I found this image of my dad while scanning the negatives taken at my Ma’s place earlier this year.
Every day on his way home from work my dad would drop by to say hello. I was alone at my grandparent’s old place so it was good to have someone to chat to and I appreciated the daily ritual.
On this particular day I’d been attempting to mow the lawn for the first time in several weeks. It was the end of Summer and had been raining incessantly. The grass loved it. The push-mower didn’t. After the mower stalled one too many times, probably from chopping up some decaying and soggy chokos, I gave up. I decided it was more interesting to take photographs of the mower stuck in the grass. That was when Dad arrived and I took this image.
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It was Dad who first inspired my love for photography. He has always been a passionate hobby photographer. When my parents bought me my first camera at the age of 10, Dad taught me how to use it, how to compose a decent image and helped me earn my ‘Photography badge’ in Brownies.
Dad would put on slideshows of his images when we were younger (and he sometimes still does). The images he’d show were usually holidays, birthdays, flowers and the various parrots, kookaburras or wallabies that would visit our garden and stay still long enough for him to fetch his camera. As a child I found slideshow nights really exciting. We’d turn off every light in the house. My parents live in the country so the house would become pitch black. It seemed to me that the darkness amplified all the sounds of the night world – wild dogs barking, the mopokes, the crickets and the unidentified scufflings.
Back then Dad shot all his images on transparency film. When he turned on the projector it would always smell like burnt dust until it warmed up. Every image change was punctuated by the clunky sound of the old projector switching frames. It would jam up at least once every slideshow and we’d have to sit in the complete darkness or protecting our eyes from the glaring bright white-ness until Dad fixed it.
While we waited I loved to watch the floating dust that illuminated like stars in the projector’s beam. It was a tiny, lazy, swirling universe in our living room. Eventually an image of someone blowing out candles or a bird-of-paradise would reappear on the screen and the universe would be forgotten.
Thinking on these connections in my past I realize this fascination with the beauty in everyday things is part of what drives my recent photography. My images seek the sublime in the smallest of details that surround me – shadows, contrails, water-drops, floating dust or even long, un-mown grass.
