Before things get too busy again I want put up some weddings from a while ago. This one was eighteen months ago and Christie and Jeremy had popped over from Dubai to get married in Byron Bay. They told me they didn’t want to spend all day smiling for the camera or posing but wanted to spend most of their time having fun. That sounded perfect to me.
It’s the second time I’ve posted photographs at the Byron Bay Lighthouse and it won’t be the last. It’s always different.
The wedding was at the Byron Bay Beach Resort which is now mothballed (as a wedding venue) and we got to the lighthouse just before sunset on a cloudy afternoon. A glider soared in the chilly updraft off the Capes’ 120 meter high cliff face, along with the bridesmaids’ hemlines. As the soft blue light faded the glider sailed back across the bay to Tyagarah airfield and we headed off to the reception.
Great Wedding Photography Byron Bay. Tracey Trezise, Wedding Photojournalism
(Thursday, 28 January 2010)
No comment necessary:)
Family Portraits Noosa
(Thursday, 28 January 2010)
I’ve got a drinking problem, and its my problem not alcohols’. The issue is an intolerance which means even small amounts are potentially fatal. It was quite a process realizing this. As a sixteen year old I indulged in my first teenage drinking session and ended up being given the last rights.
My sweet father-in-law thinks it’s the worst affliction imaginable and most people have a “bummer, glad it’s not me” reaction, but really in itself it’s not a bad thing and arguably a blessing.
A short time either side of that event my elder brother Jim and eldest sister Christine died suddenly after drinking. Only with hindsight have doctors been able to finger the culprit though the chemistry is still not understood. All three of us shared whatever it is that causes a few drinks to be lethal. My elder sister Deb escaped that throw of the dice.
Drinking lubricates most socializing, and when you’re young there’s the peer thing too. In my youth I felt a little sidelined and became more of an involuntary observer than participant.
I wasn’t cynical, but fascinated with something I wanted to be in on, but couldn’t.
After leaving Art College in ’87 I began to record what I’d been looking at for the previous 10 years, by documenting drinking culture, mainly on Friday and Saturday nights in the Brisbane CBD. I wasn’t looking for the unusual or spectacular but the typical and mundane. I attempted to be as objective as possible usually shooting from the hip so as not to be noticed. The wide angle lens and camera body was taped up to lock its focus and hide its shine.
Often there was too little light to see and I never knew exactly what was on the negs until they were developed. Sometimes it was like randomly sending a remote camera to the depths of the ocean to see what was there. Technical excellence ran a very distant second to content; I cared only a bit about the zone system and zilch about the golden mean.
After a while I displayed thirty photographs at McWhirters Art Space in the “Valley” in a solo exhibition I called “A Shot in the Dark”. The exhibition ended up on the ABC’s 7.30 Report which was then state based, and once a week they closed with a story on a current exhibition. The comments book in the gallery was active. Entries ranged from “If someone told me I was looking at the work of the best photographer in the world, I’d believe them” to “not art, f#cking sh!t”.
The experience was in some ways cathartic and afterwards I had an “I’m done” feeling. Apart from plotting some personal stuff, for various reasons I put away the camera for nearly a decade until a few months before the turn of the century.
Brisbane Street Photography, Art Photography
(Thursday, 28 January 2010)
As wedding photography is supposed to be about capturing memories I thought I’d test that again and show Georgie and Graeme’s wedding from early in 2007. The original plan was for them to travel with family and friends to Byron Bay from Melbourne. A few months out that plan was reversed and I ended up going down there. Not quiet Melbourne but across Port Philip Bay on the Bellarine Peninsula at Queenscliffe and a glorious winery called Spray Farm.
Melbourne wedding photgraphy, Lathamstowe, Spray Farm, Geelong wedding photography, Photojournalistic Wedding Photography
(Tuesday, 12 January 2010)
Please don’t read this if you’re offended by explicit descriptions of sex, it’s not used gratuitously but its necessary to help paint a picture of my late, great aunt Florence Sellers who passed away in 2001 at the age of 96 …. And no this isn’t a deviate story, the opposite actually.
As a kid it’s helpful to have adults around who show a non-judgmental interest in you as an individual, and right from the start we were friends. No one tangled with Auntie Florence and went away unscathed, but she only fired up if she felt disrespected. I never felt threatened by her and was intrigued with her pluck and independence. She could put anyone in their place, so to have her as a friend was always entertaining.
