I met Phil Riley at Metro, in Mount Gambier, where photography gave us our first common ground. Phil had come to see my exhibition at The Riddoch, and only later did I discover that he was himself a well-known jewellery artist.
Some time later, he gave me his well-worn copy of Stephan Vanfleteren’s Surf Tribe. When I tried to return it, he simply said, “Keep it. It belongs with you.”
That gift opened another conversation.
Phil has surfed since he was young and still finds his way back into the water. He began telling me stories: dolphins travelling inside a translucent wave, an elephant crossing the shallows in Sri Lanka, a curious seal circling a surfer.
I could have written them down. Instead, I saw them.
Photography has always been my first language, so I used artificial intelligence as I might use an unfamiliar camera: not to decide the images, but to help me reach them. I shaped composition, gesture, focus, grain and light until they felt less like generated pictures and more like fragments of memory.
These photographs are, in that sense, a small tribute to Phil Riley.
He gave me a book, then his stories.
Inspired by conversations with Phil Riley
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Each image is a page, and each collection is a story—immerse yourself in them as you would a novel.
