This month's theme chosen by me: Silence
Silence is something I crave living in the big city. It’s an elusive thing – you can capture it very late at night, or very early in the morning, but it never lasts long. Always punctuated by the soft hum of traffic or the shrill piercing of a siren.
Silence is intangible, philosophical, political - there is no one thing that comes to mind when thinking of the word. Instead we think of NOT talking, of NO noise, of being silenced. It’s a word that conjures up things being absent rather than present, and that’s a hard thing for a photographer to capture. There are many ways to interpret the theme, and I wanted something that would make all of us think, something that has a different meaning to all of us living in our respective places, in our different lives.
For myself, I chose the theme ‘silence’ to push myself to find a pause within a throng of people, or to seek out an image that automatically feels calming. I have realised that I usually run away from the city to shoot peacefulness, because I find the city blocks my urge to photograph. This time I decided to limit myself and not shoot early in the morning, or late at night, and but to go out there into the city in the middle of the day and shoot amongst the throng to seek out that elusive representative image.
I chose the aquarium to shoot in. Silent it was not, it was half term, packed with children, and a fire alarm curtailed our visit. But there is something about the deep blue of the water, the foreboding shapes, the stillness of movement, and the apparent weight of the water that means silence to me. It takes me back to childhood diving on reefs, looking at this other world where noise doesn’t exist and even your own body is weightless and inconsequential. Freedom and entrapment all at once – a bit like the city itself. That’s silence for me.
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