Religion is

The first winds of winter

Then let my name be called

Traveller

-Basho

From time to time I think about those people who, having found the photographic path that works for them, and fascinated by it, compelled to follow it, do so happily for the rest of their careers.

Lucky them.

The remaining few of us, restless souls that we are, and never quite content with any one direction, move from one thing to another, exploring, learning, then, having found what we wanted to find that period of time, moving on.

I have often thought that people fall into one of two categories; villagers, who are happy where they are and with the community where they find themselves, and travellers, who have psychological and spiritual ants in their pants, who can never stay still for very long and who need to move on. Basho, the 17th-century Japanese haiku poet alludes to this in the poem above. Travellers in the photographic world tend to be generalists, people who can never be pinned to one genre, who need to move between portraiture and landscape photography, between documentary and still life. They will spend a certain amount of time here, a certain amount of time there, but always they will move on at some point. Thus their development as artists tends to be a piecemeal thing, and as a consequence their progress tends to be slower -if more comprehensive.

Some 15 years ago a friend shared the haiku with me, and in some strange way it defined me then, as it does now. In a way it was a comfort, because it gave me a sense of my own journey, and an affirmation that being a traveller was okay. It meant that I might spend time doing documentary photography, then move on to the landscape, perhaps visit portraiture then return full circle to where I had begun. I am okay with that, although one or two of my friends find it quite amusing.

I have noticed as well, as the years have rolled by, that I have a number of themes, a number of leitmotiven which tend to occur from time to time. The swimming pool series pops up unexpectedly, for reasons which I do not really know; my fascination with the landscape is a constant, but one which I will put down for a time, from time to time.

And then there are the mannequins. For reasons I do not yet understand, I feel drawn to photograph them, to build upon an open-ended question which has as yet shown no signs of resolution. So be it. I am okay with that. When the mannequins suddenly demand my attention, I resign myself to the fact, engage with them and see what they have to tell me. To date, they have remained remarkably silent, choosing to keep their own counsel, and not let me in on the silent dialogue in which they engage. But I am ever hopeful.

And the work continues.

I woke up last Sunday morning, with the knowledge that I was going to spend the morning working with my class in the central city. At first I had no thought of taking my camera with me. Photography had become somewhat of a foreign activity to me, one in which I had not engaged from month or so. A long time for me. However, as I was thinking through what I would need to be that morning, the questions I might be asked and the potential responses, how I could best be of service to my students, a sly thought infiltrated itself into the back of my conscious mind. Take your camera, it said. No, not the documentary camera, take the Big Boy’s Toy, the full noise. I raised a psychological eyebrow. Really? I asked. Frankly, at the moment, I am not that interested in making photographs. I am not sure I can be bothered.

. The voice persisted. Take the Big Boy’s Toy. Its tone had become more insistent. There are things to photograph, there is a truth to be uncovered. My eyebrow rose a little higher. My cynicism stepped forward to defend me. It is a grey, crappy day, I spluttered. I hardly think I am going to find anything I want to photograph. By now I was well and truly in my own way, determined to trip over my own self-delusion.

But the voice continued. Take the Big Boys Toy. I am going to show you something, I am going to give you a glimpse of what lies behind the wall. I will show you a truth; I will answer a question for you. Yeah right. A Tui moment. My cynicism, born of depression and exhaustion, now had its claws well and truly glued into the ground, firmly anchoring my ennui. But the voice would not take no for an answer, so in the end I adjusted my attitude 180°, and got my gear together. More surprisingly, as I made the 30 minute drive into the city, I found my point of focus was adjusting, that I was beginning to get excited about photography again. Lord knows, it had been long enough.

I pre-flighted my equipment. Memory cards, more than enough, I suspected, Alpha 900, 24-70 lens. No tripods (both lying on the floor back in Hanmer), and not even my monopod (lying on the garage floor at home). Oh well, perhaps there would be enough light for the revelations that were about to come to me.

Yeah right. If they did.

My fingers did the usual pre-flight dance.ISO, exposure mode (AV),DRO, shutter release mode. All good. I turned the camera off and headed into the alleys. Time passed, my students were off chasing their own imperatives, and I started to look around me. It was familiar territory, but like all familiar territory, it is never quite the same two times in a row. Because nothing is ever the same, because everything moves on, part of the act of observation is being able to play the game of Spot The Difference. The bill stickers had been, so the posters at the mouth of the alley were different, told a different story, alluded to a different truth. I photographed them anyway, seeking to make abstracts, to draw internal truths from them, to find stories within them, to spot the devil in the machine.

I circled ever wider, exploring anything and everything. Somewhere in the process I had decided to give in, to submit, to stop yelling and start listening. After a time my visual hearing became sufficiently sensitive that I began to notice things, to perceive relationships and subtle truths.

I began to hear the voices behind the wall.

I walked down a short stretch of alley, checking on a couple of students, answering questions about histograms and exposure problems. As I stepped past one of them, I glanced back at the wall. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make graffiti art no one would ever see. I could imagine the artist thinking: what the f&%*! I am going to do. And so they had. It was rather superb, a testament to a desperate soul who had to do it anyway. It reminded me of a quote by the great French artist Henri Matisse, who said: Art is not something I do, it is something I have to do. When the muse is on your back, with her hands on the reins, choice is not an option.

Somebody had pulled out a felt pen and written an inscription on the wall. It never ceases to amaze me how many pure truths can be found in out of the way places, in hunch-backed alleys where exhausted plumbing slides symmetrically down the wall like fat varicose veins and algae clings to the bricks with all the tenacity of guilty memories.

Religion is for people who are scared of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been to hell.

It was nice to see that the writer could punctuate.

I made a whole series of photographs, moving the quotation around the frame, zooming in and out. Who knows? I might find a use for it later. But the voice had not let me down. It had shown me a truth, one that was a little uncomfortably close to home. The photography was easy, the pondering anything but. I began to think about the nature of enlightenment, or rather the path. To reach ascendance, the Light of the World had to suffer a hideous death on Calgary and descend to hell to reach Enlightenment. Hineahuone gave up her immortality and travelled through Rarohenga ( Hell) to reach the same place. I remembered an old piece of wisdom, pointing out that if you feel compelled to take the spiritual path, you should resist it as long as you possibly can.

Maybe the graffiti artist knew a thing or two. Maybe he/she had made the same journey.

We moved on, circling ever wider, moving to different alleys. Then we separated, and began the journey back to our cars and back to the classroom. I could not help myself. There is a fashion shop on the lower end of the CBD, where the mannequins are suspended from the ceiling by thin stainless steel wires firmly screwed into their crown chakras. By day or by night, there is an eerie, surreal quality about them, a something-more that continually pulls me to photograph them. There is a truth there, but I cannot quite put my finger upon it. So I photograph it, whenever I am passing, because photography allows you to do that, to store moments for later perusal and analysis. I spent a little time and made some photographs of them. And left.

Two disparate photographs, two disparate scenes. As I looked at them in Lightroom, however, I sensed a commonality, as if the broken thread of the text on the wall was somehow interwoven with the mannequins suspended from the ceiling. When I combined them, and used masking layers to reveal and hide, I had a feeling of picking up two pieces of thread from two different places and finding, to my utter amazement, that each belonged with the other.

What, of course, they were trying to tell me I was not sure. The simple statement on the wall had somehow become a novel, a visual War and Peace stretching to 2500 pages. It was a message of enormous complexity and infinite layers, written in a language I had yet to learn.

I had heard the voices behind the wall. They had kept their promise.

But I have no idea what they were trying to tell me.