Give Way

Dry grass stalks and seed heads crowd the base of a galvanised steel signpost carrying a red and white Give Way triangle, in open grassland near Bombala in the Monaro. Cloud thickens toward the top of the frame, broken by a patch of blue sky to the left, and a low hill traces the horizon just above the sign. There is no road and no intersection anywhere in view.

Brett photographed this on 22 December 2018, on the Nikon Z 7 with a 180-400mm lens. The compression of a long lens is what strips the road out of the picture and leaves the sign standing in grass, which is the whole of it: an instruction to yield, addressed to nobody, in a paddock. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on. Lifted out of its traffic context the triangle stops working as a sign and becomes pure shape and colour against dry high-country pasture under an overcast sky. The seed heads at its base and the low hill behind are all the setting it gets.