Words and images

Philosophy on the streets

Category: In the street

The stories we (don’t) tell — 2022-12-05

The stories we (don’t) tell

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We all like a good story: happy or sad, of adventure, of loss, of perseverance…of experiences in and of life.

Storytelling is fundamental to us as humans. We tell stories, listen to them, seek them; sometimes we avoid them. Stories inform, persuade, challenge, entertain, strengthen and even weaken or break relationships. They punctuate our lives; they subsist in our being, in our environment. Without stories our lives loose much of their meaning.

Two people in a cafe sharing a story with one person using expressive hand movements

Many stories are true, reflecting lived experience. But some are false, deliberately so. What makes one story true and another false is the basis of the story and its intent.

A true story is founded on, and relates, an event, action, process that actually happened. And while the telling may be embellished for storytelling purposes its intent is to share a personal experience. In the sharing may be found release, comfort, understanding, support, affinity, oneness, for both the storyteller and story taker.

On the other hand, a false—untrue—story, even though it may be based on some truth, has a different intent. Such a story may be designed to persuade, entertain, mislead, confirm biases or otherwise support a particular action or point of view.

When consuming a work of fiction—in any medium—we usually suspend our disbelief and enjoy the tale. We know it’s false after all. But sometimes, for some of us, our disbelief is replaced by belief, our biases reinforced, our beliefs confirmed. Some of us also consume truth as falseness, more evidence to support our beliefs and biases.

Fiction intended to change belief has a history as long as that for fiction intended to inform morals and behaviours. These later fictions are found in fables, parables, allegory, fairy stories; the bedtimes tales we tell our children both to instruct and entertain. To such fictions we respond (or expect the story taker to respond) with reverence, humour, belief, acceptance or understanding. The more profound the intended message the more we—the story taker—are challenged to understand, to grasp the insights offered through falsity.

So significant are stories to us that we laud successful stories and story tellers: Academy Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, Nobel Prizes, Booker Prizes, Walkley Awards. So many awards; so important to so many societies. But only for stories that exist in physical form. 

Verbal, oral stories are transient, not captured in a document, physical or digital. Yet such stories have been around for much longer than recorded stories. First Australians, for instance, have been telling stories for tens of thousands of years. Such stories persist because of their importance to those societies; they are part of the culture, integral along with behaviours and beliefs.

Then there are other stories, not spoken or recorded.

Some stories exist in our actions. They are implied. Open to reading and interpreting. There to be consumed if noticed. More personal than the truest ‘true’ story; their intent unclear, transient, confused. So much richer; so much more profound. So fleeting.

Two smiling women, one highlighting a banana she has placed at her waist.

Finally, there are stories resident in the physical world that will never be told. Objects abandoned, buildings derelict, weed strewn vacant lots. The detritus of our society. How did these come to be? What events lead to their current state? What laughs, tears, fights, loving occurred there or were occasioned by them? Was the coffee cup discarded before it was empty? Was the coffee enjoyed? Why was it discarded just there? While there is always a back story those stories will never be told because no-one is interested in them; they are the trivia of life, of our civilisation. Yet those stories tell us as much about ourselves as any other story. They simply have no story teller. And no story taker.

A discarded take away coffee cup on the ground surrounded by leaves and detritus of the city
What’s in a name? — 2022-08-19

What’s in a name?

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During my days as a photography student, many years ago, I was always challenged by studio work. It wasn’t the studio per se—the space, the lights, the props—that disquieted me. Rather, it was how all those aspects were to be brought together in front of my camera’s lens. I felt inadequate in this challenge so much so that I focussed my photographic efforts on subjects outside the studio. I went outside into the streets looking for scenes, objects, people, activities whose nature, arrangement or lighting caught my eye. And those I imaged.


Over the years I developed a nomenclature for much of my style of image making. The smallish, often unnoticed, objects I imaged I called extracts. Extracts were captured and removed from their context—time, location, culture—and isolated onto various sizes and types of photosensitive material. Extracts—the unusual, the familiar, decontextualised, isolated—were what really piqued my attention.


They still do.


And, in my older age, after much deliberation about the nature of photographs, I decided they required a new nomenclature, one better reflective of their nature: moments of place or extracts of time.
For what is a photograph but a moment of time recorded, a scene extracted from its context. Time is stilled, excised from our perception of its flow, forever preserved. As was the scene, so shall be the image, forever (notwithstanding any subsequent artistic manipulation).


Extract or not, all photographs are subject to a post-exposure culling. Many images (under exposed, blurry etc) are simply and easily discarded, deleted from a memory card or hard drive (or thrown into the bin if on film). Others lie deeply buried in islands of ones and zeros, perhaps listed in a catalogue, perhaps not. They are abandoned: existing but not wanted or needed, accessible but not sought. A select few images experience a brief flurry of interest: printed, shared, published.


Whatever their disposition, a photographic collection contains a history of its creator’s awareness, a timeline of the locations visited, a sequence of interactions with the world. In short, photographs are our past, documented in fractions of seconds, our own, personal, moments of place, our individual extracts of time, excised from the trajectory of life leading towards our ultimate end.


Life—all life—abounds outside the studio, in the streets, beyond the towns, in dark alleyways and on bright sands. As a photographer we document what appeals to us; we take instants of time and place and give them an external existence. And in doing so the images say more about us than they do about their subject.


So here’s to extracts.

A moment in time — 2020-11-26

A moment in time

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Time is, to me, a most enigmatic concept.

