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John Arthur Nichol

  • Zip

    With these handles, I used to zip and unzip

    Three shiny zipper handles, no longer attached to zippers, lie jumbled together on a soft, mottled brown background. The camera has zoomed in so the zipper handles seem big, and detailed. Illumination is from the side, lighting some surfaces and throwing others into shadow.

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 4

  • Three Histories of Ashfield

    A set of three terrace houses viewed from the front, identical in form but different in colour and state of repair. Each has a brick fence with a tiny yard, and French doors to a balcony on the upper level with elaborate wrought iron railings. Thick concrete walls separate the balconies, curving up to meet rendered fascias topped with sandstone urns. Both end houses appear well-maintained, but the middle house needs refurbishing: it has different, peeling colours top and bottom, cracks and moss in the brickwork of its fence, and dark stains on its fascia.

  • Hunters and Gatherers

    A wide, flat rock platform stretches from sand at bottom left to the ocean with small breaking waves in the middle distance, and a line of headlands on the horizon. The sea is dark blue. The sky is pale blue with white clouds: fluffy clouds high up and flat-topped clouds below them. A line of human figures spreads across the platform, stepping and fossicking in shallow pools and reflected there along with the sky. Children crouch, and a woman in a bikini carries a bucket.

  • Self-Portrait in Shadow

    A shiny, dark blue gate meets the rough concrete of a sunlit footpath, where a thick, irregular line of white paint runs along the concrete. The gate’s horizontal slats angle sharply up the left side of the photo. A shadow covers half of the gate and half of the footpath, an amorphous shape beginning at th ebottom edge and tapering right to the top where it suggests the head and shoulders of a person wearing a hat. On the gate’s second slat down from the corner is a small, luminous red rectangle with sharp edges.

  • A man with short, dark, wiry hair pushes a stroller containing a small red-haired boy. The boy sits with his hands in his lap, looking disconsolate. His hair flutters in the breeze. The man doesn’t once look up from his phone, whose screen he is reading with close attention.

  • Two old women are swapping war stories. One has a huge, thick plaster cast encasing her entire arm, with just a hole at the end for her fingers to breathe.

  • A bunch of teenage boys dawdles past, accompanied by two basketballs bouncing in monotonous rhythm. The sound has been heralding their approach for some time.

  • A thin woman in the distance, just a shadow, mounts the footpath with four little wheels and contemplates the path ahead.

  • A tiny girl flies past on a bright pink scooter, a riot of colour in rainbow-striped crocs, dark blue shorts and a jumper covered in flowers. Pink sunglasses dangle from her neckline, and her blonde ponytail flies beneath a maroon helmet with air holes and thick black straps.

    She glides to a halt, turns back to rendezvous with her mum, and they continue together.

  • An older woman is crossing Pittwater Road with terrifying slowness, smiling, utterly engaged in a conversation on her phone. The lights change as she reaches the pedestrian island in the middle but she doesn’t stop. She just keeps walking at the same unhurried pace, chatting away, crossing the murderous traffic lanes unchallenged.

  • Solitude

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 3

    A lone figure, seen in silhouette from behind, sits beneath a black umbrella on a steel and timber bench overlooking the surf. The sea and sky are both grey, but the water is darker. Waves break on the tip of a rocky outcrop in the middle distance and sweep round onto the sand, which is littered with seaweed. A two-storey yellow building and a swimming pool extend out onto the outcrop. A silver railing separates the bench and walkway from a short drop down to the beach.

  • Entropy in Red

    A close up of rust on a red street posting box. The rust has eaten right through the metal of the mail box, creating a series of layers beginning with bright red paint, then broken corroded metal in shades of brown and orange and red, and finally flakes of almost pure red oxide lying at the mouth of a black cavern.

  • The End of an Autumn Day

    A street half in darkness, with long shadows slanting across a tiled footpath. In the foreground, four silhouetted bicycle stands in the shape of horse-shoes are joined to the stretching loops of their own shadows. A yellow building on the left runs into the distance with bins and a pile of milk crates out the front and shadowy, glinting cars on either side of the street.

  • Our Mysterious Planet

    The lines on this footpath look like slinkies, but in my day we called them tumblebugs.

    A grey footpath is scored across with broad, pale marks that look like three-dimensional cylinders. The shapes are composed of regularly-spaced, spiral lines, and the end of each shape forms an angled cross-section of a circle.

  • A mother abandons her pram in Dee Why and runs, returning with a very small boy attached to a very big, very brown poodle. They set off again, the boy still in charge of the poodle and trailing its lead along the ground. The dog just goes with it.

  • A woman walks past with a pink lead hanging in the air. Almost certainly there’s something on the other end, but for architectural reasons I can’t see it.

  • A man is rearranging the fruit shop display, wheeling wooden boxes to the right and lining them up again. He fetches a long black pole to wind the awning down, and blessed shade embraces the pumpkins.

  • An old woman rolls her walking frame up to the entrance of a block of flats and engages a young man there in conversation. He opens the door and steps aside and she trundles in. I’m struck by the thought that she might not even live there: perhaps she’s a burglar, a hit-woman, a habitual visitor of foyers.

  • A balding, middle-aged man is walking on the footpath. He wears a white shirt bulging over dark trousers, and his bottom lip curls out so far I can see it from across the road. His head is bent so he’s not really looking where he’s going, but out of habit he turns aside and climbs two flights of stairs in a despondent trudge. He enters the lawyers' office.

  • A harried young man darts along the footpath and crosses the road, clutching sunglasses in his teeth and fumbling in the pockets of his blue checked suit. He scuttles into the distance, phone to his ear and coat-tails flapping.

  • An electric scooter flies across Howard Avenue in Dee Why. Its operator doesn’t stand, but rather sits comfortably on two sacks of rice with his feet in the air. His line of sight is just above the handlebars.

  • Ready for Any Weather

    A vertically oriented photo showing only the tops of two big white cafe umbrellas folded down and tied shut, against a white sky with faint horizontal strands of blue at the bottom. One umbrella is slightly further away and so appears shorter.

  • A big, craggy old man waits on the B1 bench at Wynyard. He has white hair, a trim grey chin-beard and a huge gold wrist-watch. White shirt, beige slacks, leather shoes. He nurses a paper cup with a straw. From the bench beside him he lifts a McDonalds bag and scrunches it. Then he coughs. He leans precariously, and his chest convulses.

  • A tall, efficient old woman guides a supermarket trolley with her own red shopping-cart balanced on top.

  • A man is ordering coffee. He’s bald on top with a fringe of white, and the front of his t-shirt says:

    Grandpa Est. 2016

    When he turns, there’s something on the back as well:

    Dad Est. 1979

    He still seems to function, though.