The Paris-based photographer’s debut photo book distils friendship and boredom across suburban Australia
Photography has long been used to preserve what disappears. Youth, by nature, is temporary and fleeting. It is the making of us and sometimes the breaking of us. Often documented through its playfulness or through its despair, what we choose to remember is heightened and momentous. What we choose to forget is the waiting, the boredom, the silence. “I love to capture a moment in order to never forget that feeling,” says Adam Peter Johnson. In his first photography book, No Birds, the Paris-based French photographer and director turns his camera towards these forgotten stretches of inertia, examining the subtleties of friendship across rural, suburban Australia.
No Birds emerged from a road trip across that country with Johnson’s long-term friend and collaborator, the model Apolline Rocco-Fohrer. More personal and open-ended than his commercial work, the project depended on their familiarity. “I rarely shoot someone I don’t know,” he says. “We wanted to explore expressions and emotions she hadn’t shown on camera before.” Like Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard’s No Sex Last Night, in which a deteriorating relationship is documented during a road trip, No Birds uses a cross-country odyssey to examine the intimacy between photographer and subject – an intimacy that is exposed and intensified by being removed from familiar surroundings.
For Johnson, Australia also echoed the landscape of Provence, where he grew up. It was during the vacant hours of a childhood in the countryside that the ordinary could become strange to Johnson, whose photographs inhabit this tension, drawing out the starkness of the everyday and coating it with the sticky translucency of childhood fantasy. “There’s a lot of melancholy in youth,” he tells me. “We’ve all been young, sitting in our bedrooms, thinking about life.” His images return to that state of introspection: “that exact moment of intimacy with yourself, that moment of fragility full of strength and hope, where thoughts turn your mind and your heart.”
Through the pages of No Birds we are taken through barren interiors and vast landscapes; along the highway, the beach and into the toilet. “Most days I would wake up early and have a coffee by myself. I would always be ready with my camera,” Johnson recalls. “I would shoot Apolline during her morning or night routines. I wanted to capture our connection and friendship, us living together.” She guides us through the book, but the photographs feel as revealing of Johnson as they do of their subject.
There is an atmosphere of stillness but also sound in these images: the distant hum of traffic; the echoes of birdsong; the creaking of a door. “We shot in the middle of nowhere. Sounds were very rare. Only cars passing, the door of our house shutting, the wind. If you wake up one day and don’t hear birdsong, something is wrong. That is the wrong kind of silence. I wanted to capture the silence we’re all drawn to. The silence of contemplation.” All that is left is a deafening tinnitus, which forces us to confront the gaps in our memory, the holes in our brain.
No Birds by Adam Peter Johnson is published by Antenne Books and out now.
