There was a time when I didn’t really look at places the way an artist does.
I visited them. I passed through them. I worked in them. But I didn’t see them—not in the way photography later taught me to see. This image from Catherine Hill Bay, taken in the quiet glow of twilight, comes from a period in my life when I was only just learning how to explore the world with open eyes and an open heart.
It was also a time shaped by loss, exhaustion, and a deep sense of helplessness.
Not long before I made this photograph, I had returned from the Australian Defence Force assistance mission following the Boxing Day Tsunami. The scale of that disaster is hard to put into words. Entire communities erased. Families shattered. Suffering everywhere you looked. No matter how much effort went into helping, it never felt like enough. It left me feeling small, powerless, and hollowed out by the sheer weight of it all.
Then, soon after coming home, I heard about the crash of a Sea King helicopter.
One of the people killed was a doctor who had been my roommate during the operation. The kind of person who gives everything of himself to help others. He lost his life in service—helping others. When I heard the news, that same feeling came crashing back in. Hopelessness. Numbness. The strange paralysis that comes when grief and shock arrive together and you don’t know what to do with either.
I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t make it better. And I couldn’t even properly feel what I thought I should be feeling.
That sense of helplessness, in different forms, has stayed with me for decades.
But somewhere along the way, photography became a quiet counterweight to it.
When I took this image at Catherine Hill Bay, I was still learning how to slow down. How to wander without a mission. At dawn, everything softens. That morning, the light was doing something special—subtle, restrained, almost respectful. The sky wasn’t shouting. The sea wasn’t dramatic. It was just… calm. And for a few minutes, standing there with my camera, so was I.
Photography didn’t erase what had happened. It didn’t undo loss. It didn’t bring anyone back.
But it gave me a way to breathe again.
This image is part of that learning process for me. Learning to explore not just places, but my own responses to them. Learning to see the world not only as a series of tasks or deployments or destinations, but as a landscape full of moments worth stopping for.
Even now, decades later, that old sense of helplessness still surfaces from time to time. Some experiences never really leave you. But photography has remained one of the ways I keep finding my way back to hope. Back to stillness. Back to a sense that, despite everything, there is meaning in paying attention. There is value in bearing witness—not just to suffering, but to beauty too.
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