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John Arthur Nichol

gratuitous images

  • The Wedding Flight

    Five snow white doves in a white cage, the bars made of painted dowel. The birds are healthy, alert and interested in their surroundings, as they wait to be released into the air as part of a wedding ceremony taking place on Long Reef Beach, Sydney. They have pink feet and coloured identification bands on their legs.

    Long Reef Beach, Sydney

  • The Wedding Spot

    A photo taken from inside a restaurant on a sunny day, looking across the outdoor terrace to a wedding party on the sand. Beyond lies the ocean with an exposed rock shelf, and a blue sky with banks of white cloud. The bride and groom, only just visible among attendees, stand beneath banners of white material hanging on a bamboo frame. In the foreground a woman stands at the restaurant doorway, looking out at the wedding, and diners on the terrace also watch with interest.

    Long Reef Beach, Sydney

  • Close Encounters of the Doggy Kind

    Two dogs meet on a long, shaded footpath by a sunlit road. One is a small white Pomeranian and the other is a big, heavy Rottweiler. The Pomeranian, alone on a bench, stands looking down in alarm at the Rottweiler, which is passing by with its owner and glancing up at the Pomeranian. The Rottweiler’s owner has paused, looking back because of the Pomeranian’s outraged barking. Both dogs have red leads. Standing in the distance is a third dog, held by a seated woman and looking on anxiously.

  • Bushfire Days

    A dirty orange sky above clustered city buildings, with the sun a white ball of light surrounded by a thick yellow band. The photo is taken at an angle so that all the buildings are leaning sharply to the left. The sky’s colour darkens and reddens the sandstone of an old building on the right, adding bands of red to the green copper dome, and turns the foliage in the foreground to a dull brown. Tall concrete buildings on the left are a darker tone of the sky’s colour.

    Sydney CBD

  • A Confusion of Angles

    Looking through the balustrade and supports of a 19th Century carved sandstone staircase from close-up. The top railing is massive, carved and fluted, echoing the sharp upwards angle of the sandtone base. Between them, each upright is a squat pillar carved into a shape like a chess piece, a queen or a rook, perhaps, with broad rectangles, narrow lips and delicate, flowing curves. Their mirror image uprights are visible beyond slate-grey steps whose edges are painted white, and through the gaps the planes of a sandstone building and its windows disrupt the symmetry of the columns. In the foreground a single, browning leaf lies curling between two uprights.

    Sydney Town Hall, Druitt Street

  • Reaching for the Light

    On a highly reflective cafe counter crowded with lids, business cards, wooden bowls, condiments, hand sanitiser and stainless steel containers, four close-packed piles of white throwaway coffee cup lids curve gracefully sideways, like plants reaching for the light. They are mirrored in the counter top.

    Bakehouse Cafe, Drummoyne, Sydney

  • The Young Ones Look Down On Their Elders

    Old and new buildings are juxtaposed against each other, and against a blue sky in the sunshine. On the left is the Queen Victoria Building with its sandstone walls and sculptures and its green copper domes, overlaid on the blue exterior of a tall new building with a pink spire, pink trim, and blue-edged blocks of dark windows. To the right of this, almost as tall and almost touching it, is a grey and aqua green facade surmounted by a narrow block of windows and flat green wall, echoing the pink spire; and down low, against this building, stands the sandstone clock tower of the Sydney Town Hall, dwarfed by its modern neighbours.

    York Street, Sydney

  • Generational Change

    Two tables inside a cafe, a gap between them and a different couple facing each other across each table. On the left, an old couple with white hair and cardigans, the man with a hand to his chin and gazing out the window. A purse on the table. On the right, a couple in their forties, in t-shirts and workout pants, working on laptops with the tops of their screens touching in the middle. A water bottle and sunglasses on the table.

  • iPhone vs The Sun

    A photograph taken looking into the sun, which appears as a huge, whited-out circle in the top right-hand corner. Trees, cars and houses on the right are hazy, washed out by the sun’s glare, with sharp points of light reflecting from car bonnets, rooves and windscreens. On the left, across a road, is a building under construction, in shadow, with cars and a double-decker bus passing in front of it and a crane on top rising tall against a blue sky. In the foreground on the right, a turning car and a distant light pole cast long shadows on the road.

