and I still call Bondi home . . .

Just around the corner from Bondi - the bit jutting out between Tamarama on the left and McKenzie's Bay on the right is my favourite spot to stretch out with a book before jumping in off the rocks

Surf photographer Eugene Tan is part of the scenery down at Bondi and Sydney's surrounding beaches. I often passed him while out for my morning run, him with camera poised and shuttering or sitting cross legged with pad and pen, facing the horizon. Aside from producing stunningly beautiful images of our stunningly beautiful beaches and the beautiful people that surf them, Eugene also runs the Aquabumps Gallery in Curlewis St and keeps Bondi up to date with his blog and noticeboard. Strangely enough, his blog is one of the best places to look for a vacant room listing or a for a casual job in Bondi.

Being on far Western shores I can no longer pop into the gallery, but photos like these (the top one was put up online yesterday) go half-way to curing homesickness. Subscribe to Eugene's daily emails here.

Bondi

Bondi at sunrise - I was treated to this view every day

My beloved North Bondi

Tamarama

How Lovely, the Western Sun

The light is special in Western Australia. Shadows are long, dusk is golden, and sunsets are peachy. My friend Jai took these photos in Margaret River and I especially love the shot below (portrait). All the different shades of white and Valli's sweet but knowing expression suggest a sense of purity that is multi-hued; that lies in the grey area between the poles of black and white.

Chris Jordan - making art of consumer stats

On the ever-popular subject of consumerism, we Westerners are inundated with information - statistics, tables, reports, study findings, etc. Apparently, however, the human brain cannot comprehend numbers upwards of a few hundred thousand or a million, and so, even with all these stats so readily available, we cannot fully comprehend their meaning and are therefore somewhat oblivious to the effect we are collectively having on the world around us.

U.S based photographic artist Chris Jordan aims to bring a sense of consumer awareness to his fellow Americans (and really, Westerners in general) by translating these inaccessible facts and figures into a visual language that we can understand. Beginning with anything from plastic cups, barbie dolls, shark teeth and other such dross, Jordan creates grand-scale images which create a sense of context and scale, giving us an idea of the way many many small actions snowball to create a startlingly large whole effect.

Plastic Cups, 2008
Depicts 1, 000, 000 plastic cups, ie: the number used on airline flights in the U.S every six hours.


Zoomed in to actual size


Barbie Dolls, 2008
Depicts 32, 000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S in 2006.


And zoomed in


Jordan's hope is that his artworks may "serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry." First we become aware; then we can consider our behaviour in light of that and effect change. Have a listen to what he's got to say in his spiel for TED ....