GoMA — Queensland Gallery of Modern Art
gomabrisbanecultural precinctwest endbrisbane floods 2011landscape

GoMA — Queensland Gallery of Modern Art

Chris Harvey
A little planet projection of the precinct — the world curved in on itself, the gallery and the river folded into a sphere.

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The 2011 floods reached the Cultural Centre. The aftermath was surreal — familiar places submerged, the usual landmarks at odd heights.

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The gardens around the precinct reward a slow walk. Stop, get low, and the whole world rearranges itself at flower height.

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A butterfly on a yellow flower, both completely still for one second. That second is why you carry the camera.

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Macro photography teaches you patience and proximity. Everything interesting is closer than you think.

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From the Author

One of the practical advantages of living in West End is that the Queensland Cultural Centre — GoMA, the State Library, QPAC, the Art Gallery — is a fifteen-minute walk from my front door. I have walked down there more times than I can count, usually with a camera and no particular plan, and the precinct never stops producing images.

The session that produced these photographs happened in the weeks after the January 2011 floods, which reached well into the Cultural Centre grounds and left the kind of visual residue that floods leave everywhere — waterlines on walls, mud in unexpected places, the familiar made strange. The precinct was beginning to recover when I visited, and the contrast between the usual order of the buildings and the evidence of what had happened was something I wanted to photograph before it was cleaned up entirely.

On the architectural setting: GoMA itself is a challenging subject — the building is large, geometric, and most photographs of it look like every other photograph of it. I found more interest at the edges: the transition between the building and the river, the way the late afternoon light falls across the concrete, the human scale of people moving through a space designed to make them feel small.

On the little planet: I had been experimenting with little planet projections at the time — a post-processing technique that wraps a panoramic image into a sphere. The Cultural Centre is a good subject for this because the architecture is regular and recognisable. When the building curves around on itself, it reads as something genuinely alien.

On the gardens: The grounds around the precinct have mature plantings that are often overlooked by people walking to the gallery. I spent an hour with a macro lens in the gardens and found more images there than anywhere else that afternoon. The butterfly and flower photographs came from the same ten-minute period in a garden bed most people walk straight past.

On returning: The precinct is the kind of place that repays repeated visits across different conditions — different seasons, different times of day, different events on the calendar. Each visit I find something I missed the last time.

The view across the river from the GoMA forecourt at sunset is one of the better things available to someone living in this part of the city. I do not take it for granted.

Chris Harvey