There’s a cat on her windowsill. The black one from next door, red bandana tied rakishly around its neck, a burst of insouciance.
He watches her, looking like he knows things she doesn’t.
She watches him back then lifts the camera and looks away.
In photography, negative space is the area around the subject, the quiet, unclaimed part of the frame. She looks there instead of at the cat. At the branches giving him an absurd hat. At the fence palings rearing from his head. At the shadows, menacing, behind him. She makes a choice about where to put her attention.
Then is drawn back to her phone by the vibration, and spins through war, famine, scandal, disaster. She scrolls, for far too long, then finally looks away.
She looks away and in doing so notices the tiny bits of life that belong only here, at this moment in time. The sunlight sliding through the shutters like it has somewhere else to be, the Vegemite-coated knife balancing on the sink as if auditioning for the circus, the leaf skittering erractically down the path to come to rest on the mat at the back door, the cat still watching from the windowsill.
She lifts her camera again, capturing it mid-stretch, and realises – again – that the art of looking away is also the art of looking at.
Musings from the cold 