    Manly Vale, Sydney

  • Two Skies

    Looking across a carpark with a grey, gabled building on the left and a Norfolk Pine tree on the right, towards a beach, a dark grey sea with a flat horizon, and a sky with two contrasting aspects. For a short distance above the horizon the sky is pale blue with fluffy white clouds. Above this hang dark stormclouds, reaching all the way to the top of the photo. The grey building on the left has a balcony with five black umbrellas standing folded against the dark grey clouds. Two boys in black are hurrying up the beach towards the carpark.

    Collaroy Beach, Sydney

  • A Secret Door

    Between two big display windows and a sandstone column is a pair of narrow black doors. One door is open, with a white bucket in the doorway. The space beyond is dark and shadowy, but it’s just possible to make out a man’s face looking back at the camera.

    Queen Victoria Building, Sydney

  • Leafy Carpark

    Part of the front of a three-storey carpark seen from the footpath. The carpark’s facade is composed of squares and rectangles, two levels per storey. Some are open to reveal the interior. Some are enclosed by vertical rails, some by solid panels, and many others by thriving plants grown in the holes of concret panels or in tiered garden boxes. On the path is front of the carpark is more greenery and a bicycle parking space.

    Manly Vale, Sydney

  • Alien Treescape

    We can see one wall of a brick house on a corner block, part of its tiled roof and parts of the red brick garden walls at the front and side. Everything else is concealed by the strange shapes of big and small poplar trees, or cypresses. The two tallest of these have grown together, like twin cones, distinguished only by their separate summits as they stand in mottled greens against a bright blue sky. The light gives the trees a peculiar quality, so that they resemble a collection of sea-sponges, or clumps of coloured steel wool.

  • A Gap in the Trees

    Looking through a gap in the foliage to a small park stippled with light and shadow, with a bench in the foreground and sandstone buildings on either side. Nearby on the left is part of a glass tower block, and to its right is a patch or blue sky with the top of a white, octagonal tower with long, low windows on each face, like slats.

    Wynyard Park, Sydney

  • Another Day at the Office

    A man sits on a city footpath with his legs stretched out in front of him, resting his back against the base of a window between two sandstone columns and looking down with concentration at a laptop computer on his knee. He wears business clothes - a white shirt, black trousers and shiny black shoes. He has a full head of brown hair tied in a ponytail, a grey goatee beard, black-framed spectacles and white cables trailing down from his ears. Pedestrians in the foreground walk towards the camera, and one of them glances down at the seated man.

  • Looking towards the IMAX Theatre and Anzac Bridge

    From Druitt Street, Sydney

    Looking downhill from a city street to a major intersection where the road on the other side becomes a motorway climbing a hill. Beside the motorway is the Imaxx theatre, a tall building of concrete and glass whose top slants to one side. At the near end, the building’s two side sections curve outwards at the top and back in at the base, giving the structure a top-heavy, lopsided feel.

  • The Visitor

    A big lizard (a goanna) is alert on a concrete floor, against the base of a wall. The scales on the lizard’s skin are clearly defined, its body coloured in vertical bands of solid darker brown and mottled lighter brown. The lizard has a short, thick, bulky leg, which almost looks baggy, with long toes ending in sharp, curved claws. Its neck is long, and thickens where it joins the head, and the face is all darker brown, with a lighter horizontal band above and below the eye. Above the mouth is a mottled band of white and darker brown. A tip of the tongue pokes out the side, and the eye is big and round.

    A Goanna in Crookwell

  • It Almost Makes Me Want to Learn to Knit

    Looking into a needlecraft shop from the doorway. Two women dressed for winter stand together in front of open shelves packed with colourful balls of wool. One of the women, in jeans and loose black jumper, is looking down at a big book she holds open. Her friend, also in black, has leggings tucked into calf-length boots. Knitted socks are ranged along the shelf-top, each sock displayed on a flat, upturned foot shape. Beyond the shelves is another aisle, and a wall covered in tall wooden racks and shelving units filled with balls and twists of wool and yarn. The floor is polished timber.

