian player, in particular, to go deep and have a really good run.”
– @ashbar96 🇦🇺#AusOpen pic.twitter.com/Gdylv1k4gl
— #AusOpen (@AustralianOpen) January 14, 2019
Here we see several suggestive cues all at once. We know where she is – the Australian Open logo is on the bench. We know she is removing her jacket rather than putting it on – note the way she grips it and the position of her arms. She has just arrived.
The professionally-folded towels and the fact that she has yet to remove any gear from her bags reinforce the idea that the match has not yet started. She is thinking of the future, not reflecting on the past. Her face on the video board suggests that she is being introduced. She’s an Australian – this is her “home” grand slam. We can feel her nerves.
The cameraman is visible on the right edge of the frame. His would be an awkward presence in many other cases but here – encroaching on an otherwise intimate photograph of a private moment – he reminds us that many people are watching. The intimacy of the moment is an illusion; a fallacious perception.
Somebody was going to win. Somebody was going to lose. People were going to be watching. Many of them were her countrymen and women. Many of these viewers would have seen live video of this moment.
Me? I’ll stick with the reality this perfect photograph prompted me to construct.
P.S. She was the somebody who won.
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Do It For The Gram
Do it for the gram.