For a fortnight Macy Callaghan has been levitating on my work desk. Arms splayed like a bird in flight, eyes fixed down the line, skin brown, and all those features set against the most brilliant shade of blue imaginable. It may be true that a picture is worth a thousand words but only one is necessary for this cover shot: freedom.

I don’t know the etymology, but it’s ironic that in our language ‘blue’ has come to mean sullen and depressed - to ‘have the blues’ or ‘be feeling blue’. The colour blue, at least when verbalised, connotes sadness and melancholy, yet the colour itself conjures the very opposite feelings. The joy and lightness of a clear blue sky, and for surfers, the allure of clear blue water.

This is the kind of blue Andrew Shield has had us feeling since he began his photography career 25 years ago. It’s also the blue I sought when, over the last two weeks, my news feed began to get the better of me. A bruising national vote. A resurrection of ancient hate. Social media encourages us to engage but the opinions only add to the friction and the sense of helplessness. When I despaired, I picked up flying blue Macy.

Issue 46 of White Horses is solely devoted to Gold Coast-based photographer Andrew Shield. It’s the third time Horsies has committed a whole issue to one photographer - the others being Jason Childs and Ted Grambeau - and the idea is doubly brilliant. The first reason is a professional matter: It streamlines the workload of Editor Gra Murdoch, a point he’d probably rather I didn’t mention here. But think about it. One port of call, one email, one phone number for every single photo in the issue?  That’s an editor’s ticket to freedom, or at least a severely trimmed to-do list.

Unquestionably though, it’s the reader who benefits from this extended gaze. Modern media may demand more of our attention yet it splits it up into ever smaller slices: the 140-character limit, the endless scroll. So a dedicated issue feels revolutionary. To have the ear and eye of someone for a hundred or so pages, to trace their life’s work as an aesthetic is honed and sharpened, and all within a carefully curated environment, is an indulgence without comparison in the modern world. It wasn’t even a thing during ye olde media days.

Beyond flying blue Macy, Shieldsy takes the reader on a trip through time and space, beginning with pre-digital shots from the early-2000s around the Gold Coast, then across oceans to the boltholes he keeps revisiting. Islands mostly, usually tropical, always rendered in beautiful blue, a colour that releases the reader, taking them on their own flight of fancy.

For fifteen years, Shieldsy worked as a staff photographer at Surfing Life, a magazine that largely eschewed pro surfing for lifestyle and travel. Two concepts right in Shieldsy’s wheelhouse. That work has parlayed into resort photography, making regular visits to trip-of-a-lifetime places, keeping his portfolio primed with peak moments.

Many years ago, I wrote an article about a Quiksilver store opening in the military dictatorship of Myanmar, slightly incredulous at its prospects for success. I was swiftly rebuked by Phil Jarratt who told me that,“wherever there's been repression, there's potential for brands that represent freedom.”

It may be overstating it, but that same theory of surfing as freedom is central to Shieldsy’s work. I’m not talking about nuts and bolts technicalities here but the big picture vibe that his eye is drawn toward capturing. The feeling of release. Of existential lightness. Of staring into deep blue and escaping your current situation, even if only temporarily.

// STU NETTLE

White Horses Issue 46 is on sale now