Above: Harry Culy, Untitled Seascape #112, (black/black), The Gap, Vaucluse, Sydney, Australia, 2018. From the ongoing series The Gap, taken from an ocean cliff on the South Head peninsula in eastern Sydney—a site he photographed many times before discovering its dark history as a place where hundreds of people have taken their own lives. The series is showing in the City Gallery exhibition News from the Sun.

Below: Alfred Hitchcock takes in the same horizon from roughly the same spot. In Sydney for the Australian premier of Psycho in 1960, he was taken to the site (as well as the zoo and a children’s hospital) for a photo op. His seemingly transfixed, contemplative gaze is broken in the next image in the sequence where he plays up to the camera by comically swinging a leg over the protective fence and threatening to climb over it.

Classic Harry, classic Hitch. Both artists of stilled tension, the frozen moment, dark and light, wonder and horror.