BY DOMINIQUE SHAW
The months of February and March have long been scheduled loosely in the diary as relative down time - a period of comparative relaxation and reflection, a time to refresh body and mind after an intense wedding season, consider where to take my work next and come back ready to do it all over again better than I ever have before.
This downtime has in fact been an annually recurring fixture in the diary year after year and has, at the more stressful of times, served as the light at the end of the tunnel; only by now such has been the predictable unpredictability of our schedule that this period has gained its own seasonal nickname amongst our small family unit: “The Era Of Good Intent.”
Suffice to say that any notion of down time has, once again, moved so far down the timeline of the day that it’s no longer even visible in the diary and right now the wedding season looks like an absolute oasis of calm in comparison. Don’t get me wrong - the presently frenetic nature of my life is all in pursuit of exciting causes, but never has quiet time thundered quite so deafeningly in my ears.
And so right now I find myself reflecting backwards instead of forwards to find that fleeting essence of tranquility; back to another frantic “period of relaxation” in which I somehow found myself in a New York apartment desperately collating a ‘body of’ my New York street photography ready to present to one of my photographic heroes, Alex Webb. The body of work in question so far was based around a day and a half of actually being in the city and maybe one image I might, at a push, be persuaded to actually show…
That New York trip was defined not by the familiar beating pressure of spiralling events though but by quite the opposite. What idle force possessed me to rise and wander solo through the streets of Brooklyn at 3am with an expensive camera in hand I’ll never know, but somehow, well before the crack of dawn one night, I found myself floating across the waters on the Staten Island Ferry, X-T1 in hand.
I don’t know how many hours passed on that boat but there I stayed, travelling back and forth as individual passengers got on and off to carry on whatever strange business might have brought them out at this unseen hour of the day: the creatures of the New York night. But there were no night terrors here, there was, strangely, only a curious sense of peace.
With the New York skyline illuminated by the breaking dawn a beautiful quiet and stillness came over that boat. Right there in that moment without a single distraction in my mind I somehow gained more of an understanding with my camera that I hadn’t felt before and an unspoken connection to these total strangers that became integral to how I have approached all of my subsequent work.
For those brief hours, in a sea of upturned good intent, I found equanimity. And when the frantic buzz of everyday life echoes all too loud in the ears the photographs I took that day serve as my place of solace.
