Introduction — How It Came To Be
“...sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow.”
Where to begin? Well let me tell you a little bit about how I found myself here and what I envision for the future of my photography.
Portrait of first boyfriend, 2007.
Ever since I was little I wanted to be a writer. Growing up as a second generation immigrant, we didn’t speak English at home. Although I would consider my mother to be one of the most worldly and street-smart people I know, language was a tender subject for her. Her broken English left her feeling inadequate, a little ‘rough’ or at times, uneducated. Of course this wasn’t true, my mum still reads around 200 books a year and will put most people to shame when it comes to testing their knowledge on Russian philosophy or Korean politics. Regardless, I remember a sense of urgency as a kid to come across as well spoken. We grew up in a ghost town in a rural area of Victoria, Southern Australia — otherwise referred to as the outback. Our region was known as the teen pregnancy and meth capital of the country. In these parts, if you had an accent you were often told to ‘go back to where you came from’. For this reason, I avoided speaking German in front of my peers to my family.
Self Portrait in bath, 15 years old.
By the time I picked up a manual camera I was probably 15 years old. I never pursued photography in any serious capacity, I simply viewed my photos as a fun addition to my writing at the time. Looking back through my career as a photographer, I feel I fell into it by accident and perhaps that’s how the best art is created; without trying too hard. I am incredibly critical with all areas of my life, and photography was the one thing I allowed myself to do, without striving for perfection. When I graduated highschool at 17 I applied to both a photography degree and a writing degree. I was rejected from the photography course soon after but was offered a first round offer into the prestigious writing degree at RMIT University. At the time when they reviewed my portfolio I remember my teachers disliking my fictional stories. They much preferred the tales of my hometown; the shoe-less gangs of 10 year old kids running around with sharpened kitchen knives, or our neighbour setting their own farm (and all of it’s animals) on fire in the hopes of insurance money. These are the stories they preferred; real life in all of its absurdity. Not the polished stories I made up. I recall my mum once saying that reality is far more interesting and strange than any fantasy could ever be, and perhaps that’s why I loathe extensive editing and body modification in the photography industry so much. It’s simply not real.
Before studying, I travelled around Europe, Mexico, England and the US by myself. A few years later, in my final year of university my dad died. I met Mike through email from across the world and decided to drop out of school to move to Canada. Writing had fallen to the wayward and I found myself working in a coffee shop in the Rocky Mountains while Mike worked away on the pipeline for months at a time. I had already had some paid photography work under my belt, photographing musicians in Melbourne for cash but I hadn’t really thought twice about turning it into a real job.
Portrait of Ladie Dee, musician, Melbourne 2012
I hadn’t intended to offer photography professionally but friends starting enquiring about getting their portrait taken in the style of my previous work in Melbourne. It was in 2012 that I began offering sessions to Mike’s friends, using the same camera I bought when I was 15. This is where two worlds collide; how someone sees themselves and what I see.
A creative friend of mine once said ‘is it a good photo, or is it just a pretty girl?’ when referring to liking an image. With a society obsessed with skinny and pretty, it can be tough to distinguish a strong portrait from a pretty body. Is that a great dress, or is it just on a rake-thin model wearing it? Is that a good photo or is it just a pretty girl standing on a dirt road in Joshua Tree flexing her rib cage? Is it a good poem or is it just a hot girl on Instagram posting them? To me, I found this metaphor aptly encapsulated every issue I had with social media. Art shouldn’t be about glorifying youth and thinness. ‘Pretty’ is just about the least interesting thing something can be. I had been raised to see women as a lot more than their bodies. The women in my life took up space. They could be angry. They could pull out a loose tooth with their bare hands. Women cut stale wood with one arms swing of an ax. Women could be ugly. Scary. Funny. The last thing I valued as a girl growing up was the pursuit of smallness. Yet it’s all we see in social media; young, small, pretty women contorting their bodies to be concave and angular. Every recipe, landscape photo or poem is followed up by an ass or ab shot to keep the consumers attention. The amount of times someone sends me a photography account they love and it’s just half naked models with a vacant expression posing in front of landscapes in every post. Surely there’s more to photography than that?
My mother putting lipstick on my Oma for a portrait.
I have only been back to Australia twice in 10 years. On these trips I made a point to take portraits of my mother and grandmother. Something clicked while I was on these trips. Suddenly I wasn’t taking photos of Instagram influencers, I was taking photos of the two women who raised me. There was this moment where I said to myself ‘THIS IS WHAT MATTERS. This is REAL’. Sure, it might not be traditionally pretty. But it actually means something. I want to create more imagery which is real to those I photograph. I want you to recognize yourself and for those who love you, to recognize you and to remember you by.
On one of my last trips home, my mum showed me a trunk filled with photos of naked women in strange and 'unflattering’ positions (of which I won’t post here). Sagging breasts, an abundance of pubic hair, belly folds and crooked noses, I asked my mum where they came from. She told me this was my fathers collection of portraits he took of models to use as inspiration for his abstract paintings. He often painted figures with large bellies, distorted genitals and big noses. When I look at my dads work and photos it makes me fall in love with the human body all over again.
There are so many incredible stories to be told which are hidden in the lives of those who exist on the outskirts of glorified youth. We have become accustomed with expecting the art and media we consume to be attractive and generally easy on the eye. To me that is not the point of art whatsoever. Art shouldn’t look like a Coca Cola ad. Art is meant to evoke an array of feelings, not just arousal or comparative shame. Unfortunately in today’s world of media, youthful looks beat out character nearly every time and as a photographer my worst nightmare is only photographing models and not people who are doing interesting things. I want to change that currency and I want to change this distorted narrative we all feed into.
My mother dressed in my late fathers hat and jacket.
So here I am, 10 years later and over 600 shoots under my belt. I know for business purposes I should be focusing on driving more traffic to my site, or posting tips and tricks for photographers or making Tik Tok reels like a muppet but for now I want this space to be one of cathartic honesty. I may be in the icky world of marketing, but I will always strive to inject humanity into the work I create. I am not a content creating machine and I want to pump the breaks on this bizarre meta-verse that everyone is fuelling. Here’s to seeing more beauty in real life, in family and most importantly, in expression — frowns, tears, wrinkles and scars.
P.s, book your parents in for a portrait session.
