'Signs of Symmetry'
This fragment is, in fact, the first Buoy Archives piece I completed in it's entirety. I have to confess to leaving the temp track that I edited the piece to in place - it's an amazing lingering atmos track by Sonora Pine, the super group made up of members of Rachels, Rodan and June of '44 (who along with The Shipping News and, of course, Slint, inspired much mediocre sea-faring poetry/writing/film stuff on my part). As is often the case, it is hard to abandon the temp track, even in a sketch like this, once the edit is over. I was unable to part with this amazing, haunting piece and hope that Sonora Pine forgive me... They should of course, immediately tell me to fuck it off if they ever chance across it and find it offensive. I am at your service, Sonora Pine.
This piece came about through three strange events. Two were witnessed from the rooftops of the city in which people were seen, alone or as satellites to each other, within the geometries of their own lives. The third was witnessed suring the September 11 (2000, before the date came to have a semiotic life beyond definition) anti-globalisation protests in Melbourne. Over the 3 days of the stand off (and subsequent police brutality, media spin etc. etc.) I was able, at one point, to clamber up to a point, with my Canon814, and film the strange, static stand off between the protesters and the police. A geometry of opposition. There was some later excitement as I was pursued from my position several blocks by some angry cops when, for some retrospectively amusing reason, I fled with defiance, sure I had 'captured' something. They must have been having Zapruder flashbacks watching me film with the super8 while everyone else around was filming the movement of police in the flurry of miniDV cameras that is now the landscape of protest.
I still have a lazy obsession with taking photographs of the ways people inhabit space in solitude. I always think of these clusters of photos as 'geometries' as the subject is usually the arrangement of dead space rather than the subject themselves. Maybe my interest in this also comes from a cowardice or voyeurism that makes it easier to photograph people in these dead moments, or to photograph dead space without humans, rather than look someone in the eye and exchange something meaningful as payment for an image.
Some geometries from recent years:
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