Light Festival

Anything to do with light I’m keen on. In fact that is the reason this  site is called Light on Australia. Although to be totally realistic, light is more dependant on having something to interrupt its progress – because otherwise you can’t see it at all. Eg, in interstellar space great torrents of it might be streaming right past you, but you can’t see it because there is nothing there for it to land on. I guess that is why this site is called Light ON Australia. Because otherwise there would be nothing for the light to hit. The light would be invisible and I fear you would then find this site to be really quite desperately uninteresting. I know I would.

And so on to Sydney’s light festival, which has plenty of obstacles to interrupt the progress of light. This festival is held in the chill of early winter and is something I look to for photo possibilities. I am interested in people’s interaction with the installations, the everchanging randomness of people’s movements and the potential for good imagery that may arise from this. The split second moment when all the elements come together is what I hope to capture. Even if I don’t know what that moment may be, and certainly don’t know if it will occur at all.

The light installations are fixed, while people’s movements and reactions are totally random, so what I am trying to capture is not so much the installations, but my interpretation of them by using a really selective composition, and timing. The timing part of it all depends on happenings I cannot predict, so I’m relying on a quick recognition to release the camera shutter. It is like watching a real life movie (not through the camera) until someone, the director I think, (um..me) yells Cut! and I freeze the action.

(Note: the images are all clickable on and will enlarge to full screen.)

Light Prism. At a decent reproduction size there is a lot of detail to see in this. The scene theoretically continues into infinity.

I had set up the composition I wanted and then hoped the people moving through the installation would arrange themselves within it. This happened at the same instant one of them fired his flash.

A giant model of Earth floats over the heads of Light featival crowds

The interior illuminated Earth globe wasn’t going anywhere, so my task here was to have the ever moving groups of people in some kind of arrangement and timing that harmonised with it t

The lights attract the people in and the people attract me in.

Colour projections, Argyle cut Sydney. Not very often do you see people lying on their backs on cold asphalt in mid-winter. In fact, basically never. Perhaps wary of developing piles they don’t even sit on it!  It is interesting the way everyone seems to re-discover their childhood during this festival, unless of course they are already there.

A cascade of light flowers seem to fall like gold tinged snow around around mesmerised visitors.  

Cold night warm lights.

It is good to see masses of people from most demographics engaging with the illuminated artworks. They have a representative age range too, one you just wouldn’t find – and don’t find – in hushed, air-conditioned, reverent art galleries where everyone poses as a sodomite. (Sorry, that was the charge made by Lord Alfred Douglas’s father.) I meant to say poses as a cognoscenti. Including me. Especially me.

It’s like a blue light disco.

But at the light festival there are young families, teenagers, couples and mature age people. Very few elderly though, maybe it is too cold for them. It is after all a very unusual practice to go out in the night in mid-winter, not as you do every other time, that is only in transit to another snug indoor location. But to go outdoors with the intention to stay outdoors for hours at a time at night time. I like the way that unique practice has now been socially engineered into Sydney life.

A current of enthusiastic light seekers

I also like the throngs’ wonder at colour and light. It is crowd endorsement of my own preferences and predilections. The only other place you’d see such a wide, representative demographic engaging with culture is in the cinema. But sitting in a seat for two hours watching someone else’s pre-digested output is much more of a passive experience than wandering the streets engaging personally with illuminated artworks.

Spinning lights to light the way

Their faces bathed in light, they personally engage with these glowing installations for relatively long periods. Just for once a year pure aesthetics rule. Thoughtful pieces, whimsical pieces, interactive pieces, kinetic pieces, they all hold them captured. Light and colour, the lesson is, are very accessible mediums.

Dispensing hot mulled wine.

They are endorsing my own philosophies and so I can’t help but feel that the receptive crowds, as a mass, become huggable. Like a teddy bear. Their collective cuteness is enhanced by everyone being so warmly rugged up, like Rupert Bear at Christmas time. Puff jackets, corduroys, beanies, fur trimmed hoods, knotted scarfs. For some reason it is agreeable to see crowds swaddled in their warm winter clothing. This is something you rarely see in Australia – the climate is too mild for that. In the daytime (it doesn’t matter if it is winter) there largely is no need to rug up, and as most mid-winter night excursions are only brief transits you don’t see it then either, and never crowds of rugged up people. So the festival is unusual for that too. There is something, I think, that is innocent about this and their wide-eyed behaviour. Traversing through the night, children and adults are on the same page.

Like a dreamscape you can see but never touch.

As they pilgrimage from display to display through the harbour promenades and through dark gardens punctuated with pools of light they seem to share a child-like naivette, like Leunig characters. Daytime washes this magic away, but for a few weeks the harbourside setting is like a Midwinter Night’s Dream.

At the altar of light.