    A needlecraft shop in York Street, Sydney

  • King Street Facade of the Forbes Hotel, Sydney

    Looking across King Street Sydney at the side of the Forbes Hotel, a four-storey brick structure with ornamental brickwork on the top three floors. An undulating half wall at the top, incorporating two tall triangular peaks, is very clear against two cream walls of a taller building behind. Every door and window is black timber and glass. The ground floor is half grey wall and half black doorways, with the hotel name at the top.The hotel presses against a taller building next door which is also brick, and shows the lettering 'Warehouse 1914'.

  • Strange Tower at Railway Square, Sydney

    A view from the ground looking up at a steel tower that stands on top of a concrete structure labelled 'Railway Square'. The tower rises on three girders, with circling, spiralling straps of metal winding through the space between, like mobius strips. At the top of the tower two horizontal circles are joined by metal spikes. They look like a crown of thorns. Perspective makes the tower taper sharply into the sky, which is bright, unbroken blue.

  • A Wall of History

    A wide photograph looking across a street to the side of a flat-roofed, windowless, two-storey building. It’s a brick wall painted predominantly in deep Prussian Blue, but there are patches where other paint, or no paint, is showing. On the right, almost all the top half shows an older base colour of dark green, where the framework supporting an advertising hoarding has been removed after many years. There are two patches of bare brickwork inside the green area, one at each end, and patches of light blue, white or the same deep blue of the rest of the wall. Black stains gather along the top edge and run down the wall in streaks. Near the ground, on the left, a big section of blue has been cut back unevenly to bare brickwork beside a sign saying 'Wicks', and beneath a panel of big coloured squares. Two surfboard signs stand out at the other end, and a Customer Parking sign in the middle.

  • Warm Light and Comfort Colours on York Street, Sydney

    The window display of a needlecraft shop. Against a background of crocheted blanket and plain hessian sacking, colourful balls of wool tumble from basket and bag amid examples of embroidery kits, knitting needles, bags, embroidered straps and labels, and bundles loops of thread. A tall arrangement of flowers fills the middle, with a tiny small potted succulent at its base, and on the right is a mannequin’s head and shoulders wearing loops of thick, knitted scarf in autumn colours, and a floppy knitted beret in black and yellow. At the back, on the left, an upstretched mannequin’s hand emerges from a green knitted wrist-warmer.

  • The Forbes Hotel, 1836

    On the Corner of York and King Streets, Sydney

    Three sides of an old building facing a street corner. We are looking at the building’s front door, on a very narrow side facing the corner. The two street frontages angle away to either side. The building’s exterior at ground level is grey, with a line of black tiles near the ground and layers of decorative stone work at the top. The narrow front facing us contains a pair of narrow, black-painted timber doors, each containing two four-paned windows and a timber panel below them. Above the doors is a closed black rectangle with black bars, which may once have been a window. This design of door is repeated multiple times along the two street frontages. At ground level the building is scrawled with graffiti. On either side of the front door is a tall, narrow brass plate with the hotel logo - a letter F incorporating the arms and torso of a waiter in formal dress - and the words Forbes Hotel 1836. Topping each brass plate is a decorative black lantern on a metal bracket. Above these is a small half-circle balcony with a rounded sandstone base and black, wrought iron railings. Beyond the balcony is a door with nine glass panels. The first floor of the building is made of bricks, and each of the street frontages has a square sign with the hotel name and logo.

  • The Dedicated Work of Sydney City Council Game Designers

    Druitt Street, Sydney

    Beside a city street sloping sharply downhill, the wide footpath is covered with geometric shapes in orange, white, yellow, blue and red. Stick-aeroplane shapes in orange and white predominate, running down the slope in tandem, but there is are rectangles as well and lettering like 'Ausgrid' and '50mm Cov'. A stooped man in black looks uphill at the camera.

  • Cocktails, Curry and a Happy Ending

    Three shopfronts viewed between parked vehicles on the far side of a city street. The middle shop has a rectangle of bright yellow above its entrance, with a bright pink and orange logo saying Pinky Ji's and stylised floral arrangements on either side. A neon sign at the top of the window says 'Cocktails & Curry', and a much bigger neon sign near the base of the window says 'Happy Ending' in block letters. A man stands in the foreground, near one of the parked cars, looking at his phone.

    Pinky Ji's on York Street, Sydney