Beaches

There are more than a hundred beaches in Sydney, and every local will argue with you about all of them. What visitors miss is how different they are from each other, because each one sits in its own pocket between two sandstone headlands, and the shape of that pocket decides everything, from how the swell wraps in, to where the rip sets up, to whether the sand underfoot is coarse and steep or fine and flat. Bondi and Bronte are a ten minute walk apart, and they don't behave alike at all.

And a beach isn't a fixed object either, which took me an embarrassingly long time to work out. Sand shifts offshore in the winter storms, then works its way back through the calmer months, so the same beach can sit metres lower in August than it did in February. In June 2016 an east coast low arrived at exactly the wrong angle and took the front off Collaroy, backyards and all (you've probably seen the photographs), and some of those beaches lost more sand in three days than they'd shifted in the previous forty years.

I photograph them mostly when they're empty, or near enough. First light in summer, you'll get the swimmers and the dog walkers and nobody else, and in the middle of winter, you can have Curl Curl entirely to yourself at seven. But crowds have never been my problem. The light's the problem, and the light's only any good at the two ends of the day.

Nearly everyone who buys one of these is buying their own beach, rather than the famous one, and I love that. It's the beach you walked a dog along for eleven years, or the one your kids learned to swim at, or the one you can still picture with your eyes shut from the other side of the world. So I keep photographing the ones nobody outside the postcode has heard of, which isn't a business strategy, exactly.