Toitoi grasses near Breaker Bay, New Zealand. Taken with a Fujifilm X100, in March 2011.
BY ROBERT CATTO
It’s been a while.
To be honest, it’s been SO long, I had to look up my own essays on this very site to see when the last one was, and what it was about. (It was June 2021, actually.)
We’ve all been distracted, diverted, disturbed from our usual patterns. Work has started up, work has shut down, work has started up again only to be shut down again.
Sydney’s finally experiencing the pandemic the way the rest of the world has been all along, with more new cases daily in the past month than we had in all of 2020. Fortunately, the very high level of vaccination in our population means those who’ve caught it—and I feel like I’m the last person I know who still hasn’t, at this stage—means hospitalisation levels have been lower than we perhaps feared or expected they would be.
Backstage at the Opera House, Wellington New Zealand, in 2011.
But, it means staying home has been the more attractive option, once again, even if it isn’t an official ‘lockdown’.
All of this is just to say: here’s where we’re at, let’s do something about it. So, like the rest of the Collective, I’m committing to doing…something, for the month of February.
I found something today that we were talking about at the beginning of this Collective. Patrick said “great pictures happen during the in-between, seconds before recognisable events, or seconds after; faces looking away or lost in that in-between. When I got that X100, it spun my entire world upside-down. My framing changed, my timing changed, that specific camera gave me the ability to disappear and become the ghost of an eye.”
So my plan is just to use my X100F like I did the original X100 that lured me into the Fuji system in the first place, over ten years ago, in New Zealand—before I moved to Australia, before we became a Collective.
Keep it simple, carry it everywhere, catch what you can. Remove distractions. Focus on the basics. Look. Really see. Become the ghost of an eye.
So—let’s see how that turns out, shall we?
Robert Catto
1 Feb 2022
Candle in a window in Courtenay Place, Wellington New Zealand, taken with a Fujifilm X100 in March 2011.
