Welcome Transience

A series on wind, flowers, and the fleeting beauty of now

Hello everybody.

I’ve had a lot of thinking time over these past few weeks and months about my series on wind, originally titled Gaoth (pronounced Gwee). Gaoth is the Irish word for wind and while I absolutely loved the name, I realised it wasn’t the best fit for this series because it doesn’t allude to what it’s really about.

There were months where I wasn’t taking photos for this series, not because I didn’t try or didn’t want to, but because it simply wasn’t working.

Let’s break this down for people who haven’t seen the series before. I’m photographing flowers in the wind, and for that I need two things:

• Flowers

• Wind

For the past few months it’s been winter here in Perth. While we’ve had a lot of wind, there hasn’t been much colour or blossoms, plenty of greens but not much else. I quickly realised that my favourite images in this series came from the relationship between colour and movement, rather than just capturing movement alone.

So while we had wind, we didn’t have colour being winter in Perth. And now that colour has started blooming these past few weeks, we’ve been getting the opposite conditions: beautiful spring days of 20 degrees Celsius (about 70 Fahrenheit for you Americans) with minimal wind. Other times it’s been the reverse, wild wind with sideways rain. And, of course, there have been those perfect days when I’ve simply been working and couldn’t shoot for the series.

I’m not mad about it though, because it gave me time to reflect on this series: why I like it, what it’s for, and what I think the overall narrative is.

On Saturday I finally got the day I’d been waiting for. I wasn’t working, it wasn’t raining all day, we had big wind, and the spring colours are starting to pop here in Perth. I spent about six hours dodging showers, walking and driving around, and shooting at six different spots. I came home, edited a little, and then went back to two of those spots because I wasn’t happy with what I’d captured. I was almost giddy.

Why am I telling you all this? Let’s start with the darker part of this week’s email.

I think a lot about death, not my own specifically, but death in general. I had a few near-death experiences growing up (three to be exact): car crashes when we had no seatbelts, a major operation as an 11-month-old, and nearly drowning while on holiday in Perth in 1995.

That’s not really the point though. I think reflecting on death is wonderfully freeing. Death happens all the time. Nothing is permanent. And that’s exactly what this series is subtly talking about.

I’m capturing the beauty of a moment, and it’s beautiful because it never exists like that ever again. Just like us.

We’ve become severely disconnected from our own mortality and from death in general. We don’t have that deep gratitude for our food because we’re so disconnected from the life it lived. We spend so much of our time wasting away in the hopes of a better tomorrow, instead of milking today for all it’s worth.

Confucius said it best: “We all have two lives, and the second begins when we realise we only have one.”

Now, death and an art project shouldn’t really belong in the same blog post, yet here we are.

Photographing wind is a great analogy for change.
Flowers are a great analogy for beauty.
And together they speak to the transient nature of it all.

The first photo I took for this series was in December. I may have 25–30 frames so far out of maybe 15,000 images taken. It might be more.

But here’s the thing, every single frame cannot be replicated. Every flower I’ve photographed is either dead or dying. Even the ones from Saturday were wrecked by the wind, so they don’t and won’t look the same today as they did then.
Even next year when they all bloom again, it will always be different than it was when I took the frame.

And the wind itself is fleeting. It exists only for the time my shutter is open and never the same again.

That’s the beauty of this series.

It was never about the wind. It was always a reminder of the transient nature of life, in nature and in our own.

That’s why I changed the name. I mean, I was also getting annoyed by people saying the series was called “Goat,” but that was secondary haha.

Transience
“the state or fact of lasting only for a short time”

A rather beautiful way of looking at life and leaning into the perspective it can offer us. These images aim to be beautiful but also emotive.

I want you to get what you get from them. I don’t expect you to connect with all of them or even some of them. I hope you do. But more than anything, I hope that when you see them you’re reminded of the beauty of now, because that’s where real life and love live, in focusing on here and now.

Big love, Adam

Here’s some of the images I got Saturday from this series.