A Contrarian Collection

A few years ago when people asked what I did, I told them I was a photographer. I wasn't really. I was a guy with a camera who sometimes got paid to take photos. I was interested in photography, though not to the extent that many of the people I studied it with were. My reasons for pursuing photography as a career were less than ideal. My Mother decided that after returning from Western Australia (I'm originally from Brisbane) after a few years, I should study photography if only because it might give my wayward life some structure. Years before that, my Father gave me his old Pentax M5 and a couple of lenses when I visited him in France. I was given pretty free reign and I roamed the hills around Suffolk in the UK and wandered through a small area in the south of France. That was the only time when I actually loved photography; I had no expectations of myself or the images.

A grapevine in the yard at my Father's barn in

the south of France. Shot on the Pentax M5

mentioned in this post.

Photography wasn't entirely new to me. My high school was a special brand of patriarchal, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, STEM subject obsessed indoctrination camp yet bizarrely, it had an art department with more funding and equipment than most universities enjoy: bulk loaders with an endless supply of black and white film, twenty or so enlargers, a full dark room set up, even lightproof booths to load your film on to developing spools. I learnt as much as I was able and the art teachers let myself and my friends in to the dark room at lunch times. So when my 14th birthday was coming around and my Father (likely persuaded by my former step mother) offered to fly me over to Europe, I knew a lot more about photography than most teenagers heading overseas. Yet it still held that crucial element of wonder.

My father and me in Angouleme.I think this
was taken on my 14th birthday.

This was a great trip for me because I had that old camera of my Fathers and a fair bit of freedom - I could even order beer at the local bars thanks to looking a bit older than my age and the locals probably not caring. That set of photos, half lost to an itinerant and prolonged adolescence remains a point of nostalgia for me 13 years later. Despite that enthusiasm, I put the camera aside soon after that. School and other things got in the way, I guess.

Years later I took photography up again when my Mother bought me a small digital camera that eventually turned into a Canon 40D. This was probably the beginning of the end for any genuine enthusiasm I had for photography. The school I was studying at, despite the presence of some capable and talented staff, was run by someone who should have been sacked long ago, had shitty equipment, slow computers and there was a really good pub a little to close for any of us to resist. Still I kept at it. My life outside the course was a mess, but somehow I managed to get a few clients. At this point my life actually got worse. What little interest I had left for photography was slowly worn down by a string of tedious marketing managers and forced social occasions with superficial suit wearing folks (networking I believe it's called). Neither of which helped my escalating alcohol abuse. Now that it's a few years behind me, I realise that what was really eating me was that the work itself was so utterly meaningless; photographs of a wealthy person's living room for the real estate section, shots of private school girls looking happy for the next prospectus, corporate event photographs for accounting firms. What I was producing wasn't just dull, it was often for people that I would refuse to work for on ethical grounds nowadays. It was good money though. I was "successful". It didn't matter to the wider world that I was depressed, barely sleeping from the stress and drinking too much. It didn't matter because that's just regular life for a lot of people.

A real estate shoot from my

commercial era.

Without really making a decision, I just stopped taking photos. I'd subconsciously admitted to myself that I never had the passion that is always talked about for people working in creative industries. What was I going to do now though? I'd stopped taking photos, but I hadn't yet shaken off the need to present myself to new people with an impressive title like 'photographer'. That constant half-truth probably did more damage to my interest in photography than anything else previous to it. I was telling people I was a photographer, yet I couldn't stand the sight of a camera with all the self-doubt and negativity I'd attached to it.

An event shot for a school I was

contracted at for a year or so.

During this time I was able to put myself through a full course of therapy, quit drinking and generally became a much healthier, happier person. I also met my partner, Sophia, a trilingual travelling circus of happiness from the Whitsunday Islands who wasn't too keen to hang around Brisbane. A few months later we were off to South East Asia with Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand on our itinerary. At this point, I'd sold my camera. I had kept a 17-40mm l-series lens (a wide angle lens) as it never hurts to have some quality glass available. We didn't have much money either. Not the kind of cash you need to buy a new D-SLR anyway. I asked around and eventually found that my Mother still had an entry level film camera she got my sister for her 21st years earlier. I checked it out on Ebay and found that it was going for about $30. I bought a few rolls of ludicrously over priced film, some rechargeable CR2 batteries and "decided" I was going to shoot the entire journey on film.

After a few days in Singapore, almost a month in Malaysia, a week or so in Thailand and a month in Cambodia, we headed up to Chiang Mai. Here I had about 40 rolls of film developed. I expected neg files and cut strips. I got whole rolls stuffed back into canisters, scratches and fingerprints. I'd forgotten to adjust my expectation for the developing world. I'd planned to scan all the negs and touch them up later anyway so it wasn't too disappointing. I was faced with many of the same doubts over in Asia though. Many of them picked up from a facility that emphasised technical accuracy and superior equipment over pictorialist (the artistic merit of an image regardless of technical accuracy and quality) value. The files had be to perfect. I spent hours removing dust, scratches, corrected colour castes, toning, reducing noise. More accurately, I was removing anything that made them reflective of an experience. I was airbrushing away their soul. It's a very sad day when you're looking at photographs of outlying temples in Angkor, shot atop a pyramid you rode three hours in tropical heat to get to and all you can think about is whether or not to use the content-aware healing brush or a clone stamp...

I finished my editing and posted them up online. Immediately I disliked them. They were devoid of any evidence that a human being had been involved in their creation. I took them all down, was reluctant to show anyone who asked to see what I'd been up to and let them sit on an old hard drive for three years. Since then we've lived in Japan and China but are now back in Australia. I caught up with a mate recently, Hamish Cairns, a photojournalist who works in indigenous communities here and spends much of his time in conflict zones like the Khyber and Indus Valleys. He talked about letting shots 'marinate' for a few years. How giving them a distance is often essential to viewing them a bit more objectively. Something he's learnt from helping legendary Vietnam War photographer, Tim Page (the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse Now), go through his library over the last few years. Hamish works with some heavy subject matter so I took this to mean, aside from the obvious, that there's a certain responsibility documentary and travel photographers have to themselves as much as to their images; don't rush them unless you absolutely have to*.

With that in mind I rebooted the old hard drive and took a different approach to editing those old film scans. I let them be what they are. Grainy, scratched, cheaply developed images. In that form they are faithful to the trip. We were poor, I couldn't afford transparency or pro-grade film, I had a lens with focus issues, a cheap plastic camera and I was standing in awed silence, at the majesty, the incalculable feat of human achievement, of cruelty (much of Angkor was built by slaves) that is Angkor Wat and it's surrounding temples. I was in a country whose golden age expired long before my Fuji Superia 400 had a chance to.

So here they are, rough and honest. Enjoy.

Tim

*Don't rush them unless you have to obviously doesn't work if you're in a conflict zone and your shots could save lives...or your editor is riding you.

Siem Reap.

A street vendor frying up breakfast donuts, dough covered in melted palm sugar.

Showing off her daughter in Siem Reap, a Khmer girl waits tables in between feedings and hugs.

Need an ear clean? Siem Reap.

Tioman Island. This monkey, nick named Jalan, was attacked by an older male. He has a deep scar on his face and is missing a leg. Some Belgian tourists nursed him back to health when they found him. Now he lives with the locals in Nipah Village.

Angkor Wat.

Chinese tourists are not my favourite set of people. I lived in China for a year and to an extent sympathise with the transformative pressures of everyday life under a totalitarian regime. That doesn't make it any easier to see bus loads of mainland Chinese tourists littering, spitting and stubbing cigarette butts out on centuries old relics.