Dream Baby Dream | Mel Fulton
Dream Baby Dream is a gentle reminder to stay alive to the details: a glimpse of the moon at breakfast; plump fruit, ripening on the tree; the way the light grazes a petal; the sky’s infinite shades of blue.
Shot on 35mm film – most of the colour shots on a Nikon FM2, a lucky find from Castlemaine Vinnies in 2017; and the black-and-white shots on an Olympus Pen FT, which shoots at half frame, hence a little more grain – these pictures are also exercises in chance, little fleeting magics that have struck me on my way.
They’re imperfect, largely unedited, and in some ways it’s a wonder that they’ve made it here at all. We get busy, or bored, or sick – we despair – and we forget to look. To dream requires playfulness, a sense of what’s possible.
But when we remember: what riches! To take a long walk on a warm day, watch the water sparkle and the tulips droop in their jar. To clap eyes on a wild hive, humming with industry on Campbells Creek. To pluck winter oranges from Dad’s tree or be delivered a posey from a mate’s backyard. To wonder at the open faces of hollyhocks at midday, and the splendid musculature of horses, the way they look like they’re hugging. The world is doggedly there, in all its everyday glory, waiting for us to worship it.
Kurt Vonnegut urged his readers to notice when they are happy; “to exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”. These are my murmurings and exclamations. In their smallness is something infinite.
Mostly, these pictures are a celebration of light: the way it transforms things, the way it dances, the magical abundance of it. Many of the compositions here use mirrors, reflections and multiple exposures to funnel its power. Mostly, these pictures are shot in the in-between: as the day opens like a flower, or as it slips away.
Like the Suicide song it’s named for, Dream Baby Dream is a funny sort of lullaby, almost a prayer: a reminder to drink in the magic that surrounds you.