I can think of several approaches to the nature of time:

  • Time is a real phenomenon. It exists now and always has. It was created along with space and matter.
  • Time is an emergent phenomenon, emerging out of the creation of space and matter. A child of these physical properties, if you like. Something separate but related. 
  • Time is a construct, a concept humanity developed to assist in making sense of the seemingly senselessness of life, death, space, matter, the universe and whatever else we do not understand.

Whatever its nature, we have chosen to accept time as an independent phenomenon and to use timepieces to monitor it: water clocks, digital clocks, mechanical clocks, atomic clocks. We monitor time and its passing to provide one context to our life, the universe and the activities we engage in. We measure our work output in terms of units of production per unit of time; we assess the age of ourselves, others and the universe in terms of years. We agree to meet or talk with a friend or colleague at a particular arrangement of digits or hands on a clock face. And so on.

Without a sense of time our lives would exist in a void and be without rational bounds. Time and its measurement, are thus tightly integrated with our lives, its physical, emotional and spiritual aspects. For instance, imagine literature and stories without time: streams of consciousness; always in the now; no past from which to learn, no future to look forward to. And no heaven or hell, each of which is time-based (post-death). Everything is only now.

Without devices to quantify time, we live by the physical world: movement of the sun and moon, the ebb and flow of the tides, the changing seasons. Noticing and remembering these changes in the physical world provides the simplest of time pieces. Simple, but still sufficient for societies and civilisations to develop and function. Replacing memory with devices like sun dials, buckets of water and calendars, provides a more abstract, and specific, measure of the passage of time; an intermediate step towards personal, portable, always available time keeping.

But without sophisticated and accurate time keeping devices—clocks—there would be no GPS satellites, no computers, no television. There would be no modern Olympic or any other game or activity that relies on time, however short it might be—hours, minutes, seconds or microseconds—to provide a start and end point. Without calendars to measure the passing of longer periods of time, we would not know when an election was due, or when our holidays start and finish, when our children are due to be born.

Without widespread use of clocks and a shared understanding of their role in organising social and private activities—and indeed of the role of time in organising life’s activities— coordinating actions across vast distances becomes difficult. Even locally we have ‘rubber’ time or flexible time, in which tardiness is accepted. How could it be otherwise?

What then is a moment of time? A duration of how much time? A second, a day, a month? We all have moments in our lives that we remember and some that we wish we could forget. So why is one moment of time more important to us than another, to be remembered or forgotten? It is, I believe, because that moment is more meaningful to us than they myriad of other moments that constitute our lives.  If we measure our lives in terms of significant events or activities, what is the relation between these phenomena and time? Is meaningfulness a component of time? Does time reside within us or is it external to us, in terms of meaningfulness? 

Ultimately, does it matter what time actually might be or why some moments are better or worse than another? What matters is the meaning associated with the moments. What matters is how those moments and their meaning combine to make us what and who we are and how they influence our interactions with the larger world that provides the context for our meanings. Thus meaning comes from location (where we are the time of the meaningful experience), action (what/who we see there), experience (what we are doing there) and others (who we share the experience with). Each of these aspects of meaning comes from a moment in time, a long moment or a short one. Time manifest.

Waitara — 2019-04-24

Waitara

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Waitara—a Maori word meaning hail, pure water, wide steps—is the name of a river and town in New Zealand, a town in Queensland and a suburb in Sydney.

Waitara, the suburb, has an above ground railway station like many places around the world. And, like most suburban stations above and below ground, Waitara’s station is small and old. It was originally opened in April 1895 to provide access to the northern areas of the growing city of Sydney and the colony of New South Wales. 

Then as now, continuing population growth and usage called for continuing upgrades to the rail infrastructure. So a second northern rail line was installed passing through Waitara necessitating redevelopment of the station. The new station was opened in 1909 and remains at the core of today’s station.

Photo of woman standing on Waitara platform

Since then, modernisation and more infrastructure upgrades have continued—electric trains, tap-on tickets and the like—allowing the station, and the whole suburban rail network, to remain relevant to travellers.

But some aspects of train travel have not changed since Stephenson introduced the world’s first public railway in 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Above ground (suburban) stations remain essentially unchanged in their nature: long platforms surrounded by tracks and surmounted by a small or smallish cabin. Protection from the elements for travellers and security for the ticket seller are the main roles of the cabin. Irregular upgrades add facilities; perhaps a toilet, even a water fountain.

Upgrades are usually a reflection of the travellers’ desire for greater comfort and their expectations of a sophisticated rail network in our sophisticated society. Even at suburban stations. For those operating the rail network, upgrades are about keeping the network relevant and moving ever increasing numbers of travellers more quickly and safely.

But one aspect of today’s sophisticated rail networks has not changed: schedules. Trains still run on a schedule. So passengers wait for the next train. Sometimes they wait and wait and wait. But, at really sophisticated stations, at least they can see how long they will have to wait. And, of course, they can usually purchase from a machine a snack (unhealthy?) or sugary drink, such is our level of sophistication.

Photo of two sets of legs

Politicians now see advantage in fostering new infrastructure to relieve road congestion (more roads, naturally) and population pressures, issues for which they too often fail to acknowledge their culpability.

One day, perhaps, we as a society will value suburban railway stations as central to a sophisticated, fair and just society. We will limit roads, knowing that more roads are but short-term solutions to poor urban planning and inadequate (or no) population policy. 

Until then, visit a suburban railway station every so often and appreciate the foresight of those who, more than a century ago, established Waitara station.

Silhouette of person coming from a swet of steps