NZ Visual Diary - entry 377

masts & moon - Wynyard Quarter

I have wanted for some time to compose a photograph incorporating the pair of masts that soar above the dry dock near my apartment. The apartment has a western exposure, so the twilight sky is often very dramatic.

This evening’s sunset was especially promising. Others would have sided with the colour rendition. The sky had rich purples. I was fixated by grey-scale tonalities. The depth of feeling — a quiet melancholy accented by the timeless impression of a black and white format — appealed to me.

The masts were silhouetted against thick rain clouds that dominated the horizon. A waning crescent moon offered porcelain sheen as counterpoint to the inky canvas below it. I love the visual excitement of a twilight sky in muted but variegated tones punctuated by the insistent sliver of moon light.

The background narrative here is that the masts have not gone to sea, as it were, in the three years that my wife and I have lived in Wynyard Quarter. There is quite literally a form of suspended animation at work in this photograph — stasis where there should be the imagined possibility of movement — and a black and white image invites a viewer to contend with still life paradox, of masts in picture severed from boat hull, and therefore incapable of motion, depicted without (forgive me) the distraction of colour.