To Stand and See: On Hope, Change, and the Work of Witness

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Thoughts on a recent reading of a letter by Nick Cave’s to a parent, paraphrased here. In a world visibly shifting — in its climates, cultures, and ecologies — bearing witness becomes a shared responsibility through attention, presence, and storytelling,

"You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you. Cynicism is not a neutral position - and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.

I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

Nick Cave April 2022

Kopar Village -Papua New Guinea 2023 - Ian Dawson

A personal response after reading Nick Cave’s letter...

There’s something in Nick Cave’s reply that lingers, not just the clarity of his language, but the steadiness with which he holds space for doubt, and then answers it not with certainty, but with care.

That sense of care matters. Especially for those of us who work out in the weather, among the animals, the ice, the people whose lives still move with the rhythm of the seasons. We see what’s happening. Not in abstraction, but in the slow unraveling of what once felt dependable - the sea behaving strangely, the birds arriving too soon, old stories beginning to slip from memory because the landscape they describe is no longer there.

And still, somehow, there are moments that pull us back toward belief. Not in a sweeping, universal way, but in something quieter. Local. Human. A grandmother teaching her grandson how to dry fish in the wind. A hunter laying down their rifle to wait, not because it is easy, but because it is right. A young girl naming each kind of snow she knows.

They are small, yes, but are not insignificant. They remind us, as Cave writes, that hope is not an idea, but an action. That what we choose to attend to shapes the world we end up living in.

Photography, at its best, is an act of attention. It doesn’t rescue or redeem. It simply points and says, look. And when done honestly, it’s less about capturing and more about listening. There is a kind of humility in that. A way of standing beside something - a bear on a melting floe, villages under salt water - and not turning away.

What strikes me about Cave’s letter is his insistence that cynicism, though it asks little of us, leaves a great deal behind. The temptation to give in to it. To close the aperture just a little. To expect less of others. To stop hoping for change because it feels too slow, too fragmented. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? To keep your eye in, even when the light is low.

Robert Macfarlane writes about the need to “unforget” the living world - to recognise that our failure lies not only in what we’ve damaged, but in what we’ve stopped noticing. The animacy of things. The meaning carried in the wind, or the voice of a river. It’s not sentiment. It’s not metaphor. It’s relationship.

And once you’ve seen it - really seen it - it’s difficult not to care. Difficult not to speak up. Difficult not to press the shutter, even if you’re not sure who will see the picture.

We don’t need to shout. We just need to show.

Because belief — in people, in place, in the possibility of repair — doesn’t come from argument. It comes from presence. From doing the work. From walking the land and learning its names. From choosing, again and again, to bear witness.

And maybe that’s enough...