The quality of a moment
What do you see when you look at this photo? I used to be frustrated with it, how grainy and low quality it is but I’ve learnt to love it.
This photo was taken in Bali, late in the evening, in a beachside bar. It was a quiet bar with just me, this woman, a hungover Australian and a dog as the patrons. The Australian sat in the corner nursing his head, we were a few hours from the party place in Bali on a quiet, empty stretch of coast. Both me and this woman were travelling solo and got chatting about who we were, where we were from.
She had a strong spirit, maybe it’s because I know that but I can feel it when I look at this photo. She was the head teacher of a primary school in New Zealand. She told me about how when she took over the school she had to write an enormous annual report every year. She hated it, I sympathised. The school she worked at had a significant Māori population and she was keen to include the community in the curriculum.
She told me about the close relationship between Māori and eels, that the health of rivers is critically important to them because it’s critically important to life of the eels. These are river Eels but after an extraordinary 25-80 years in freshwater they swim 5000km in to the deep ocean to spawn. She wove river restoration in to the curriculum. She wove other things in too, like beekeeping, which teaches the children not only how to make honey but how to run a small business packaging and selling the honey.
This woman was about living a connected life, she was about real learning. With a bit a mix of mischief and defiance in her eyes she told me how she had got the annual report down from a huge lifeless document to a single photo. The photo is of a huge collage of what the students and community feel they have achieved that year, and what they want to do with the year ahead of them.
I can’t remember the name of this woman, and we didn’t swap contact details. I’m glad we didn’t do the performative dance of swapping emails and making empty promises to stay in touch.
When I look at this photo I see her. I see who she is. When I look at this photo that quiet bar on the beach and that conversation become the present for a moment. This photo is not about the quality of the image, but the quality of the moment.
