Thoughts on a show

I’m sitting in the café adjoining the Front Gallery, where my show is currently on. My opening was last night and I’m feeling a little bleary. My sunglasses hide the bags beneath my eyes that must surely be a giveaway to the seediness I’m currently experiencing.  I’m here ostensibly  to imbibe coffee and eggs and bacon to assuage my mind into a connection with the absolutely stunning spring day that is in full swing outside. I’m also here to spy … to see who’s looking at my photographs and which ones they linger over and discuss. From time to time I wander in to tweak the lighting or straighten a picture. I tend to do this when there are people in the gallery and I can have a talk about the images and how they were created … people have been very nice and said many congratulatory things. I’ve even sold two of the pictures, one which has been hanging in my bedroom for the past year and a bit, I will miss when it goes to its new home. I will miss them all if they go. They’re little pieces of me … each one a photographic journey now rendered manifest and framed and hung upon a wall.

I imagine their new homes and spaces, there’s a part of me that would like to visit them there … to see how they inform and play in their new surroundings. Other folks will see them every day and I wonder about this … quite inordinately.

I realise I’ve spent three hours here now … becoming slightly more human with each coffee (maybe one more?) and finding myself gazing blankly at the other patrons in this Inner North Wi-Fi hangout, bent over laptops or skipping the world, reading their Kindles … I notice very few are actually talking … even the couples with mismatched devices are intently studying their own … noone is reading a book … not a paper one anyways. There’s one couple; I’m not convinced they’re an item though he wants to be I think and he’s constantly trying to show her amusing things on his phone and she’s looking awfully bored … increasingly so the more insistently he appears to not read the body language and blind to the look of disdain each time he offers his screen … but then he’s not looking at her … he’s looking at his phone and therein lies the problem.

A bit rambling today but there you go…