13. Trigg-o-nometry

Saturday, 20th December, 2014

Hillarys, Perth, WA

It's great being on holiday. That is when I do manage to switch off from making pictures or analysing every moment because it might be a future project or relate to an ongoing project. I love it, it keeps my mind focused and allows me to question everything but photography is the kind of vocation that you take anywhere and everywhere, even on vacation, especially on vacation. Although not so much in the snapshot sense, not anymore anyway, or maybe a little bit.

Sontag helped me realise that one.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs...Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.

                                                        - Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

Anyway, yesterday we visited AQWA. It's an aquarium here in WA.

I could stare at fish for hours, especially in a big tank, with big fish. And when it's exotic, it's even more interesting. Amazing.

With Sontag bubbling away in the back of my mind I did think it was all a bit weird and, like photography, a bit voyeuristic. Maybe not voyeuristic because I'm not sure what the fish and turtle see in returning our gaze.

I imagined a mall, like the one we visited a few days before. Quite a boring experience if I'm honest but watching people can be interesting too, especially the exotic which as de Botton posits is anything away from the norm.

Well in this imaginary mall there was a watery tunnel and in this world the fish have the power, a bit like Planet of the Apes but fishy, and the inhabitants swim around in a circular fashion gawping at the exotic.

"Look mum, there's an Englishman."

"Ohhh, there's a Christian"

"Look...an African"