It is not often that I write words without intention and a plan, so today, you’re in for a treat.
Today I am exploring the anxiety of the tomorrow. That sweet, precious hope, that perhaps, it will all be very much okay, and everything will go to plan. I don’t get anxious for the worst case scenario — because I have already planned for that. In essence, the worst case scenario is that nothing happens, and the universe goes on without my agency being imposed upon it. But in fact, I’m delaying what I really want to write about.
The anxiety that there will be an uproarious success.
Tomorrow, I am hanging up my photographic exhibition, Myth. It is my first solo show in many years, and my name is at the top of the flyer that’s been distributed around town to promote the festival that enables the exhibition. I have joked that this means that I am “headlining” the festival, as though I am as cherished and important as that band that draws the audience.
Really, it is just a matter of the geography.
I get anxious for success.
I have never been trained to deal with success.
I hold the belief that I have never truly experienced it in any meaningful way.
You probably don’t want to read the lamentations of a man rapidly approaching middle age. (Though on reflection, we all travel through time at the same rate.) A man confessing on the topic of self-sabotage, imposter syndrome and worry. As a man I’m not as pretty as a damsel in distress, and it is unlikely any princess charming will leap to my aid.
Distress is felt all the same, and the anxiety of potential impending success is one of the reasons I probably do poorly at self-promotion. It is why I often don’t bother. If you’re reading this far, thank you, because that is a success that I could not anticipate.
By all external measures, I am a success. I made it through childhood. I did well in school. I lost people to terrible diseases. I lived on. I went to University. I lost other people to sudden, unforeseen circumstance. I lived on. I completed my studies. I travelled. I was lost for a little while.
I lived on.
I came home. I got a job. I got lost again for a little while. I missed my creative side. I returned to it. I lived on.
For you see, I have always wanted to tell stories, or at the very least, through my photographic work, hint at larger, polynomial stories that are woven from the viewer’s thoughts, a moment distilled from a larger, ongoing, manufactured narrative.
People tell me my photographic works are stunning. That they’re well captured, interesting, and beautiful. That’s the surface. I want people to dig deeper. To find themselves suddenly at the bottom of a well.
Not everyone is Roland Barthes. Not everyone thought as deeply as a French philosopher on the notion that every photograph embodies death. Even a simple selfie, or a smiling bride beaming at her husband, situated just out of frame.
In his wonderful, book-length essay which reads more like a memoir, Barthes is poetic, beautiful, miserable, and approaches the image(s) produced by photography with child-like wonder.
The same child-like wonder I have when observing representations of things. Then, he too, tragically, became a victim of inevitability, perishing as a pedestrian, after being hit by of all things, a Laundry Truck. A remarkable life ended in an unremarkable way. Camera Lucida was the last book he published.
To steal a quote from Barthes, in every photographic representation of the late man, we can look upon it and say, “He is dead, and he is going to die.”
Returning now to a man not recently deceased — myself! As I look upon the boxes of picture frames that will be loaded into my vehicle tomorrow and hung up upon a wall — I wonder about an audience of an unknown number will gaze upon the images.
The creative energy I have extracted from my mind and into picture frames. I wonder what they will think. Not only of my images, and the things they represent, but what reputation the work will give, to me, the man anxious about success.
They will observe a moment that I observed, first in my mind, which I then manufactured, observed and then captured.
Showing my work and telling others my dreams will always be a moment of extreme vulnerability and one of confrontation. No one asked for my images to be produced, created, or displayed. I am imposing it upon others, and their eye will wander across the image along the railroads of light I have harvested.
Many of these works have hung in my home for some time, others have been nothing beyond pixels and digital representations of a moment in the continuum of history. I’m afraid of losing my creations to sale, but I hope that they might lead different lives and bring reflection upon the minds of others, for only a short while.
I’m afraid of success.
Myth is on display at Cafe Nova, 19 Murray St, Gawler, South Australia 5118, from October 10, 2025 through October 20, 2025 during Cafe Nova Business Hours.
