Blue Mountains winter solstice

I have a great preference for cooler weather. Dealing with it is as easy as layering your clothing. Unlike in the heat of summer, which is almost impossible to escape. In my time however I have well and truly sweated – there is no other way of capturing desert images for example.

So the Winter Solstice festival held in the Blue Mountains of NSW was an attractive prospect. A friend had reminded me about it and kindly invited me. Photographing there in winter I could be as active as I wanted, with never a bead of sweat raised. And there is another benefit to winter – the soft and gentle sunlight  that droppeth to Earth like the quality of mercy.

With so much going on in a festival such as this, I only have to move around in the crowd, and by being alert and receptive, let the images appear to me. This doesn’t happen immediately. I always have to warm up, or more accurately, open up. After half an hour or so I reach a receptive zone. Before that, I usually feel a bit stiff, like I’m in need of oil to loosen up the visual stiffness. The first successful photo is the oil I need, and it is enough to switch me on for a few hours. It is the same when photographing the landscape. I don’t really see it properly until an hour or so into the process, when a kind of alchemy occurs and I become quite productive.

So here are the photos I took at the Blue Mountain’s winter solstice festival.

They sparked a conversation with my expatriot friend Richard Cowper, who lives in Catalonia in NE Spain.

He is a profesor of English, and it is not so much that he loves photography – although he does, and is a perceptive analyser of it – it is more that, generally, he is  open and alert to the world and is always curious and questioning of it.

As I am a part of the world – and his for that matter – he drew out aspects of my photographic  philosophy and methods. I have included the conversation here as it is relevant to why the photos on this website look the way they do. You can read as much or as little as you like, or just look at the pictures.  And if a picture is of interest then there is some detail and discussion about it here. (Click on any of them for a full page reproduction.)

A ski jump of people.

Dick: Thank you for those photos of the Solstice Festival. It’s good to see Australia evolving fast towards a new paganism. I’d never heard of this festival (the Blue Mountains version that is) and I’d never imagined Katoomba could attract so many people. They’re not just BM folk are they? I’d never imagined there were that many people in the Blue Mountains. 

 Barry: Yes, it is likely all those people in the photo are Blue Mountains residents. If they had come from Sydney I would have seen that from the varying proportions of their ethnic origins. The Blue Mountains is still largely Anglo-Celtic – in this case literally as far as the eye could see, in fact piling up and over the horizon itself!

This was a novel sight, and it felt somewhat  like visiting a foreign country – or at least the Australia before Gough Whitlam.  In a way this was appropriate –  and maybe why the festival is held here – as the ceremonial marking of the solstice has ancient Anglo-Celtic roots as at Stonehenge.

Dick: I like ALL the photographs. Is there any theme common to all the costumes? The Sun King (great song) has an obvious winter solstice connection, but the mediaeval guys? The pink ladies? The goggle girls?

Sunlight breaks through the clouds to fall on a group of dancers.

Dressed in a mediaeval theme.

Barry: I can’t really answer that, maybe they were  taking creative license and just dressing up in the antique.

Dick: Taking a lot of trouble to dress up like those guys has never interested me, but some people really go for it. “Brave Sir Robin” for example, has given a lot of thought to what looks a mediaeval pilgrim’s outfit, with all his long-distance travel requirements hanging from that frame on his back.

Barry: I can answer that one. Those pilgrims are dressed like the characters in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. One of them is even holding a pair of halved coconuts! It’s definitely solstice creative license.

Dick: Of course. And that’s why you called the photo “Brave Sir Robin.” That’s where the knights come in too. It’s a good documentary photo: it tells a story. But where can you get a suit of armour? Did they make them themselves (in metalwork?) or rent them? The knights’ boots let them down a bit, but Jesus, they’ve got chain mail, helmets, gauntlets, plate armour, shields, and accoutrements (whatever they are). 

These goggle girls look like a case of you muscling in on someone else’s shot, so good for you.                                          

Steampunks.

Barry: re the goggle girls, I’d been hanging around them hoping something would happen, as I could see they were good subjects. Something did happen. A mother (I assume) wanted a photo of them and this was good as it opened up the conversational circle that groups of people automatically form into, with all their faces turned inward. No photo to be had there. I didn’t muscle in on someone elses’ photo though. What I was interested in was the breakdown from their photo pose immediately after that was taken. That is the instant I’d planned to take it. For some reason the two flanking girls had largely maintained their former photo pose but it still works for the girl’s variety of expressions. You can see the difference here, for example, between the public mask people put on for photos, while the other girls are revealing more of their character.

