Forty Degrees

David Collier was shooting the day Sydney hit forty degrees before breakfast. Hottest day of the year, and he spent it indoors with Bella Donovan and a camera.

Collier photographs a series called Sleepyheads—women without clothes, quiet moments. His work doesn’t feel exploitative, just documentary in the plainest sense. A person, a room, light. The subjects always look comfortable, which you don’t see much in photography like this.

Bella’s from the north of New South Wales. I don’t know her other work, but she photographs well—which usually just means she doesn’t fight the camera. Collier said they kept it loose, practical given the heat, and just worked from there. The light was good. She was good. Sometimes that’s all there is.

Days that hot strip everything unnecessary. You can’t perform in it. You can barely think. So being undressed indoors while someone documents it makes a certain kind of sense. You’re just there, nothing performed, nothing hidden.

Collier’s been making these photographs for years. The work doesn’t have that quality a lot of nude photography has—this sense that someone’s being used. Instead there’s something equal in the frame, a genuine interest in the person.

I haven’t seen the final photographs from that day, but I imagine they have what his work usually has—something honest, something unguarded. Not prudish, not gratuitous. Just there.