Marie and I were on our annual wedding anniversary holiday on the Queensland Sunshine Coast in February 2021.
On most days, we head out with our cameras and simply see what we find. There’s rarely a plan. Just time, curiosity, and whatever draws our attention.
That day at Mooloolaba beach, it was the rocks.
There were many of them, scattered along the shoreline. Some held small pools of water. Others had already drained as the tide receded. What caught me wasn’t the scene as a whole, but the surfaces — the textures, the colours, the small details that most people would walk past.
I started photographing them, one after another.
At some point, I lost track of time.
Each frame felt like a moment of quiet focus. Not rushed, not forced. Just looking more closely than I normally would.
Every now and then I’d look up and see Marie nearby, absorbed in her own photographs. Once, I thought I noticed someone filming the scene with a movie camera. But mostly, the world outside the rocks faded away.
It was just patterns, textures, and attention.
Later that day, I downloaded the images and realised I had taken over a thousand photographs.
At first, that felt like too much. Then curiosity took over. As I worked through them, I began to see something I hadn’t noticed at the time — each image felt like a small study, almost like a specimen slide. Not of rocks, but of something more human.
I didn’t fully understand it then.
In fact, this particular photograph didn’t stand out to me at all.
It wasn’t until a few years later, when I was putting together my photobook Aspects of the Human Condition, that it began to shift. Looking at it again, I started to see something different.
The coloured stones felt like strengths — small, quiet pieces of value, almost like hidden jewels.
The darker surfaces felt like the parts we don’t always show.
Not flaws, exactly. Just the less visible parts of who we are.
The photograph became the cover image for the book.
Not because I set out to create it that way, but because over time, it revealed something I hadn’t seen when I first made it.
I’ve come to think that some photographs are like that.
They don’t ask for attention straight away. They wait. Sometimes they’re waiting for a purpose.
Sometimes they’re waiting for you to be ready to see what they hold.