Jonathan Delacour: And that's exactly the point that I was going to make. There was a passage in "Cold Mountain" where two of the female characters are talking. Ruby's father was a fiddle player. And Ada says to ruby, "Do you remember the song that your father used to play called the Mole In The Mountain?" And Ruby says she does remember that song. And Ada says, "I wonder if he wrote that himself?" And Ruby says, "Well, I think when it comes to fiddle playing, there are hardly any what you call original songs. That a song gets passed from fiddle player to fiddle player. And each of them adds something and takes something away. So over time, you end up with something that's very, very different. But then she goes on to say, "And as with all human endeavor, there's no such thing as progress. That quite often, what's lost is superior to what's being gained, or what's being substituted. And at the end of the day, you're lucky to wind up even." And when I read that, I thought this was just pretty much the truest thing I had heard.

It was something that I'd been thinking for a long, long time. The culture in which I live has this idea of progress. The idea is that we know more than people did 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. I think that that's completely and utterly untrue. I think that we know certain things that they didn't know. And they know lots of stuff that we don't have a fucking clue about. And really incredibly important stuff that they knew, that's lost, and that we'll never retrieve.

Interviewer: That attitude has informed a lot of the contemporary, post-sixties Australian culture. Much more than the American fascination with and romanticizing of the Native American, the connection to the unbroken history of the Aboriginal people of Austrailia has been quite profound for a number of Australians of European descent. It's turning the white man burden thing on its head, as if we are learning a completely different civilizing impulse from Aboriginal wisdom. The idea of progress has not only had the ability to destroy the natural resources, but many types of human memory that appear now to be extremely vital to our understanding of ourselves, and our place on this funny sphere that we are spinning around on.

Jonathan Delacour: I think that that's the task at hand in a way. I don't think we have any choice in this. Something taps you on the shoulder, and for whatever reason, your aptitude, or your inclination, or your background, or your previous experience. And you think this is what I'm going to attempt to do. I can remember someone saying to me, maybe a couple of years back, you can measure the health of a culture by the state of its storytelling.

Aristotle has, six levels of drama. I went back to Brenda [Laurel's] book to refresh my memory on this, but it still didn't stick. What Aristotle was saying is the easiest of all is spectacle. And that given the enormous success of "Titanic," I just wonder whether spectacle is a kind of cancer of our time.

Interviewer: But isn't it an old cancer, bread and circuses?

Jonathan Delacour: Everything's cyclical. There's temptation to fall into, "Oh, the world's terrible, and da da da da da." I'm resisting that. It worries me, it just worries me. I'm interested in intimacy and distinctive voices. And so the stories that I look for grow out of that interest.

Interviewer: Don't you have a sense that the search for intimacy is a natural reaction to consumer homogenization? Are we going back to a more natural order of relationships? Or are we just a small group of literates trying to convince ourselves that the world sees things our way?

Jonathan Delacour: I tend to think, depressingly, that it's the latter. Because I don't get any sense that people are unwilling consumers. I'm just as much of a consumer as anyone else. I think part of the problem, and this is where I'm going to run the risk of sounding like this reactionary old fart, is that as you make things easier, and easier, and easier, you get less and less and less of value as an end product.

In my time, during the period I was a photographer, the standard of photographs that was being taken plummeted as the ease of use of cameras increased. So photography just became less and less and less relevant.

That when you look at what photographers did in the American west in the 1870s, like from the late 1860s through the mid-1870s. Those photographs are unsurpassed in their visual beauty. And they just had to struggle to make a picture.

All through the '20s and '30s and '40s and '50s, when photography was driven by people who wanted to tell a story, and what was whether it was Walker Evans, or Robert Frank , but their medium of publication were magazines. And they were storytellers. Television took over that. Then everybody had a camera, and the whole genetic pool got deluded, so to speak.

Interviewer: It's a very similar discussion I had with Mark Petrakis. His shared your opinion that things last in some proportion to the kind of design struggle that you can feel the person put into the artifact.

Jonathan Delacour: I couldn't agree with that more.

Interviewer: And that therefore, things that are easy are light, and lose their meaning almost before they're called an artifact.

There is a socio-cultural, psychological issue about living in broadcast society where most of our stories are delivered in unidirectional context. Broadcast narratives become the totems of meaning in our lives. As a culture we draw more significance out of the most recent "Seinfeld" episode, than the story of the relationship of an acquaintance who just went through a divorce.

That's why I'm on grass roots campaign not about design excellence, but about media accessibility and literacy as an interpersonal exchange mechanism. So that people begin to use the languages of cinema as an extension of their conversations, to amplify meaning.