Dick: Do you mean like the fixed, rictus, insincere, teeth baring masks that real estate agents wear for their publicity photos?

Barry: Ha! Not so bad as those! They’re classics of the taste free genre.

Dick: About you “muscling in”, I didn’t mean to suggest either impropriety or laziness. You were taking advantage of a situation that was developing in front of you, in ways you could foresee, and the moment you chose to take the photo was completely your own. I remember my nephew Rob aiming his camera once at a woman in Barcelona who was posing (in an exaggerated way) for a friend, but rather than take her in the pose he got her laughing and relaxed and once she had dropped the pose – a much better shot. It hadn’t occurred to me to think beyond what was in front of my eyes, but that’s what you do all the time.

Those girl’s goggles got me googling and then goggling at the results of a “steampunk” search. To my amazement, “steampunk goggles” appeared. These looks / fashions / aesthetics / genres or whatever are so bizarre, but I have to say those girls look good, especially in a group, which makes them look simultaneously more attractive and more intimidating. 

Barry: Still burned by high school experiences I see! All this has made me think more closely about the timeline to photographing the goggle girls. I now believe that I took the photo in the moment before all the girls had readied themselves for the mother. That timeline makes more sense as the two flanking girls had already prepared themselves, while the others where experiencing that little self-conscious moment we all get when we know we are about to be photographed. Looking away from the camera, downcast gaze, coyness, etc.

People outside the church soaking up the gentle sunlight of winter.

Barry: This is what I call a tableau, with the groupings of people in exact position.

Dick: That has always been a fascination of yours.

Barry: But they also make me worried of ever being able to repeat such things in future. These are, after all, sentient beings with their own independence – and a camera and a paintbrush are not interchangeable! I reason I must be responsible, but that doesn’t mean that I can expect to do it in future. This at least keeps me on my toes.

Dick: It’s quite a different approach to your landscape work.

Barry: Composition is all important in both. On the other hand, landscape – the aesthetics of light – informs my people work more fully. You can see this from the way light and colour  is often a big part of it. eg, in the grey angel, the pink dancers and the beam of light in the cooking stall.

Dick: I love the grey angel. She’s got a lovely face, and she’s posing for you so sweetly.

Barry: I admired her for being brave enough to dress so lightly on a Katoomba June.

For all that my people images are influenced by landscape, I have never seen myself as only a landscape photographer – perhaps just a really quite convincing  imitation of one.

Dick: Ha ha – you’re just being glib there. I don’t think you’re an imitation. In fact, you are a specialist. Your morning glory cloud photos for example are completely unique.

Barry: Even so, I do see it as a worthy sub-set to my main interests – which you see here in these journal entries, for example. That is, predicting the likely behaviour  of people and therefore their movements, the challenge of this ever changing potential. Also being physically close to people without being an influence on them.

Dick: I have often been admirably intrigued by the ‘invisible’ photographer nature in your work. 

Barry: That is a means to an end. Which is completely natural photography.  National Geographic is a benchmark for that.  Psychological awareness of others is needed for this as much as visual. You can predict what they are more or less likely to do next. It also helps to be equally aware of yourself as others see you so as to not have your presence be an influence (unless you want that.) Although it is obviously not, in the resulting images it may come across as “invisibility.”

Dick: Which you don’t need shooting landscape.

Barry: Landscape doesn’t make nearly so many psychological demands on you! In fact it doesn’t care about you at all. To paraphrase your own famous dictum about subjects you prefer photographing: Landscape doesn’t move and can’t form an opinion of you.

Dick: Ha ha! I hope you have helped me to improve on that score.

Barry: Landscape does have its own skill set though. Physical fitness,  understanding of the weather and anticipation. Anticipation is how I was set up, for example, to capture (on two joined up frames of 6×7 film a rare image of a double rainbow over the Three Sisters.

The Three Sisters are so over photographed that your only hope is to get something different like this.

Landscape being a sub-set therefore might have been the wrong term. I am a landscape photographer to the same extent that I like to document things. People and landscape both come under the final heading of real life, which is a document in itself. I respect the fields under the heading of documentary greatly, and where they are linked is in light and composition and in the standards I try to maintain no matter the subject.

