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Suburbia, Smart and Byrne

The first two decades of my life were spent growing up in the western suburbs of Sydney. Long summers were spent walking or riding my bike in the blazing sun through suburbia. The concrete and bitumen seemed to melt beneath my thongs as I made my way past lone gum trees and street signs casting crisp shadows, sun-bleached billboards advertising products no longer available, deceased sulo bins, and nature strips with rock and roll haircuts.

One of my favourite visual artists when I was in high school was Jeffrey Smart. I remember seeing several of his paintings at the Art Gallery of NSW and being blown away with how unique and refreshing they were. Using subject matter which may have otherwise been considered throwaway, ugly, or mundane and turning it into something beautiful.

Corrugated shipping containers became a perfect study of light and shape. Street signs and kerb-sides reduced the composition down to simple blocks which found beauty in their simplicity.

Jeffrey Smart

George Byrne (also Australian born) found his place in this same world and brought it to the world of Instagram. As such, his medium is photography rather than painting. And rather than capturing the industrial space that much of Smart’s work did, Byrne instead captures the world of suburbia I am all too familiar with.

George Byrne

The subject matter – block colours, kerb-sides, street signs, bollards, road markings, palm trees and random passers-by in the middle of nowhere – puts the focus on light, shadow and composition in the same way that Smart did. It’s abstract, yet familiar.

George Byrne

Byrne lives in California and a lot of his photography has taken place between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. I’ll be in Palm Springs in five weeks and plan to channel (or rip off?) his aesthetic.

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New York to start a New Year

In New York, boy, money really talks – I’m not kidding

The Catcher in The Rye

When I moved to Vancouver, one of the places high on my list to visit during my time here was New York City. I first saw New York in July 2011 and it was everything everyone had hyped it to be, and more. To top it off, back then the Aussie dollar was worth more than the greenback so I was able to spend a good 5-6 weeks in the US , including 10 in NYC, without burning a hole in my pocket.

But that was an exceptional time. For someone in Australia, New York straddles the inconvenient circumstances of being at least two flights and 20 hours away, as well as enormously expensive. And since it’s so far away you can’t just spend a few days there.

From Vancouver it’s only 5 hours away, and with plans to return to Australia in 2020, as well as a week off over Christmas – it seemed the obvious time to tick ‘Christmas in New York’ off the list. To top it off The Strokes were playing a New Years Eve show.

It didn’t disappoint. Returning to a location 100 months later is a fascinating experience. It highlights the differences of the location as well as the differences within yourself. Last time around I was hitting all the tourist spots, museums, galleries. I was splashing cash at every bar in town until the early hours of the morning (with perhaps a touch too much confidence), meeting all sorts of wonderful people.

The Strokes were incredible

This time around was more about restaurants (including hitting every Aussie cafe in town), areas I hadn’t ventured last time, and finding new and interesting spots to photograph. And I still met a bunch of friendly folks. It really is an incredible place. Bizarrely I still knew my way around as though no time had passed at all.

But Summer in New York still wins easily over Christmas in New York.

The year began in the greatest city on Earth, and it will end in my favourite city of all, Sydney.

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Spring Forward Fall Back

Like the sun through the trees you came to love me
Like a leaf on a breeze you blew away

Growing up in Australia, the concept of distinct seasons was foreign to me. In Sydney it’s either summer, or not summer. Sure, some leaves fall in autumn and spring time is windy – but visually there isn’t a great deal of difference aside from the length of shadows on the ground.

I was struck by these differences in my first year living in Vancouver. Not only the change, but the speed of change. I’d never seen such green tree leaves as what hit my eyeballs in spring. And the colours which greeted me in autumn were so bright and saturated they didn’t seem to belong in nature. Maple red is on their flag for a reason.

I decided to catalog these visual differences as observed from my Canadian home, 25 stories above Vancouver. I love straight, clean lines. The visual un-distort / distort treatment I used turned out even better than I had hoped.

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Whitehorse, Yukon and the Northern Lights

Back in September I flew up to Whitehorse with the hope of witnessing the northern lights. Understanding just how many factors had to work together in order for this to happen (most of all the weather), we lowered our expectations and ensured we planned other activities at Yukon Wildlife Preserve. We saw deer, elk, muskox, foxes, wild sheep and caribou. The lynx were too shy so we missed those, and the moose and mountain goats were just too damn ugly to photograph.

We also were treated to some incredible autumn foliage. Summer is my favourite season back home, but in Canada it’s the season which follows.

After the wildlife tour, we went out the following two nights to try and spot the aurora. At 10 pm we piled into a van and were driven 30 minutes out of town to a field with cabins and campfires. I set up my tripod and camera and started snapping shots of the stars, assuming this would be all I manage to photograph. Fortunately at around 2 am the magic started dancing across the sky and I’d ticked another item off my bucket list.