The Gaps by Leanne Hall (classic literature list .TXT) 📕

street, a little girl wearing her mother’s pearls, an erect nipple, ruined buildings, dilapidated glamour, petrol stations, burning houses, city lights.

My mind settles into the same flowing hum as it does when I jog. I move onto the next book, and the next.

Beautiful dishevelled young people. Bare skin, sexy angles, tangled limbs, wet mouths, drunken abandon, muddy smears, floating. They look like adults one moment and teenagers the next. Ecstatic in one shot, miserable in others. Troubled or hedonistic, it’s hard to tell.

I’d be happy if I could take one photo that matters, and here are hundreds.

The realisation that I could work at this for fifty years and never achieve anything half as good as these images thumps me in the chest. If you want to feel confident about what you’re doing, don’t look at great art.

I stretch my arms up and out, realising that I’ve been hunched over the books for quite some time. The man in front of me has been replaced by a professor-type in a knitted vest.

The woman to my right is taking careful photos of each letter and envelope, openly, so it must be allowed.

I flick back through the monographs, trying to find the images that have struck me the most, lining up my phone to capture them. I photograph the schoolgirls in hats and the little girl in pearls. The house in the woods. When I land on the city street scene with a solitary Asian face in a white crowd, something dawns on me.

Almost everyone is white.

I turn to my favourite sequence of pictures, the sullen, naughty teens. They look gorgeous and highbred, despite their degradation. Blue veins and pale skin. Tawny hair and red lips. They could be Natalia and some Grammar boys, so easily. They definitely couldn’t be me.

I check again, racing through page after page, finding a world that is overwhelmingly Western and white. This is not what the streets of my town look like.

I wonder why I’ve never noticed this about Henson’s photographs before. Does it make me like the photos any less? How could I like something that ignores my existence? It’s still on my mind as I hand the books back to the librarian at the desk and sign out in the visitor book.

‘Are you interested in contemporary photography?’ the librarian asks. I’m so lost in thought I’m slow to answer.

‘Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’m trying to learn about it. There are so many different styles.’

‘You should speak to my colleague, Chris. They know everything there is to know about our photographic collections. Do you want me to see if they’re around?’

‘I don’t want to bother—’

The librarian waves my protests aside. He makes a quick call then sends me out to the main room, to the info desk. Chris has short purple hair and a septum piercing.

‘So, what exactly are you looking for?’ they say.

‘I don’t know…’ I’m positive Chris would rather deal with weighty academic requests than vague curiosity from a teenager. ‘We’ve been introduced to some photographers at school, but they’re all the famous ones. I guess…I want to see photos of someone who looks like me,’ I say. ‘Or a lot of different types of people, actually.’

Chris claps their hands. ‘This is the best enquiry I’ve had all day. Come.’

They march me to the Arts Reading Room and load me up with books from the photography section.

‘I’ll give you too many options, then you’re more likely to find something that resonates.’

Chris helps me lug the books to a table and then leaves me alone. I want to thank them for taking me seriously, but the words get stuck and they’re gone before I can say it.

The array of art books is mind boggling. Most are related to exhibitions that have happened all over the world, so it’s like taking a round-the-world trip in an hour.

A book about masquerade and self-portraiture and constructing different selves. A catalogue from the Lagos Photo Festival. Collections of found photographs from India. A coffee-table book about female Chinese artists. Gender performance in photography.

Some photos are posed and almost look like movie stills, some are so casual they seem like accidents. I think my photo of Natalia falls somewhere between the two, and I wish I’d thought more intentionally about that before taking it.

I spend some time on a monograph of Tracey Moffatt’s work. I’ve seen her photographs before, but only one or two at a time. And there’s something different about seeing the image on a page, running my fingers over the coloured paper, more alive and tangible than looking at photos on a screen. Her photos are carefully staged and full of symbolism.

I pause at one of her most famous images: Moffatt dressed in a cheongsam, looking expectant and wistful in front of a falling-down shack. There’s a brassy blonde woman in the doorway, a sweaty guy drinking inside, a pair of blurry kids and a young Chinese man in a traditional conical hat outside. The landscape is red and hot and dusty, and obviously fake.

I wonder about where the Chinese elements fit in with Moffatt’s Aboriginal heritage, but I don’t know enough about her to figure it out. She’s saying something important, though, it radiates off the page. The photo uses stereotypes and stock characters, but the effect is mysterious and the colours glow and Moffatt looks in control of the whole thing.

I turn next to the book about Chinese female artists, called Half the Sky. Brave women who worked in private without acclaim, who made large-scale ink works, who shocked everyone by shooting their own artwork with real bullets at an exhibition opening.

The introductory essay explains that the title is based on the Mao Zedong quote: Women hold up half the sky.

I’d read in the paper that morning how many calls the police hotline had received about Yin’s disappearance—apparently hundreds of calls from people all over, and not just about Yin but about dozens of other missing women too. Shouldn’t we be doing more