She is red soil, sandy beaches, deeply scarred cliffs surrounded by an ocean of blue.
She is an environment of extremes but I love my hometown girl, Australia.
I’ve spent many years travelling her landscapes, photographing her diverse textures from many angles and taking photography students right to her heart.
From those deep reds seen in middle Queensland to the relentless beige on the west coast, the Antipodean landscape is extremely spacious, mostly flat and barely inhabited.
In 2005, I stepped away from the camera to begin a new and exciting writing project. It was to become a novel. I used what I learned behind the viewfinder to develop an entirely new narrative.
Combining the elements of photography, Australia, its diverse weather and spaciousness, was a pleasant challenge. What came out was a thriller.(No, it’s not another war correspondent story.)
SEETHINGS follows a photographer seeking to take a perfect picture of night lightning.
It sounds like a simple premise: Find a storm, take photos of it and bring the results back to the studio to study, frame and then display.
But our protagonist’s life is complicated. The images he takes continues to infuriate him.
Studying the results always comes with a sense of frustration and disappointment. Perfection in an art form such as photography is highly subjective. There’s always a better way to compose a storm photograph, a better arrangement of light.
There’s always a more impressive lightning strike to capture.
It could be a flaw in the art or a shortfall in our artist’s desire to express emotion.
There is another component or two I’ve added into the narrative to make things more interesting.
Something else is in the forest with our photographer during these night-shoots. It makes an insidious sound. There’s a momentary shadow of something during the flashes of light.
A body is always found the following morning.
Our near-defeated snapper hears the strange growl before each storm. It raises their neck hair. It’s not until a news broadcast mentions a victim’s name the next day does he begin to suspect something.
There’s a link between the sound heard in the forest, the news stories and the frustration to find sanctuary inside a perfect storm scenario.
SEETHINGS isn’t about revenge.
Revenge is yet to come.
Creep you later,
“Forman’s writing style is artful, with the protagonist Mitchell’s warped thought processes masterfully exposed. The author has a powerful and vivid command of language and his word pictures are stark and disturbingly real.”
– Linda J Bettenay, author of ‘Secrets Mothers Keep’ and ‘Wishes For Starlight’.
