Scale

There is a big difference between seeing pictures of things and seeing them in real life, whatever the circumstances and no matter how amazing the photos.

Last year at the end of a trip around Australia with some friends I went to Ayers Rock. It is a stunningly beautiful area. How can one rock be so much? Before we got there, I actually had very little interest in visiting it. "It's just a stupid rock," I thought. I only agreed to go there because we were drivig home within just a few hours of it, and it seemed a waste not to. It's not as if I was ever going to make a special trip there just to see it... "It's one of those things every Australian should see," I'd been told. So I went.

I don't even know how to describe the feeling that came over me as I saw it in the distance, and remained with me as we approached. I couldn't understand how something I had seen in so many photos right throughout my life could at once be so the same and yet so very different. How could it be so familiar and yet so brand new? Surely, you would think i would have learned by now, that as brilliant as modern photography is, one thing it cannot and will never be able to accurately portray is scale.

Anybody who has ever looked at real estate photos probably has a good grasp of this. Anybody who has tried to insist to friends that their holiday photos "just don't do it justice." Anybody who has driven down the Hume or Melba Highways in the last couple of weeks will also begin to have an understanding- anybody who has seen the loss and devastation on the faces of those who have lost everything, and the stress and worry of those who still feared they might.

Many people have said to me recently, "I've read the newspaper and found myself crying," or "oh isn't the news just so sad at the moment - those poor people." The generosity of Australians and the world has been amazing, obviously many people are aware that this disaster is beyond the realms of anything most Australians have ever endured. However, I think the only people who can even begin to understand the real scale of this catastrophe are those whose lives have been irreparably changed: those who have lost friends or relatives, those who have lost their homes and memories. Those people now have to begin the mammoth task of trying rebuild their lives. and that's something I am certain they don't want people taking photographs of. They don't want strangers thinking they understand something the scale of which they cannot possibly understand and something to which no photograph can ever do justice.