Advance and Retreat
Vinnie 1. Riversdale Beach, 2025.
Reflecting today on the difference, for me, between work and recreation. The two so often overlap. I will take a client project onboard, and so much of the experience will feed my creative wellbeing. I go on a family holiday, and end up arrested by the light, and a very ordinary subject, and so I make cinematic photographs that belong sometimes in my commercial world. When somebody asks me what I do, they mean, for a living. My answer is ‘photographer.’ But my answer would be that if it was what do I do for pleasure, as well. Not all the time, of course. I don’t actually take my camera with me everywhere, though sometimes I think I should. But when I do, it’s a compulsion to use it, to find a new way to see a thing, and collect it in the way we collect memories - similar to how somebody might collect a butterfly and pin it to a display board. I pierce that memory with my camera.
Family time is generally fraught with interruption lately. Somebody always has a thing they need to get done, or a place they need to be. This mini-vacation by the sea removes those disruptions. Instead, we’re playing board games (Catan and Love Letters, and I won both of them tonight, much to Nino’s displeasure). We’re shooting arrows at driftwood targets on the beach, and watching movies and walking over the dune and through the tussock. We’re talking to each other about more than just the organisational particulars of every extra curricular commitment. This morning, Vinnie joined me on the sand dune watching the sunrise. I took some photos, of course, but I took more a little later when we’d gone back inside. He’d eaten breakfast, and was just entertaining himself until the other Bains surfaced. We’re both loving how specific the sound is here - a dull and constant roar of the ocean, accompanied by gusts of wind, but an absence of our usual sounds - traffic, the wailing cat and the aural clutter of tv and phone and computer.
Returning to this idea about work and play. I’m accepting that I might never make any money from my urge to pursue ‘art’, whatever that actually means. In the post-study aftermath, I am piecing together the ways that we can fund our life. One of the main ways I can do that is with my photography, and I have never been more grateful to have this ability to merge my obsession and our need. It’s one of the reasons that I’m so disinterested in AI. Many creative people insist that as AI is beginning to rob us of our livelihood, creators should pivot and learn how to use it. I never got into this profession for the cold financial business of it. I became a photographer because I love putting my face to the camera and finding the shot. It’s really that pure. There’s such irony in the fact that the first areas ‘hit’ by AI are the things that creators do - writing, image-making, music. Those are the things we should be preserving, instead somehow teaching AI to clean the windows and empty the compost bucket. If I could get AI to fold washing mountain every day, I’d be pretty happy.
All of this to say that I am really enjoying escaping our ordinary life, for a little borrowed seaside idyll in the land of the rising sun. Trademe will probably see an increase in my casual searches for property in the area. (Which is such a joke, we certainly can’t afford that on my artist earnings.) But dreams, as they say, are free, and mine are full of this litany of lovely unreality, where we make simple memories and appreciate the way the sun breaks through the clouds.