At first you can’t tell whether it’s a reflection, something on the surface, or something hidden in the watery depths. There’s a chaotic line that ripples across the surface, further broken every once in a while by water drops. And slowly towards the top of the frame, a rope appears, dragging something through the water. A white shape starts to emerge, submerged. And as it gets closer it gets sharper, less refracted, less fragmented.
It’s a camera, a waterproof GoPro encased in a white DIY frame seemingly made of PVC pipes. It’s covered in green algae like filaments, brought up with it from the depth. As a hand cleans it off, you start to see the lens and wonder what it has seen. And even though it’s impossible, you wonder if it’s capturing you right now. And then you realize a camera is filming a camera, and you’re stuck between two technical gazes mediated by human gazes - yours and whoever is holding the camera capturing this all.
I’ve been filming in and around National Parks for the last six years, and I was initially drawn to a gap. The gap between the way a place seems, and what it feels like. Between how it’s represented - through postcards, photographs, memories, stories, and future imaginings - and what the present texture of being there is actually like.
I’ve always wanted to make a documentary about a family road trip, one where everyone’s piled in the car, and I’m there too. Family trips like those, feel to me like they sit within this gap: between the memories to be created and the present moving by, between the frame of what gets photographed and what stays in the peripheries, between the collective moments and the fractured memories, between the deeply special and the deeply quotidian.
The camera has always occurred to me as something that connects, something that creates a kind of attention that I, that we, so dearly need. But a camera is an apparatus, and an apparatus can just as easily disconnect. It can take something and make it for something. It can turn a sheep into a dot for tracking data, it can turn a family trip into a series of captures rather than experiences, it can turn the presence of a moment into a longing for a future memory.
Is it just about the way we use it, as we heed Flusser’s warnings not to let it use us?1
It’s a camera, a waterproof GoPro encased in a white DIY frame seemingly made of PVC pipes. It’s covered in green algae like filaments, brought up with it from the depth. As a hand cleans it off, you start to see the lens and wonder what it has seen. And even though it’s impossible, you wonder if it’s capturing you right now. And then you realize a camera is filming a camera, and you’re stuck between two technical gazes mediated by human gazes - yours and whoever is holding the camera capturing this all.
I’ve been filming in and around National Parks for the last six years, and I was initially drawn to a gap. The gap between the way a place seems, and what it feels like. Between how it’s represented - through postcards, photographs, memories, stories, and future imaginings - and what the present texture of being there is actually like.
I’ve always wanted to make a documentary about a family road trip, one where everyone’s piled in the car, and I’m there too. Family trips like those, feel to me like they sit within this gap: between the memories to be created and the present moving by, between the frame of what gets photographed and what stays in the peripheries, between the collective moments and the fractured memories, between the deeply special and the deeply quotidian.
The camera has always occurred to me as something that connects, something that creates a kind of attention that I, that we, so dearly need. But a camera is an apparatus, and an apparatus can just as easily disconnect. It can take something and make it for something. It can turn a sheep into a dot for tracking data, it can turn a family trip into a series of captures rather than experiences, it can turn the presence of a moment into a longing for a future memory.
Is it just about the way we use it, as we heed Flusser’s warnings not to let it use us?1