The Title
Beauty exists in reality all around us
but there is also a coexisting reality of pain, decay and death. The
two words in English even look a little similar. Spring becomes Winter,
flowers go to seed, today's youth will one day be old - if they don't
die first. This would be very depressing if one failed to fully appreciate
the reality of beauty in all its complexity and subtlty.
The people in my photos will age and
die. Some have had terrible things happen to them but they have survived...
others will face some trauma in the future. In every case however they
were beautiful when I photographed them and I thank them for that.
The History
Imagine you live in a very small city,
little more than a country town, on an island to the far South
of the Australian mainland. You are an "art" photographer but the art market
in a town of 150,000 is negligible. The costs of exhibiting on the "Mainland" for
a non-established artist are prohibitive. The world doesn't know
you exist... until you discover the World Wide Web.
As a teenager I used to sidle nervously
into Winnings Newsagency in North Hobart (school cap concealed
in my pocket) and buy copies of an American magazine on nude photography "for
collectors". It was pretty tame stuff by modern standards; lousy
technique and no pubic hair... but it was hot stuff for me. I noticed
with interest
that one of the photographers was a woman - Bunny Yeager. Of course
I never heard of Bettie Page (more's the pity) who is now her most
famous model.
In art lessons at school I was finding
the nude more exciting and challenging than any other subject. I longed
to be in a position to work from live models but books and magazines
had to substitute. I was exactly like those pimply little America-On-Line
nerds who regularly send me messages asking how to find female models.
I had no concept of photography as art.
At school my "art" was drawing and painting and I was very puzzled
when, in my matriculation year, our new art history text had a
chapter on photography (and a picture by Cartier-Bresson).
After university and a number of career
changes I finally went to Art School - initially to learn magazine
design. I hated it and I think I only stuck it out from a pigheaded
determination not to let the bastards beat me. But I did meet a couple
of photography students who introduced me to photography-as-art and
the history of that art (which I was startled to find was as old as
photography itself).
My friends then started an eccentric
little photography business (which became Q Photographics) and let
me hang around. The routine of processing customers' films and printing
their photos was exactly the discipline I needed to get me started
as a serious photographer.
And I certainly needed discipline: in
1980 I destroyed a film brought in by Tasmania's conservation hero
Bob Brown. It contained shots of the Franklin River, one of the State's
last wild rivers and then under threat from a hydro-electricity scheme.
Bob must have walked and camped for days to get those shots and I blew
the lot with one processing error. I cringe every time I think about
it! I'm only telling you now to expiate my guilt.
The point of all this is that I left
Art School with their piece of paper but without their approval as
an artist. My work is definitely not politically correct, I'm left-handed
but not an aboriginal lesbian AND I had been a little too outspoken
in my criticism of the school while I was there.
On the whole commercial galleries won't
touch photography because, they say, it won't sell (there's something
of the Catch 22 principle in that) so I have to exhibit at my own expense
- which I can't afford to do often enough to give myself any profile
or convince buyers that I am an established artist.
On top of this, from 1986 to 1993 I edited
a small arts magazine. My editorial policy was anti-elitist, bringing
art back to the people - which further alienated me from Hobart's ultra-elitist
middleclass, middleaged arts establishment. Then I criticised the arts
coverage of Hobart's only daily newspaper.
Not surprisingly I was promptly sent
to Coventry: all references to me and my activities were subedited
out of any stories written by the paper's journalists.
By now you should begin to see why I
needed the Web.
The Web
Things happen fast in Cyberspace. It
was only November 1994 when I had my first go at putting something
up on the Internet multimedia phenomenon known as World Wide Web. As
a rite of passage that event is equivalent in stature to being given
my first camera and my first nude model.
I edit a magazine for the Division of
Information Services at the University of Tasmania. A few years
ago we decided, as cutting edge IT people, to make the magazine available
on the descriptively-named network system "Gopher". It didn't really
worry us that nobody ever seemed to read the gopher version - at
least we had tried.
But in a breathtakingly short time it
became obvious that the Web was now the dominant Internet activity.
So, as cutting edge IT people, we decided to put our magazine on the
Web in March 1994 (a year later we discontinued the gopher version).
The initial html editing for the web version was done by a gifted student
we recruited as a casual (and came to depend upon totally). Inevitably
he left for greener pastures and I noticed everyone was looking at
me.
For someone with twenty years experience
in producing paper journals, editing an e-journal in hypertext markup
language (html) is worse than a quantum leap. It is practically beginning
from scratch. If a paper journal is linear, an html document is like
tree - and the branches can go anywhere.
One fateful day last March (1995), while
absently wandering about the university's homepage I discovered
that when I clicked on my own email address I got a new page - blank
except
for my name and phone number. The boy wonder had given me a homepage
of my own! I already had "permission" for that part of the server so
up went my photo, a CV, a few articles and finally (God help me!) a
little "virtual gallery" of my photographs.
I do nudes. Nudity is such an established
tradition in the art world one forgets that many people still find
it offensive. I certainly did forget until the very morally upright
secretary of a very senior professor stumbled upon my little exhibit.
For once the instruction descended the chain of command with remarkable
speed and I was told by an embarrassed supervisor that it was not appropriate
for pictures of naked persons to be associated with the University's
homepage and that I should take out the link - which I promptly did.
Of course my pictures and the associated
html documents were still there and from the usage figures it was clear
that a significant number of people were already accessing them directly.
I removed all references to the university and sat tight. Nothing else
happened. I began developing my html editing skills by pinching ideas
from other sites and trying them out on my own. I also added some more
pictures from more recent work and the gallery got bigger.
I began getting email about my work.
Just a trickle at first (one or two a week) but this was virtually
the first positive feedback on my pictures in ten years as a practising
artist. And it was the first time I had used email for anything other
than work - for sending messages around the campus. Now I was getting
drawn into deeply philosophical discussions (and my typing improved
out of sight!).
Many messages were serious discussions
on my images and my intentions in creating them - luxury! I was in
Heaven! Then there were the nerdy ones such as `what are the models'
phone numbers?' or `send me all your female GIFs' (this is the AOL
smorgasbord approach to the Net - my reply was `Do you intend breeding
them or keeping them as pets?') or `where do I find breast-feeding
women I can photograph?.'
