Anita Totha

Solitude.

I was watching the fisherman on a particularly cold and rainy day. He was fishing a windswept stretch of Ninety Mile Beach on the Tasman Sea. He was out there by himself for hours and there wasn’t another soul to be seen for miles. I took a number of photographs of him throughout the day and he barely moved an inch. The fisherman wasn’t bothered by the harsh elements at all. I wondered if he ever caught a fish? I also wondered what he was thinking about for all those hours?

He was soon engulfed by the gray mist - I couldn’t see him anymore.

When I arrived in New Zealand from New York almost five years ago, I craved isolation to get away from the throngs of people and business of the everyday. This image symbolizes that feeling for me. There are still places in this corner of the world, on this little island, where you can escape and get lost in your own thoughts. I took this photograph at the starting point of Ninety Mile Beach in Ahipara, Far North, New Zealand in January 2015.