At Dendy Street Beach in Brighton, about thirteen kilometers south of the center of Melbourne, more than eighty timber huts stand in a row facing Port Phillip Bay. They have no electricity and no running water. You cannot sleep in one, rent it out, or run anything from it. They sell for several hundred thousand dollars.
I set up on the footpath above the beach, on the rise where the road runs along the top, and waited for the city to come on behind them.
There is a category of thing our economy has almost no language for, which is a place that exists only in order to be a place. The boxes do nothing. They hold a deckchair, some towels, a bucket. What that money buys is somewhere to sit and look at water with nothing expected of you in return. Standing above them at the end of the day, with the city lit up behind and the bay going quiet in front, what struck me was not the contrast between the two. It was that somebody decided, a hundred years ago, to protect a strip of ground whose entire function is to have none.
Nothing Asked is that row at the close of a day. Eighty small rooms with no purpose but to be somewhere to sit.
Photographed at Dendy Street Beach in Brighton, in the City of Bayside about thirteen kilometers south of central Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, at dusk with the Melbourne skyline beyond. This is a single frame image. The subject is the Brighton Bathing Boxes, a row of more than eighty timber huts with corrugated iron roofs, uniform in scale and construction and individually painted by their owners. Most were built between 1907 and 1933, originally as changing rooms reflecting Victorian-era ideas about modest bathing, and they remain without electricity or running water. They are protected under Victorian state heritage legislation, ownership is restricted to local ratepayers, and they cannot be lived in or let. Presented as a horizontal panorama, offered as an archival limited edition from 12 by 36 inches to 30 by 90 inches on acrylic, metal, or archival paper.
Each image is released in limited editions, with edition size set by presentation and scale, so the most substantial works remain the most rare.
Every work ships insured and arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity.
If a piece is damaged in transit, the choice of replacement is always yours, and your edition number stays with you.
Production time runs 2 to 3 weeks for metal, 3 to 4 weeks for acrylic and paper, and 5 to 6 weeks for framed work.
Collector Edition of 25 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Handcrafted Italian Frame
TruLife acrylic in a handcrafted Italian frame with a linen liner chosen for the image. Frame series, finish, and liner are settled with you after the order, and production begins from there. The frame and liner add about fourteen inches to the finished dimensions, worth allowing for when planning placement.
Signature Edition of 50 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Gallery Float Mount
Face-mounted to TruLife acrylic and floated approximately one inch from the wall, with no frame to mediate between the image and the room. UV-resistant, anti-reflective, and scratch-resistant, with a lifetime guarantee against fading.
Signature Edition of 50 · ChromaLuxe Metal Print · Gallery Float Mount
Color infused into the aluminum panel itself, floated from the wall on a concealed system. Where acrylic produces luminosity, metal produces clarity. Exceptional fade resistance with no glazing or coating required.
Fine Art Edition of 100 · Hahnemühle Baryta Fine Art Paper
Printed without acrylic, so light meets the paper surface directly. Highlights stay luminous, shadows keep their nuance, and the surface has a tactile quality the other presentations approach differently. The understated choice, and the traditional one.
Complimentary shipping within the continental United States. International collector shipping available upon request.
Still deciding
Designing for Stillness
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
How to tell whether an image will still hold you in a year, how scale changes what a photograph does in a room, and how to match a piece to the work a room actually performs. It cites the research it draws on, and it is equally clear about where that research stops. About ten minutes to read.