Aileen Chen’s photobook, Diary of a Lucky Seagull, ends with her ambition: “Keeping a diary to help me pay attention to life around me.”

Chen is a flâneur and scavenger. A seagull, of course, circles with crossed fingers, waiting for whatever is dropped. To be a Lucky Seagull is to have found something worth the dive. 

Where bodies appear in the book, they are cast in their ‘costumes of survival’: mostly puffer jackets and colour-blocked outfits. A woman in orange, another in pink, one in purple. A newly in-love couple in matching blue shirts and cold-margarine-coloured pants pose together on a bridge. Accidental matching is caught in Chen’s web too, like a man with a teal plastic bag and matching teal suspenders.

Where is the man in the white archive gloves (worn so loose they’ve stretched to an exaggerated Mickey Mouse hand-size) going? Where did that person with the blue plastic bag, pulled over his head to protect his hair from the rain, come from? People hold big bags on their shoulders and backs and around their necks. What’s on their to-do lists?  

Most are photographed without knowing it. One exception is a woman in a Woolworths supermarket showing Chen all her layers at once, like licking one side of a gobstopper. An orange woollen beret, burgundy dress buttoned top to toe, grey shawl, black jacket.  

Fox Talbot, pottering about Lacock Abbey in 1835 with his squares of silver-sensitised paper, called his earliest pictures “photogenic drawings”. In these a leaf or a scrap of lace is laid onto the page and left to imprint itself without a pencil or brush. The leaf or lace touches the paper and makes its own portrait by contact.  

Chen’s photograph of a scorched, charred-with-a-spiral tea towel, draped over an oven handle, is an exact soot-black copy of the electric element visible just above it. I know these spirals. A flat I once lived in, in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, paying a meagre $120 weekly rent and, naturally, no bond, had one. Every butter knife had the same baked-on soot spots and I asked, full of naivety, why. 

The nape of the neck comes up again and again in Diary of a Lucky Seagull, as a formal tic. It is a part of ourselves we cannot see nor guard. One cannot help but think of Lee Friedlander’s shadow falling (too close!) across the fur-coated back of a stranger on a New York pavement in 1966. 

Between all of Chen’s casted characters is a door plastered with four signs in two languages, declaring, with mounting desperation, “NOT TOILET.” A telephone pole pleads in a hand-lettered warning: STAY SAFE, DANGEROUS INTERSECTION AHEAD. A desktop thesaurus window, exhausts synonyms for “amazing”: astonishing, astounding, bewildering, shattering, spectacular, stupendous, thrilling, wondrous et al. 

Near the book’s end, several ruled, blank pages appear as an invitation for the reader to become a Lucky Seagull, and somehow find a steaming hot chip.