Muhammad and Paristo, North Wollongong, January 2016.

I met Muhammad and Paristo as they were heading home after body boarding at the beach in North Wollongong. They agreed to be photographed and this portrait was made on the street where they live. They told me they were from Persia and explained that they felt the word ‘Iran’ often brought too many negative and complex associations with it.

These are the first posts on this blog for some time – I’ve been busy with many things and it’s been a bit neglected.

I moved to a new suburb of Wollongong, south of Sydney, late last year. Having finished (at least stages of) a couple of projects, I wanted to spend some time wandering around the streets with a camera. I’ve always enjoyed doing this a great deal – even if no images are made for extended periods. It lets me be in the moment and, apart from other things, think about photography, what it is, how it works, why it might be worthwhile to take pictures that pretend to be a record of a place at a particular time. A lot of those thoughts meander into considering how any such exercise is very subjective and prone to personal selectiveness and chance – and therefore how it can be very naive to think that one is adding to a ‘document’ that has some kind of relationship to the ‘truth’.

Without expanding on those considerations for the time being, below are some other images made while wandering around my own nearby suburbs. They really form part of a memoir – and also contain details that, no doubt, are of some value in a historical archive (sometimes despite the actual aims of the photographer).