The Spirit of Stories

Last Tuesday, as I often do when I'm walking through the city, I ducked into the State Library to see what stories the old building was willing to tell today. It is a building with stories in its stones. Its mortar is molded by narrative. Its very foundation, both literal and figurative, is formed by fiction.

I was drawn through the undercroft and up the stairs towards the back of the library, meaning mostly to bask in the grandeur of the domed reading room; that temple of knowledge, literature, books and paper surpassed by few other places in either hemisphere.

But the Spirit of Stories, who resides in the concrete, mortar, bricks and stones of the library, had other ideas, and drew my attention to a sign, pointing through to the left: "Mirror: New Views on Photography".

Now, I know that the stories photos can tell are endless, so I followed the Spirit's suggestion and went to the left towards the doors of the exhibition.

Once through the doors I was bathed in semi-darkness, and confronted by a 12 ft high mirrored cube, while a voice from the middle of the room, reciting prosaic poetry, beckoned me in further.

It could well have been the voice of the Spirit, made human.

A map on the wall had three directions, "You could be here", "Or here" and "You can sit here".

Easy enough to follow.

But what could be hiding behind the cube of mirrors; The place where I am beckoned to sit?

Walking past it, into the centre of the room, I saw a large screen filled with various photos, of landscapes and portraits, in black and white and colour, both new and old, and heard a woman's voice asking questions about the very nature of photography itself.

The capturing of a moment in time: Is it a lie? Who is captured? Whose story is told after the shutter is activated?

But it wasn't that which really caught my attention.

It was the row of 8 foldable chairs (and two beanbags) set up for people to watch the screen. There was a man possibly asleep on one of the beanbags, and one other man, sitting, engrossed by the art on display.

I took a seat at the other end of the row and began watching the screen.

The woman’s voice ended, and was replaced by a man’s. The story changed, but the poetry remained.

Soon though, something else happened. More individuals came in, obviously led here by the same Spirit I was, until there were six of us in the room.

Six strangers all drawn to the one meditation on art on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, when we had all of Melbourne open to us. We chose instead to be there, sitting silently in the darkness, being asked rhetorical questions that no mortal can answer.

Being challenged by unseen narrators telling us their truths about the stories and lies of photography.

And for one tiny moment, we six strangers were all of a single story. A part and perspective of which I am telling now. This written photo capturing one single moment in time, when six different lives, six different narratives, six different experiences combined in silence.

That is the power of art. This is the power of stories.