Walking into photographer Aimee Crouch’s exhibition 

, one is reminded by Susan Sontag’s words about how ‘the image is also the object’. Horizontal groupings of identical black frames are spread half-way across four white walls of a room. Within them are deep rectangles of negative white space that encase each black and white photograph Crouch has taken. The small, thick frames projecting out from the wall remind us that these photographs are physical entities, that both depict our worlds and are artefacts of them. In 

, these objects are the snapshots of Crouch’s life that she has taken over the past four years, portraying everyday moments she has felt necessary to commemorate; a mix of family members and strangers, banal objects of the everyday made mystical and glimpses of nature at play.

The images are therefore at once familiar and mysteriously remote; we recognise them as images of our collective lives and yet the specificity of this particular life evades us. The intimacy of watching someone sleep next to us is depicted in Crouch’s close up of her nephew peacefully dreaming, the thrill of spying on someone who doesn’t notice us is shown in her long shot of a neighbour being spied from above. A photograph of a crescent moon defining the black sky with its curve, is a moon we’ve seen before, just not on that particular night, at that angle. A fluttering blur of bird’s wings is a movement we know, but not the lorikeet that was flying around Crouch’s friend’s house while they were enjoying cups of tea. This diaristic quality to her photographs comes more from a need as well as a desire; ‘It is diaristic in a sense. Although there’s a lot of photos I take because I have a really bad memory’.

But is with the groupings of the photographs that certain aesthetics crystalise into view; the vertical line of a tree stump is matched by back lit pleats of a curtain and the muscular legs of a flamenco dancer mid stamp. Other groupings hint at the texture of Crouch’s photographs; the vertiginous crawl of tree roots in soil are mirrored by the vein-like branches of a tree in the air, the feel of which is mimicked in the crinkles of a doona. It’s a grouping together that’s intuitive Crouch says; ‘I’ll keep editing them down, looking at them next to each other and then I might have an idea of what images should go together… so it’s kind of like a fluid process that doesn’t really make much sense to anyone. It’s kind of collecting… I guess when I see them together it’s a bit like poetry, you just put words together to create something, to make meaning and make sense of a thing.’

And just like moments in our lives, some snapshots speak with intense movement and sound, others are pure stillness. The rush of a waterfall’s frothy white can almost be heard, and yet the silence of two empty chairs waiting in sunlight is deathly quiet. Things are one thing, but they also intimate another through Crouch’s eyes; boulders rising over ripples in a river are transform into abstract patterns and tree roots and branches can look like the veins in our hands. In 

 Crouch helps us to appreciate the act of looking anew, and to find what it is we want.

Tree of Hands