In the image, Photographer On The Vacant Shore, I’ve reinterpreted David Ashley Kerr’s 2010 photograph, I Hear The Sea, which, with slight humour, depicts a man in surf-lifesaver costume, behind a wall of banksia scrub somewhere near the Gippsland coast.
Kerr’s photograph itself was inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s melancholy 1810 masterpiece, The Monk By The Sea.
Kerr’s lifesaver is, perhaps, ironic in the way he is separated from that which defines him. Hearing the sea, but lost, befuddled, divorced from his role. Like Friedrich’s monk, weighed by the dark sea of existential dread, perturbed by insurmountable nature, both the inner and external worlds confronting man in all their brute and brooding power, the Age Of Reason found itself further divorced from anything that might relieve the spirit.
Photographer On The Vacant Shore poses similar questions. Absent, signified only by the machinery that defines him, has the photographer been forced to retreat by the encroaching storm, and instead become the viewer? Rather than making “the eye the centre of the visible world” (Berger), in both Kerr and Friedrich’s images perspective is blunted; we are brought into the midst of each scene. Our absent photographer’s shadowed footsteps place the unseen camera, in the hands, before the eye of the viewer.
If our photographer, moved to the focal point of a imagocentric universe, has become the viewer, and the viewer the photographer, has the lifesaver, hearing the sea, drowned, and the monk, confronting god and nature, taken one step closer to the deep? Does this piece ask, in our modern condition, in which we can see into the heart of the atom, see to the edges of the known universe, indeed see back almost into the moment of the universe’s birth, but, here now, against the storm, against the shore, in our unsure stance, not know anything for certain?
Do I know? Do you? Perhaps it says only this; it is easier to ask the question, than know the answer, and when an image asks this of us, that, is a statement in itself.
Berger, J (1972) Ways of seeing, episode 1, camera and painting, BBC, London Accesed from https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk
