Waves

These aren't pictures of a place. They're pictures of a condition, and the condition turns up wherever it likes, from Maroubra up to Bondi, and well beyond. Nearly everything that breaks in New South Wales started life thousands of kilometres away, as wind blowing across the Southern Ocean, and by the time it reaches Sydney, the mess has been sorted out of it. So the waves arrive in even lines, ten or twelve seconds apart. That's the swell worth setting an alarm for. Local wind chop just wastes your morning.

What makes a wave photographable is the wind, not the size, which I'm embarrassed to say took me years to accept. A light westerly off the land holds the face up, and draws the lip out clean. But twenty minutes of northeasterly will turn that same swell into a crumbling mess. So autumn is the best of it, when the water is still warm off the back of summer, and the mornings go glassy, and for about ninety seconds, the low sun sits behind the wave and lights the whole thing from the inside.

Nearly all of these were made in the water, which means swimming out with the housing, treading water for an hour or two, and taking whatever the ocean hands you (it doesn't take requests). You can't back up, and you can't change your mind about where you're standing. And from the moment a wave stands up to the moment it lands on your head, you've got about a second and a half to decide.

I get it wrong far more often than I get it right, and the nine pictures here are what's left, after a lot of mornings of getting it wrong. They end up in offices more than anything else I make, which puzzled me at first, and then stopped puzzling me. A wave is the one thing you can hang on a wall, and everybody already knows the sound of it.