I’ve always felt more at home in the city.

Despite the fact that I was born and raised on a rural property, several hundred kilometers from the nearest major city, I’ve always found comfort and safety in the dense urban environments of Sydney and latterly Adelaide. I suspect this is in part due to the anonymity, where the most you’ll likely interact with someone is some polite, meaningless words as you grab a drink from a run down and cramped convenience store, or throw some change to a busker in a busy mall.

It was the city that gave me the security and confidence I needed to come out as transgender, nearly a decade ago at the time of writing. Country towns don’t give you a crowd to disappear in, especially when you exist as some sort of anomalous presence, outside the experience of the average farmer. I never felt like a curiosity in the city, never felt like a beacon of strangeness as I walked down the street. I was always just another part of the greater texture made up of the blanket of innumerable faces.

There’s great solace to be found in that ironic isolation.

This project exists as a love letter to that irony. The strange incongruity of emptiness in an urban space, the quiet of the night in an environment that never rests.

It’s a requiem for the night time hours in a place I feel most at home.