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Essays
Lissa Mitchell
Matt Butler
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Lissa Mitchell
It is not always possible to see things clearly.
I observe.
I feel.
Sometimes photographs act like remnants of what I observe and feel.
The border where the known dissolves – the earth becoming the sky, dark becoming light, life becoming death.
The moment we realise love.
Camus Wyatt’s series of photographs, boundaries of being, is lyrical and deeply moving. Created between 2014 and 2021, the series illuminates the personal experiences of the maker within a range of physical and emotional landscapes. Photographs are like containers - holding visions that provoke feelings. While they cannot change time, they might provide a connection to a past experience by acting as a prompt to memory and feeling.
‘Encountering a photograph – like encountering music, [...] requires a certain silence and blindness, and, together, this silence and blindness suggest a kind of withdrawal from more conventional (or less surprising) understandings of photography.’ i
Wyatt uses the camera to distort what he is showing us. His photographs are dream-like and raise questions about the limits of what is known through observation. I wonder whether it matters that I can't clearly see what the image is promising to show or that it’s hard to see what it really depicts. I pause and look away...
One of the promises of photography is that it will show us things. A prevailing myth is that it is a window into the past – revealing what is lost. What can be made of someone using it to hide things from us and obscure the visual facts?
If I submit, will I see what photography can’t show?
I am entering into a form of exchange with these images – a reciprocal, unspoken, deal.
Or is this just a story of lost innocence?
The photographs are records of scenes Wyatt has found, and they relate his experiences of community – at the cinema, a party, the beach. But they are also bound to one deeply personal image. It is the anchor dragging them all slowly along the sea floor, ripping up everything in its wake. In 2017 Wyatt took a photograph of his father shortly after his sudden death at home in the Wairarapa from heart failure. His father’s body lies on a bed, covered by a sheet evoking the sense of sleep and paused time – the in-between - while diffused light shoots and swirls through the room from a curtain covered window. There is no stumbling into this room.
Viewing these photographs I am drawn into familiar and forgotten feelings. This feels like remembrance even though these are not records of my experiences. While they are not what I have known, they have familiar undercurrents. They are beyond me or I have drifted out beyond them and they cannot reveal the past. Walking backwards will not return me there. Photographs are spaces that time and change inhabit – can I locate the cockatoo or chase that cat into the dark garden? No – I must leave them behind.
A drooping hydrangea on a window sill, rain dribbling down the window pane. A man on the street and one in the water, with their backs turned. Creating an atmosphere. As the song goes: ‘don’t walk away, in silence’.ii Cathartic.
Three images connected: a dark scene of an island with steep sides, Te Mana o Kupe ki Aotearoa, sits still in the distance. Its nocturnal inhabitants on the move unseen. FLASH. Its past inhabitants barely known. FLASH. Something – an unknown bird (but not Tītī Wainui on her roost on the island) - bursting out of the bushes. An unordinary now.
I have walked in and I don't know where I am.
Dream - gazing out the window and missing the facts.
I sucked in so hard and now I am blown out the other side.
Light entering my eyes in the darkness: "Here! Over here! Watch me flicker as you draw near".
Sound fumbles in the air from somewhere in the dark.
The noise is loud but is it brighter than the light?
How long will I be here between the two? An hour or so? All night? What's the difference?
I am a drifter - stuck here seeing what I don't know.
I see magic - it is the light moving onto the dark. Solids dissolving. The future forming.
When you return show me a photograph.
i. Eduardo Cadava, 2021, ‘Notes on Love and Photography’, Paper Graveyards, The MIT Press, p.184.
ii Joy Division, 1980, Atmosphere.
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