Another dusk image – once again legible in terms of traditions of Romanticism…and, no doubt, photographic cliche.
But no wish to assert the originality of this image. On the contrary, what interests me is that it is so easy to obtain. I can stroll out any late afternoon, walk up the steep hill towards Mt Keira, then across to Gipps Road and encounter any number of views similar to this; soft strands of orange cloud fading to blue light and the blue of the ocean. The technical term for this moment, I discover, is “the gloaming” – the short period after the intensity of sunset and before actual nightfall. The gloaming is the memory of light, the passage of light, the waning of light.
The issue for me is how this moment remains accessible to me, to all of us? What enables it to still appear? The gloaming is associated with a pause, the performance and repetition of a pause. The gloaming appears as an index of the passage of time, but also represents the suspension of time – a curious passage beyond ordinary temporal constraints and experience. It summons the past – a sense of kindred relation to the past – while also manifesting, within the past, a sense of possibility.