Life Above The Surface

Life Above The Surface. 2024.

On a sweaty afternoon in 2019, my friend and I baked as we walked the red dirt track to Gantheaume Point, about 10 minutes outside of Broome. When we arrived, we discovered a motley crew of locals and travelers had gathered on the cliff, and I immediately snapped this shot. It felt staged and somehow almost like a Slim Aarons work. Perhaps simply because no one was on their phone, there was nothing to really date the shot, so nostalgia dripped from scene. Among the riff raff, there were hippies, and bogans, and surfer types, and European backpackers, and local teens smoking ciggies, and others yelling obscenities from the water, and a polite young family who I would come to learn were driving around Australia having left months ago from Sale, Victoria. If you look closely, there’s even a fisherman trying his luck off in the distance. It struck me that, in the photo at least, there was a perfect rhythm between all these people. It didn’t feel crowded, it felt like everyone was right where they were meant to be. All of these people, from different walks of life, drawn to this place at this time, for me to capture in this moment. The stark contrast from the warmth of the rock to the dancing turquoise ocean added to the surrealism of the composition. Down there, beneath the waves, there’s a set of 130 million-year-old dinosaur footprints that are captured in the rocky shelf. You can see them when the tide is very low. But on this day, I forgot to look for them, as I was too distracted by the carnival of life above the surface.