Can you hear it Vicki? I want to say. It's not words, it's nothing so coherent as words. It's all of us, hoarse with calling, straining in the darkness to hear something we recognise as our names.
Cate Kennedy, A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear
Can you hear it Vicki? I want to say. It's not words, it's nothing so coherent as words. It's all of us, hoarse with calling, straining in the darkness to hear something we recognise as our names.
Cate Kennedy, A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear
In 1992 Leonard Cohen released the song Waiting for the Miracle. It tells of an aging man lamenting the time he has wasted waiting for the miraculous, transformative relationship that will finally make him feel connected, to feel loved. Forlorn and alone, he lives with a nagging sense of regret that he was blinded to the possibilities available to him earlier in his life. I had listened to this song many times over the years, but one day while driving home in the late afternoon, it came on the radio and made me think about the experience of living here in Perth, one of the world’s most isolated cities.
This series, Waiting for the Miracle, carefully combines straight documentary photographs with constructed imagery, to take us on a metaphoric journey through and beyond a fictional coastal frontier town where young protagonists cling precariously but tenaciously to a sense of possibility, hope and resolve.[1] Responding to quiet moments of luminescence within the landscape, and to brief encounters with subjects in extraordinary light, the work uncovers ambiguous fluid narratives in the interplay between images communicating what American photographer Robert Adams says we all work to keep intact- “an affection for life.”
[1] Adams, R. (1981). Beauty in Photography: Essays in the defense of traditional values, New York:Aperture, p. 34