Little Sydney Lives
There’s something different about the way a child views the world – a sweet naïveté, a rose-tinted lens. It’s the expansive joy of a busy beach on the first day of summer, when the holidays seem to stretch ahead of you for eternity. It’s the sense of transcendent awe that comes over you when you take a moment alone to look out across a river and realise, for the first time, that other people’s lives carry on without you there. If we could bottle those feelings, offer adults the chance to tap back into the intensity of emotions in their freshest form, we’d be millionaires. And while that kind of neurological wizardry is currently impossible, there’s an exhibition popping up in Sydney offering the next best thing. Little Sydney Lives is a photography exhibition featuring the work of some of Sydney’s best young photographers, and if you want a taste of childhood nostalgia, we’d suggest adding this to your hit list. Part of City of Sydney’s Art and About program, this year’s competition saw more than 284 entries submitted by children aged between 5 and 12 from across the Harbour City, with a total of 21 photographs making the finalists’ exhibition. The collection of photographs capture the essence of childhood – a big sister shrouded in sunlight, a handstand on the football field, a backyard bonfire. Among the shortlisted images, there’s a gloriously colourful picture of sunbathers on the slab at Wylies Baths, a perfectly framed shot of five Swans players approaching the SCG, an