Interview of LostMnts by Freya Bennett
Summer is for losing yourself. In long days, cool water, dusty walks, and quiet edges of the world. That’s the space LostMnts captures in Swim and Camp: hidden swimming holes, mossy tracks, and still nights under eucalypts. These aren’t postcard views — they’re moments meant to be felt, not collected.
Your work feels very atmospheric and intimate. How did you approach photographing places that are already widely visited, but in a way that still feels secret and sacred?
I move slowly and arrive without an agenda. Even in places that are heavily visited, there are quiet edges – like early light, bad weather, off-angles, moments between, that most people pass straight through. That’s usually where the atmosphere lives. I’m not interested in documenting a location as it looks, but in responding to how it feels when no one’s watching. That often means waiting, returning multiple times, or choosing moments when the place feels withdrawn rather than performative. Sometimes this is in less-than-ideal weather.
There’s also a deliberate restraint in what I show. I leave things unresolved, partially hidden, or just outside the frame. That space invites the viewer to slow down and bring their own sense of reverence to it. In that way, even familiar places can feel secret again, not because they’re undiscovered, but because they’re being seen in a different way.
What draws you visually to swimming holes and campsites?
They’re places where people lower their guard. Swimming holes and campsites aren’t designed or controlled in the same way as lookouts or landmarks, they’re earned, stumbled upon, or shared quietly. Visually, that gives them a softness and honesty that I’m drawn to.
How does anonymity shape the way you shoot?
Anonymity removes the need to perform. Without a name or a face attached, the work doesn’t have to explain itself or align with a persona. That frees me to shoot intuitively and let the place lead, rather than thinking about how an image reflects back on me. It also changes how I move through landscapes. I’m less visible, less extractive. I can arrive quietly, stay longer, leave without leaving a mark. That distance creates a kind of humility in the process, the focus stays on watching and responding, not claiming authorship. In a way, anonymity mirrors the places I’m drawn to. Just like a swimming hole or a campsite, the images aren’t asking for attention. They exist to be discovered, not announced.
You talk about “anti-tourism.” From behind the lens, what do you think conventional tourism photography gets wrong about places like the Blue Mountains?
Conventional tourism photography tends to flatten places into products. It prioritises spectacle, scale, and instant recognition, clear skies, wide angles, postcard certainty, so the viewer can consume the location quickly. In places like the Blue Mountains, that approach misses the point entirely. The Mountains aren’t about a single lookout or perfect view. They’re slow, moody, and often uncooperative. Mist, shadow, repetition, and enclosure are part of their character. When photography edits that out in favour of spectacle, it teaches people to chase highlights rather than relationships.
From behind the lens, anti-tourism is about refusal. Refusing to reveal everything. Refusing to frame the land as a checklist item. Instead, the goal is to cultivate respect, patience, and a sense of earned access. If an image makes someone feel curious but not entitled, then it’s doing its job.
Were there moments while shooting Swim or Camp that felt genuinely spiritual or transformative for you? What did those moments look like?
Yes, but they were never dramatic. They were quiet shifts rather than big moments. Often it was being alone in a place for long enough that the rhythm of it took over: the sound of water repeating, light moving across rock, the temperature dropping as the sun left a canyon. At some point the urge to make an image disappeared, and I was just there. When I eventually lifted the camera again, the photograph felt more like a by-product than the goal.
Those moments were transformative because they dissolved scale and ego. It didn’t feel like I was documenting a location for Swim or Camp, it felt like being temporarily folded into the landscape. The images that came out of those times tend to be the quietest ones, but they’re also the ones that hold the most weight for me.
How do you balance revealing beautiful locations without contributing to their overexposure or damage? Is that something you consciously photograph around?
It’s absolutely something I photograph around, but not from a place of gatekeeping, more from a sense of responsibility. My work is built on the belief that education is more effective than secrecy. Both Swim and Camp open with a strong focus on conservation, respect, and how to move through these landscapes properly. With increased pressure coming from things like the Western Sydney Airport, tourism isn’t going to slow down, so the more important question becomes how people arrive, not whether they arrive at all.
Visually, I still choose to withhold exact locations and obvious identifiers. That’s one way of cutting away the mainstream, checklist-style tourism mentality. By photographing mood, texture, and experience rather than pin-drop clarity, the images resist being used as directions. They ask people to engage thoughtfully, not extractively.
The aim is to reframe the relationship. If someone is drawn in by the beauty and then educated about care, restraint, and responsibility, the photography becomes a gateway to stewardship rather than to damage. In that sense, revealing less isn’t about exclusion, it’s about encouraging a slower, more respectful form of connection that these places are going to need.
When someone flips through these books years from now, what do you hope they feel — and what do you hope they don’t see?
I hope they feel a sense of quiet permission, to slow down, to look longer, to remember what it felt like to be somewhere without needing to prove it. Ideally the books still feel calm and intimate, like a shared memory rather than a record of places conquered or collected.
I hope they feel respect for the landscapes, not nostalgia in a hollow way, but an understanding that these places were cared for, listened to, and treated as living systems rather than backdrops. If the work holds up, it should feel timeless, not tied to trends, algorithms, or a particular moment in social media culture.
What I hope they don’t see is instruction or entitlement. No sense that these pages are a checklist, a brag sheet, or an invitation to extract. I don’t want the books to age into souvenirs of overexposure. If years from now they still feel understated, unresolved, and slightly withheld, then they’ve done what they were meant to do.
