The Human Condition

People often enter my photographs in the middle of doing something: dancing, waiting to bat, watching a game, standing with a friend, or simply looking back at me.

I made these pictures in different places and for different reasons, but together they return me to gesture. A raised hand. A turn of the head. The way someone occupies a space when they are concentrating, playing, performing or simply being themselves.

At MoMA in New York, Lenio Kaklea's movement became a succession of brief forms in low light. In Brooklyn, a chain-link fence separated me from a weekend softball game but also became part of the pictures. In Wilmot, Western Sydney, the relationship was more direct: portraits made as part of a project concerned with the experiences and words of local public-housing residents.

On 19 October 2013 I stopped near West 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue when I noticed sunlight being reflected between the buildings and shopfronts. For two minutes and twenty-six seconds I remained in one position while shoppers, workers and tourists passed through the frame. The buildings hardly changed; everything happening beneath them did.

That short sequence became as much about looking as New York itself: repeated architecture, changing gestures, chance alignments and people briefly sharing a piece of pavement before continuing elsewhere.

You can find the images in the New York Collection and a story about it here.

I don't see these photographs as an attempt to define the human condition. They are observations of it: movement and stillness, friendship and play, confidence and uncertainty, the performed and the unguarded.

What interests me is the small amount of time photography gives us to notice these things.