Unmarried until she was in her late fifties; well past children, she secured her place in the world via a career in nursing. A matron by the age of 35; it was a position held for 41 years. It’s easy to see what she was doing, she was not going to be beholden to anyone let alone a man. Her love hate relationship with men as a gender was a real marker of her personality. A superficial reading (by some of the males and females who knew her) was she was a man-hating militant feminist. But she actually loved men and was occasionally charmed by certain individuals, but more often couldn’t swallow the status quo. From her perspective men did most of the trouble making and deserved none of their unearned privilege.
We’d go out together and one time (1992) we went to see the movie Baraka. It was an awe inspiring depiction of modernity’s effect on the natural world and human culture. Its signature was breathtaking cinematography, a Phillip Glass soundtrack, and absolutely no dialogue. When it finished and the lights were coming up, she turned to me and said “Dear, …. it said nothing …. (pause) ….but said everything.”
In 2000 she caught the bus from Brisbane to Lismore a couple of times to visit, quite a feat for a 95 year old. I’d meet her and we’d drive out to our 40 acres at Jiggi were she’d talk all day about the past and her take on life, and potter around the garden. Outspoken about everything she would often jump into the deep end of a conversation and open it with a challenging question, “ Tell me Stephen do you believe in the Immaculate Conception?” It was difficult to predict which way things were going so I learnt early that it was best to speak your mind and hope for the best.
“No not really”
“Well I do, I’ve seen it!” Her narrative was laced with stories of nursing in the slums of Sydney during the depression, WW2 service in the Solomon Islands and 1900’s rural life and there was no telling were an idea of hers had its origin. They often had a theme of man’s injustice to man but more often to woman.
If there was point to be made she’d frown and tighten her mouth as she spoke, slowly delivering the story in a lilting rhythm.
“…. you might have this young girl see, … and she’s new to the city and she meets this young fellow … and he makes her laugh, and he’s handsome, and he’s a good dancer, … and they go out and have few dances, and he offers her a lift home, … and he starts kissing her in the car, … and next thing he’s got his bloomin’ pants down and before you know it he ejaculates, and a bit of semen lands on her labia … and semens like jolly lice you know!! , next thing you know the poor girls pregnant, and she hadn’t done a thing wrong, her hyman was completely intact!.”
She caught herself and laughed at her own brazenness “Dear what must you think of me?’ I didn’t say, but I thought the world of her which she realized anyway.
The next year, around her 96th birthday she took the bus into Southbank from Sunnybank to celebrate with friends. On her way home she hopped off the bus and walked in front of a car but survived with a badly dislocated shoulder, and a broken arm. So strong was her spirit she convinced the doctors to let her go home (and continued living by herself until the last 4 months of her life). They didn’t set her arm properly so she was lop-sided and learnt to do everything with one hand.
One of the last times we visited her unit, her by that time frail, bird like form disappeared into a room and she came out with a couple of old jars and said to Simone, “now your mother looks like a sensible sort of person who’d know the value of a good jar, do you think she’d want these”? It was a touching reminder of an almost extinct value system.
A melanoma formed under her injured arm and she was gone, not without a fight, a few months later.
At that time the Lismore Regional Art Gallery announced the theme of it’s annual art prize “Living legends”, open to all genre's. I don’t usually enter competitions if the only outcome is the chance of a pat on the head and a prize or some unbelievable title, but this offered a relevant forum for an idea/feeling.
Aunties’ last gift to me was a small box that had her life summarised in a few dozen photographs, letters and certificates.
If you live, at a certain point life becomes a gradual disappearing act, and there were photo’s of Auntie as a young flapper in the 20’s, a successful professional and an ageing recipient of an BEM. Naturally I couldn’t use her as my subject though she was my inspiration. So I enquired and found two centenarians at a local Nursing home. One (Irene Compton) was the wife of the NSW Minister for Lands in the 1950”s and the other (Syd Ballard) was once the Head of the Department of Agriculture in Northern NSW. The staff with permission of the families supplied me with a few past photographs and a beautiful recent letter to Syd from someone he’d mentored at the height of his own career.
I’d bought a Hasselblad impulsively 12 months earlier and finally found a purpose for its medium format potential. Syd and Irene were photographed against a simple background in their wheelchairs, the negs were scanned and I pasted copies of a few of their mementos and the memoirs onto the wall behind them. ….. alluding to their slip into obscurity.
To make a statement about the invisibility of the aged and to give them a presence, I made the enlargements life size and displayed them as a diptych.
The judge Alison Kubler, to my astonishment picked “Syd and Irene” out as the winner, and I got the $3k prize which just about covered the printing and framing costs, but that is the lot of most who consider themselves artists.
Art Photography
(Tuesday, 12 January 2010)