The Australian Afternoon

C-Heads runs the kind of photography that makes you feel slightly ashamed of wherever you currently are. The Austrian independent magazine has built its identity on exactly this: natural light, skin, and the quality of attention that results when a photographer with a real eye finds someone genuinely worth looking at.

Janneke Storm is South African by origin, Australian by residence, and technically a wedding photographer—which is either the least interesting or the most revealing fact about her work, depending on how you think about the gap between hired craft and personal vision. In her own time she photographs her adopted country, and the results have drawn commissions from magazines and labels around the world. Looking at her images of Sophie Young taken along the Australian coast, the reason is obvious.

Sophie at the edge of the ocean, in the grass, in whatever light the afternoon had left to give. There’s a looseness to the images, an absence of editorial strain. Nobody performing. Just someone at home in a landscape that happens to be extraordinary.

I came across these in Berlin, where spring was technically underway but the sky was doing its best impression of February. Australia felt unreachable in that moment—not just geographically but as a whole register of existence. That much light. That much water. A coastline of that scale. I’ve never been, and looking at these I felt the specific mixture of longing and quiet self-reproach that comes from knowing you could go and haven’t.

Someday. The waves can wait.