Intersection — Long Exposure Black & White Photographs of Newcastle
Some places become so familiar that we stop seeing them.
For Intersection, I returned to landmarks along Newcastle's coastline that have become part of my own visual memory: Nobbys Headland, Stockton Breakwater, Bar Beach, Merewether Ocean Baths, Newcastle Ocean Baths and the Canoe Pool.
I wasn't trying to document these places in the conventional sense. Long exposures allowed me to remove much of the incidental activity and reduce the coastline to something quieter. Moving water becomes mist or tone. Clouds stretch across the sky. People occasionally remain only as traces. Concrete walls, starting blocks, railings and breakwaters become isolated forms.
The intersections in these photographs are both visible and remembered.
There is the intersection of ocean and architecture, movement and stillness, permanence and erosion. But there is also the meeting of a physical place with everything that has happened there before—personal memories alongside the experiences of generations of people who have known these places.
Newcastle's coastal landmarks are never completely still. Water moves around them, weather alters them and people pass through them.
The structures remain. For a while.
Every picture I make for myself becomes part of my story—an intersection of people, places and moments.
When I find a scene that might become a photograph, I look for where light, shadow, line, shape and sometimes humanity meet. But the intersections are not only visual. They reach into memory.
These places hold things that happened to me, around me, and long before me. In black and white, blurred water and pale skies leave space for memory and nostalgia, while familiar structures become markers of place and time.
If you know these places, you bring your own memories too. They can exist alongside mine, and alongside the countless stories held here across generations.
Layers of intersection.