Photographs

Wake while it is still dark.

Dress.

Light the fire.

Make coffee.

Read the New Testament.

Sit in silence.

Here is the scaffolding I use to construct the day, a frame which gives shape to and bears the weight of everything that follows. The silence wraps itself around two concepts too big for right now: intention and consent; perhaps I'll try and speak of them at another time.

And then, when the light turns blue silver, before it gets all directional and golden, before the sky has its brief fling with the long end of the colour spectrum, I drive around the harbour.

The light plays and dances. Light off the sea is reflected, and therefore polarized so it has a different character from that which is flooding the new sky. Light filtered through clouds is softer and bluer than the fresh edged stuff, which has only had to contend with air. There are shadows and lines and colours and reflections everywhere. There are photographs lying about at every turn, but I don't need to point my camera at any of them - I look at them and let them drift way. There are photographic words I don't much like: "capture" and "shoot", which imply hunting, stilling, conquering; but I am here merely to look. My camera is a way of engaging. The harbour is so huge, and so immensely old, and so beautiful that I could never hope to capture it or shoot it - why the hell would I want to? So I stop my car and hope that my pictures might suggest something of its elegant and eternally mobile, four dimensional beauty. This activity - looking, framing, pressing the shutter - is not about taking something away, it is tabout being here. It is, really, the last act of my morning silence.

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