Lodestars Anthology contributor Grace Smith has just launched her new print shop that features some of the images she captured on her road trip from Brisbane to Uluru - an Outback adventure we included in our recent Australia magazine. To celebrate, we’ve shared a few glimpses of her work below, paired with the lyrical musings of writer Sarah Jappy. To view Grace’s full collection click here. For now, here’s to open roads and endless skies.
Poring over Grace Smith’s ochre, umber and gold images of the Australian outback on a late-summer afternoon in my South London study, I feel like someone receiving postcards from outer space. Not least because of the vast, lunar landscapes, pockmarked craters and incandescent glow of Uluru and Kata Tjuta at sunset - settings Grace describes as ‘Australia’s version of Monument Valley’.
It’s also the disparity between viewing these images from far away, feeling dwarfed by the epic beauty of landscapes never encountered but often imagined; scenes so powerful they moved Grace to tears. “I was speechless, it is so beautiful in person. It takes your breath away. Driving makes you appreciate it more because you’ve done the kilometres to get there. I didn’t expect it to be so emotional.”
Add to this my two-year sense of longing, a pining for distant lands and extraordinary scenery, for warmer climes, for unfamiliar faces: a wanderlust that burns, despite the dampening, life-shrinking effects of Britain’s multiple lockdowns in 2020. Even with restrictions lifted and vaccinations taken, travelling to Grace’s remote scenes feels like a giddy dream, a sun-drunk impossibility - incomprehensible to think it was once so easy, so unquestioned.
Studying photos of Grace’s road trip from Brisbane to Uluru brings Australia back. That dazzling light, those startling colours, a sky so vast, a horizon so limitless, the minutiae of nature and human life. Grace says: “Our sun is so beautiful, but it’s strong. And the colours - there’s a vibrant rustic-ness to it. It’s an outback palette, it’s incredible to shoot. In the city, there’s all this maximalism, but then you go out there and it might be the smallest thing, like bougainvillea on a petrol pump, it’s the one thing that stands out that’s so beautiful.”
Looking at her photos, I can almost feel the vibrating heat as the sun warms discarded sheets of corrugated iron. I remember languid Australian afternoons that called for impromptu siestas, sunhat close by. According to Grace, Lester Cain - photographed snoozing on the veranda of his Middleton pub - would swap between napping and conversation, nodding off between comments.
As I look, the photos become a kind of visual sustenance, an ephemeral warmth. Washing drying in the sun. A haze of raspberry-pink flowers. The promise of a good night’s kip from a blinking, ruby-red ‘ROOMS’ sign in Winton. A flock of egg-yolk-yellow birds in the trees like autumnal leaves. Denim-blue and ombre skies, where swathes of gunmetal-grey blend into peach-pastel stripes. A golden road that yawns ahead like an unanswered question
For Grace, the road trip was a means of experiencing life differently: “There’s no pressure. You can see things for what they are. It’s really wholesome. It all comes back to that slow, holistic living and how you experience things in life, and I got to do that through my lens.”
Having the freedom to slow down and capture what counts, whether confined at home, in the middle of an epic road trip, or immersed in the vastness and subtleties of our daily lives, is our challenge. Recalling these learnings is essential - and photographs like these are our tools.
Grace and Sarah’s full story was published in our Australia magazine.
