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  Terra Incognita | 2013

All the images were shot over a period of six months on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, one of the most famous beaches in the world. Bondi is also one of the most photographed beaches in the world – my challenge was to capture it with my own vision. None of the people in the images had any knowledge that they were being photographed at the time. It was spontaneous and surreptitious. Of the things I saw, what interested me were the shapes that sunbathers made – individually or as a group. I wanted to isolate these shapes and have them seen as natural ‘sculptures’. The second thing that interested me was the oblivious nature of people on the beach. Once they arrive on the sand, people act differently – the elements of the sun, beach and sand seem to anaesthetise them and they appear to go into some kind of trance state, not conscious, not unconscious, but somewhere in between. Numbed by the sun. The beach felt like a live installation, a live show of people – endless activity, constantly changing. Each time I went there I watched a different performance. Some days the show would be amazing and I captured so many great images. Other days I would be lucky to capture one. When the beach was extremely crowded, the energy was different and I found it very difficult to capture something unique. I thought more people would mean more opportunity, but found the opposite to be true. People became like sheep: the more there were, the more they tended to look the same and almost mimic one another. The beach may be in my home town, but I rarely recognized a single face. I could have been in any country in the world. I saw all shades of skin, and heard many tongues, but the beach seemed to possess only one voice, a universal language – the surrender to the spell of ignorance cast by the sun.