Most of these images are only one two-hundredths of a second of unimportance. There’s no real method to selecting these over any of the other 556 images i’ve shot in the past month as part of this project. Perhaps the image of Hare Krishna’s dancing as police arrest a shoplifter in the background is of more importance than any of the images in this post.
None the less, the images are all things that happened. The fact that they all have no lasting effect and that they were gone as quickly as they happened bares no importance. They are all moments - people acknowledging the camera or being unaware of it, people and objects interacting with the sun or their surroundings.
All these things happened and they’re worth acknowledging because if we don’t all we have is routine. To quote one of photography’s intellectual heavyweights, Joel Meyerowitz, “None of it means anything, but it happened, and maybe that’s enough.”

Three men discuss business whilst a fourth man looks suspiciously at the camera.

An elderly woman shields herself from the sun with a newspaper.

School kids crowd onto a tram. Again a suspicious gaze.

A man crosses the road with an Aboriginal painting. Seconds earlier he had walked past two men in wheel chairs both with Australian flags attached, unknown to each other. Also unknown to one of the men was the African man who approached the flag quietly from behind, kissed it and walked off.

A busy crowd cross Flinders Street. In both the foreground and the background, unknown to all, there is a raised hand and a face looking back.

A man exits an office building on Collins St as sun pours in from between buildings.

The sun squeezes through buildings to expose only the word ‘SAVE’ in a shop front.

Real estate agents at work in the city.



Cigarettes and sun. double cancer.

One leg breaks the pattern created by shade from awnings.

self portrait. with and without cat.

some recent work

everything.

reworks

Older ones, but i haven’t shot much over summer.

end of the tote

I’ll let the photos sum up the night for me.

All images copyright Mike Read 2010.
please contact me if you would like to use any of these images.
www.mikereadphotography.com