“It is Chanel No. 5, you’re right,” Miriam says, her voice calm. “I just didn’t expect to read something about myself. I wasn’t aware I was being watched so closely.”
She smiles, guarded but curious.
Eleanor shifts in her seat. “You read it?”
“It popped up in my Substack feed,” Miriam replies. “I wasn’t expecting to see myself there.”
Eleanor hesitates, unsure whether to apologise or defend herself. “It wasn’t really about you,” she says finally. “I just used small things I remembered from my last visit.”
Miriam nods. “It made me think about the way you see people.” She leans back into the leather chair. “Do you feel, as a photographer, that you’re always watching? That you see things others overlook?”
Eleanor smiles. She likes people who ask good questions. “When my husband was alive, we used to go on photography trips into the city or to gardens. He’d come home with hundreds of photos of things I hadn’t noticed. I’d look at them and think, was I even there? It was like I was blind.”
She glances out the window. Light glints off the building across the street, a curtain flutters and a figure moves behind it. “I need a starting point – for both photography and writing. But I don’t think I get starting points from watching.”
“What do you mean by starting points?” Miriam asks.
“Once we drew colours from a hat before heading into the city – his was blue, mine was red. That gave me something to look for. And that was great. I actually came home with some images I liked.” She smiles at the memory.
“So you don’t think you’re always watching?”
“No, I don’t think I’m observant at all.” Eleanor pauses. “Someone once called me a bowerbird. They said I collect things – stories, words, ideas – and I use them to create something. Like the story you read. I guess it came from things I’ve collected.”
“When I read what you wrote,” Miriam says, “I felt you’d taken pieces of me – my wonky left eye, my unmatched suit, my perfume. Seeing them was … confronting.”
Eleanor resists defending herself. That’s not why she’s here.
Miriam lets the silence stretch. “When you take a portrait, or write a story,” she says finally, “do you think about how the people you’ve collected from might feel? About how collecting can reveal more than you intend?”
Eleanor meets her gaze. Calm, but piercing.
“I watch, I listen, I interpret too,” Miriam continues. “But the difference is, you collect, and then you show your work to the world.”
Eleanor smiles wryly. “I wish I could show the world, but my audience is very small.” Her smile falters. “Sorry, that was inappropriate.”
A bus pulls into the stop one floor below, its mechanical sigh heavy in the air. Eleanor rubs the back of her neck, the muscles tight from holding herself still too long. The bus moves on, leaving the room too quiet.
“Are you saying I’m unethical?” she asks.
“I’m saying you’re powerful,” Miriam replies. “And that power carries responsibility. You decide how someone’s captured … and you also decide how they’re presented to the world.”
Eleanor looks down at her hands. “I always thought of it as seeing, not shaping what’s seen.” A bird lands on the railing and shakes itself, feathers settling. She sits back, something in her easing. “I never thought of it as power.”
“When you think about your portraits – your Faces of Melbourne, for instance – do you see that power there?”
A face springs from Eleanor’s memory: an older woman near the State Library, bent under the weight of her shopping bags. She had helped her to the tram stop, and as they walked, the woman shared stories of her early life in Melbourne. She stopped to show Eleanor grainy black and white photos of her son who had taken his own life many years before. The grief was still raw, as if time had barely touched it.
“When I asked if I could photograph her,” Eleanor says, “she nodded straight away. I chose a spot where just her face was lit. It’s such a beautiful portrait. She gave me something real and I wanted to honour that.”
Miriam studies her for a moment. “You were moved by her story,” she says. “You wanted to see her, and to let others see her too. That’s empathy – but it’s also exposure. Maybe that’s the tension you live with as an artist.”
Eleanor squirms. The word artist sits uncomfortably.
They sit in the stillness, neither reaching for resolution. A soft chime breaks the silence. Their hour has ended.
Outside, the late afternoon light is soft and luminous, the kind photographers dream about. Eleanor walks home, stepping around puddles and cracks, her thoughts running faster than her feet ever could.
As she passes the café on the corner of her street, she notices a woman in the window, alone. A half-finished coffee, a book open on the table, shoulders slumped. Something in her stillness suggests she hasn’t turned the page in a while.
Eleanor lifts her camera just as the woman lifts her head. Her face is streaked with tears. Eleanor is again captivated by the way light touches faces and the stories faces tell.
Her finger hovers over the shutter button. The woman smiles, a fragile thread of connection.
Eleanor lowers the camera, pushes the door open and steps inside.
Musings from the cold 