What the Caption Doesn't Say

I spend a lot of time in archives. The State Library of Queensland, the Australian War Memorial and the State Library of New South Wales. I look for photographs of men - bathing, resting, sitting close, touching. The archives have plenty of images, catalogued in catalogue-style language: "men bathing" or "soldiers at leisure."

But what I see is intimacy.

When I look at a photograph of two men lying side by side, or relaxing with one arm draped over the other, I'm reading something specific. It's not just that they're close. It's that their bodies don't betray any discomfort about this closeness. There's no tension, no awkwardness, no pulling away. If these men weren't genuinely physically comfortable with one other, you'd see it. A trained eye quickly catches what's off in an image, and what draws me to these photographs is what's not off. The ease is visible. The closeness is real.

But what happens next is that I cross a line, from recognising intimacy into something I can only call desire. And I have to be honest about where that line is, and who is drawing it.

I come to these photographs carrying my own history of male intimacy; of desiring it, of living inside it, of being unable to name it for most of my life. When I see an image with no context, no caption, no story, no trace of who these men were or what they meant to each other, I fill that space. I project.

For a long time, I thought that this was a problem. That my desire was colouring in what I was seeing.

But then I realised: the archivist who labelled that photograph "soldiers at leisure" was projecting as well. They may have looked at two men lying together and projected the absence of desire. They could have filled the silence with heteronormativity; an assumption that men don't desire men, that closeness between male bodies can be nothing other than mateship and camaraderie. Their projection becomes the official record. Mine gets no space in that archive at all.

So, the question is not whether I'm projecting. Everyone who looks at these images projects. The question is whose projection gets to be the truth.

I'm not claiming to know what those men felt. I'll never know. But the archive decided for them - and it may have decided too narrowly. It closed down a possibility that the photograph itself leaves open. My work tries to open this back up.

This is where the painting begins.

Something changes when I take one of these photographs into the studio. When I paint a group of men fully clothed, outdoors, relaxing, I work to convey mood. Connection. Trust. The brushwork holds the scene together. The bodies engage with the landscape. Intimacy as atmosphere.

But when I paint flesh, naked or half-naked, the men I find near water, the process transforms. The paint thickens. I build skin through colour, layer on layer, stroke by stroke, no one mark enough on its own. Figures emerge complex, structured, present, weighty, warm. I keep going back into it. One pass is never enough.

This repetition - this insistence - I've come to understand, is where desire enters my work. Not just in what I choose to paint, but in how I paint it. The fully clothed men in groups get mood. The flesh gets my devotion. My hand building their bodies in paint, layer over layer. There's something physical in that act, something that goes beyond depiction. It becomes its own kind of intimacy - or its own kind of desire. I'm not always sure which.

The archive refused to name what it contained. I can't always name what my painting does either. The difference is that I'm willing to stay in that uncertainty. To let the question remain open. To keep layering.