The tableau outside the church is another one I should have mentioned as also being influenced by the landscape part of my mind.

Dick: Is that because the image  is as much an observation of light as it is of people in time and space?

Barry: Yes, the soft and gentle sunlight falling on them right then, at the winter solstice moment, is like a blessing. This does emphasise the point that it is unwise to try to pigeonhole photographers – or this one at least –  as image creation clearly has to be an amalgam of your whole mind and how you see the world.

Dick: That church tableau a gentle example of your style. I recall another you took during Chinese New Year that is more action packed.

Barry: I think you mean this one with the celebrating revellers  carrying umbrellas with lights. It is not so much my style as a style of photography I have admired whoever might have taken it.

….Anyway, that is enough talking about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?

Dick: Ha ha! I’ll tell you another time perhaps.

Barry: Ha! I hope you don’t think I am indulgent.

Dick: Not at all. Or not too much. But if you can’t be a little bit indulgent on your own site where can you be?

Barry: Good point.

Dick: And besides that, what you think results in your images. The two are the same. If your images are worth looking at then the thinking that brings them into existence is worthy of consideration too. What came first though, your philosophy or the images?

Barry: I became a photographer literally in a few seconds, how that happened, I won’t go into now. But a few moments of pictorial influence and I was suddenly able to re-order the world and distill it into good images. Something I hadn’t been able to do when I had woken up that morning. I’d never even owned a camera!   I knew I was a photographer from that moment and in fact an image from my first roll of film managed to get published.

So I had some developed thinking about the subject from the beginning, mainly from the graphic sense, so at that time ‘philosophy’ is too grandiose a description for it. I merely hopped onto a photographic train that had already been rolling along quite outstandingly for 150 years. But personally, it was a rennaissance for me that taught me over the years to think about the hows and whys of what I do. Why my images look the way they do. My reflections and experience in turn fed back into the images, refining my approach so that the ideas and the photos merge into each other.

Dick: An example that perhaps illustrates what you are saying. Looking again at that tableau with the two girls on the bench, I thought the “Counterpoint” sign hanging over the door is a rare kind of serendipity. According to wikipedia, “counterpoint is the relationship between voices that are harmonically interdependent (polyphony) yet independent in rhythm and contour“. Well, the people near the bench and the group near the door are independent, but they harmonise, as all the people in the picture do. You could even take that “Winter Magic” as a comment on that winter solstice light that you like so much, but I’d better stop here before I get carried away.

Barry: I like to practice photography of social cultures, and harmony might be one of the descriptions. Cultural and societal themes, people’s natural behaviour as they experience life themselves. I am not really a dark issue,  or conflict covering photographer type. Great respect though I have for them. Some significant resolve to tackle the landscape for example is needed when gravity is such an unforgiving master. Or even to take documentary photos of perfect strangers.  I do what my instincts guide or tell me to do. It is about their human condition as much as it is mine.

Dick: Photography is literal, so we see exactly what you see.  As you infer they say just as much about the people  depicted as it says about you. As in this park scene, which, like the church scene, I think is a counterpoint tableau.

Barry: The girls posing for their own photo seems to be the focal point, but what had caused me to stop is the protective hand the father has on his sleeping child. Flanked by his two sons, you can see in his face their bond, his awareness of their presence. Even if he is probably thinking about something else, something day to day, his demeanor is the underlying reality that show his priorities. I lingered there in the hope that a photo may develop from the feeling I had looking at the father. The girls’ suddenly taking a selfie was the spark that enabled me to capture it.

Dick: It is intimacy and the girls’ fun combined.

Barry: As with the steampunk girls it is an example of how you can do everything possible beforehand to be in the right place and so potentially create your own good fortune. The classic statement is: “F8 and be there.”  What you are trying to capture is likely to disappear very quickly and very often does, that is the challenge of capturing real life.

A wickerman shambles past at the head of the pagan parade.

Beanie girls

High hair and dressing up for the festival.

Dick: One last question. In the big Katoomba street scene, of all the thousands of people in the photo, the only figure looking at you is wearing the golden sun mask – the personification of the solstice itself. The point of the whole festival. How did that happen?

Barry: I had been watching him slowly approach through the dense crowd, and as I knew his symbolism was important I was sweating on getting a clear shot of him. I didn’t hope that he would look right at me at the same instant the rest of the people were in a good arrangement. There you go again, it pays to be prepared, to have anticipation. F8 and be there!