Song for Dora

Harrison Roach x First Point

Word on the coconut telegraph is that The Who (or what's left of them) might be coming to our barren island this year.

It's part of what they are calling, the Last Tour Ever.

They'll keep making albums, but the logistics and physical toll of touring are now too much for a bunch of old geezers from Shepherd's Bush, London.

I for one, will be trying to get tix.

"I can go anyway, way I choose

I can live anyhow, win or lose

I can go anywhere, for something new

Anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose"

"Nothing gets in my way

Not even locked doors

Don't follow the lines

That been laid before

I get along anyway I dare

Anyway, anyhow, anywhere"

from Anyway Anyhow Anywhere by The Who

Monochrome Monday (randoms and remembrances)

Hughie parks the old car west facing the surf and grabs his leather bound Petri and hand held light meter. He knows its f8 and 1/125 second but checks anyway. He's been disciplined by poverty, the War and life on the sea.

He takes a shot of the line up at The Point and one of the family leaning against the wire fence above the cliff. It will be a few months before he finishes the roll of 36 and sends it off to the Kodak lab in Melbourne. Money's tight.

1970, the family's last holiday together . The oldest boy could soon be off to Vietnam, if his number comes up. Long haired hippies with bell bottom jeans and bare feet are everywhere. 

Hughie can smell smoke but it's nothing like his MacBarrens Navy Cut pipe tobacco. 

Monochrome Monday (Equivalent)

These first words for the new financial year are for cyclist photogs, Steve and Robert. 

Thanks for your friendship and inspiration.

Seems that, for a botanist, Minor White (1908-1976) spent a lot of time looking at clouds. He would get his cumbersome camera out and surf the light with the disciplined eye of a Zen master. Waiting and waiting and waiting and then when the light reflected or refracted in a certain way, he would capture etherial fleetingness onto big sheets of film.

Yes, anybody who was there then with that camera could have taken that shot of that barn or those clouds. It wasn't like he had to swim around the line up dodging rogue sets, anti-imagery locals or anything.

But his photographs were not just images of stuff - frost on glass, clouds, peeling bits of paint or gnarly old rocks. No, his compositions directed the viewer's gaze towards specific elements out of all the clutter that Reality presented at that moment for him to choose from. (And yes that probably makes his photos political, but let's leave that for now.) He called them Equivalents as they caused an emotional reaction unrelated to the content.

And what did Minor White do on days when there were no clouds? 

Well, he co-founded Aperture, one of the most influential photography magazines ever, still communicating on numerous media 60 years later!

Next time you pick up a quality surf mag, (one that makes you still go "wow"), take a good, hard look at the wow shots inside and consider the way the shooter chose to frame them and consider this. The shooter or the editorial designer was probably inspired by the great photographers such as Minor White or taught or mentored by those that were - shooters who knew a cloud was not just a cloud.