Eleanor is plagued by a dream of herself that she has not yet managed to actualise.
It visits her most mornings, while the kettle boils, the version of herself she keeps coming back to, the one who moves through the streets with a camera at the ready, collecting quiet moments. That woman is captivated by the way light touches faces and the stories a face tells. She lives in a house smelling faintly of cedar and tea, with shelves of photography books she browses intermittently. Her portraits don’t hang on her own walls, but they do hang on other people’s – portraits others have described as intimate and assured and quietly transcendant.
Eleanor, on the other hand, mostly photographs flowers these days though she’s not exactly sure why. She thinks it’s something to do with their fragility, their complexity – how each flower seems to have a personality of its own. Photographing them feels like a small experiment in seeing differently: shifting focus, playing with light, adjusting angles until some kind of story emerges. At home, she works deliberately, arranging light and background, the process almost meditative. In gardens, she responds to what’s there – wind, shadow, a sudden burst of colour. She’s exhibited her work a few times – small shows where people have bought pieces and said kind things – and members of her U3A photography group often tell her she has a real eye. She thanks them, smiles, but inside she thinks they’re just being kind … or polite … or wrong.
She finds, in a box of prints tucked under the bed, photographs she took six years ago while she was going through cancer treatment. That time still lives in her skin, the memory of so many hands touching her, adjusting her, ensuring her position is just right. It had made her uneasy, and that unease became the focus of a project – hands as both comfort and intrusion. In one image, Sonia, the model, stands in a shaft of late afternoon light, her body half-covered by her own hands, the gesture both protective and exposing. Eleanor studies the image for a long time – the narrow beam of light, the rawness in the posture, the quiet, potent vulnerability of it. This, she thinks, is the kind of work she wants to return to.
She reaches for the book of portraits she printed when she’d finished her Faces of Melbourne project and flicks through it. She remembers where each shot was taken, her subjects’ names, and the stories the older women told as she photographed them. She was deliberate about her practice – the light, the framing, the angle – she’d known what she was doing. Looking through those pages again, she feels the quiet certainty of that work, the joy it gave her, yet something in her still resists believing it was assured.
Eleanor hears the scrape of a chair behind her and looks up. Her grandson has wandered in from the garden, a piece of toast in one hand, his current favourite dinosaur in the other.
‘Who’s that?’ he asks, pointing to a photo in the open book.
‘That’s Josette,’ Eleanor says. ‘She was walking through Myer when I saw her.’
‘Did she tell you stories?’
‘She sure did,’ she says. ‘Stories about her son who grew up and got married – and she showed me pictures of him too.’
He studies the page, eyes wide. ‘Who’s that? I think she’s pretty.’
‘That’s Bella. Her name means beautiful. And that’s Brabh. He was my first face of Melbourne. I was standing at the traffic lights and I saw him across the road. His face was so interesting I just had to take his photo.’
He looks up at her. ‘You should take my photo too. Every morning when I come here. You could make a book about me – Garry’s Faces of Breakfast.’
She laughs, surprised by the small flicker of excitement that rises in her chest. ‘Maybe I could,’ she says.
At 7:10 the next morning, Garry arrives, sleep still in his eyes, hair sticking up, a dinosaur in each hand. She gets him a bowl of Coco Pops and sits with him at the table. The light from the window falls across his face. Eleanor lifts her camera, adjusts the focus, and presses the shutter.
The image on the camera screen is a little soft, a little crooked. His spoon is halfway to his mouth, milk dripping onto the table.
She makes tea, sits across from him, and listens to a story about a dinosaur that can fly and also do karate. She nods solemnly. “Sounds plausible.”
Later, she opens her laptop and creates a folder: Breakfasts with Garry. She’ll add one photo a day until he gets bored, or until she does.
While she doesn’t feel actualised … or even assured … she does feel like someone who knows how to begin.
And that, frankly, is more than she expected.
I have used the same first line as my previous story While the kettle boils. I wanted to see if I could take it in a different direction.
Musings from the cold 