Feast or famine. That's the all too frequent choice when finding PAD material.
The Sculpture By The Sea exhibit is an annual outdoor exhibition of sculptures which are placed along the coastline from the southern end of Bondi Beach, up around the headland including Marks Park at the top of it, and on to Tamarama Beach.
Although the range of sculptures runs from "Uh, OK, why did you bother" to "That's interesting..." to "That's just weird" to an occasional "Oh wow, that's amazing", with over 100 sculptures to shoot if you don't come away with at least one PADable shot you just ain't trying. Your biggest challenge isn't looking at the sculptures, it's finding a way through the crowds without having them drown you and the background of your photo with the tide of their presence.
The most astonishing ones that I saw this year were a collection of mirrored steel poles with disks under them. The disks contain wildly distorted photographic images, but when you step forward onto the disks you see the images un-distort in their reflections in the poles. Effectively you become one with the sculpture. However it's experienced far better than it photographs, so I elected not to use my shots of that exhibit for my PAD.
I'm undecided whether this one fits into the "amazing" category, but given the level of detail and the planning that went into it, I think I'd say that it does.
This 2013 painted bronze sculpture by Englishman Sean Henry is titled The Wanderer , as you've probably guessed from the title of my PAD. The exhibition catalogue states that:
The artist's sculptures of anonymous people exist alongside us but go beyond the narrow limits of simply imitating life through subtle changes to colour, scale and material.
The sculpture is a little over 2 metres tall and a set of 5 of them will cost you $170K. (Whether this is 5 variations of the same sculpture or 5 different figures is not stated).
I do like the capture of the expression here; there's a weariness in the bags under the eyes, and a hollowness in his look. Whatever The Wanderer is looking for I'd say that he has yet to find it.
