It sometimes seems miraculous that compelling photographs can be made anywhere on earth, even in the most unpromising environs. It may even seem so to the photographer making the photographs, that a place and its people may remain visually recalcitrant despite all one's skills and will. Just when you think the world's visual riches have all been tapped, and every strategy applied and reapplied to the most mundane and lifeless subjects, along comes this surprisingly gratifying collection of photographs of a remote town in Australia with an ungainly name-Wyalkatchem, or Wylie for short.



Love, judiciously applied to almost any subject, can change everything. Love, palpable longing, and loss (the inevitable consequence of the first two qualities?) permeate Brad Rimmer's photographs in Silence. Rimmer is blessed, or cursed, with being an insider to this shrinking agricultural community. He left Wylie for the capital city of Perth in 1982, nineteen years old, on the heels of two siblings and in advance of his parents and another sibling's departure. In 2008, before he'd finished making these photographs, his grandmother died. As Rimmer put it, "Her death meant that returning to Wylie to complete the project was slightly depressing. The final connection I had to this place I once called 'home' was gone."

Slightly. I wonder if the people of Western Australia know they share the Midwestern American plains knack for understatement.



Jess, the heroic and wistful figure on the cover of Rimmer's book, regards her portrayer (and us) with a gaze that evokes The Last Picture Show. She's an Aussie Cybill Shepherd; along with her many youthful cohorts (far more under twenty-fives than over thirty-fives) in Rimmer's portfolio, she poses the question "Why stay?" The low sun, which draws their eyes outside of the frame, renders the silent land and faces with amazing, yet knowingly fleeting, grace. One can almost hear the curtains being drawn, because no one's there to clap. —George Slade