PHOTOBOOKS
LAUNCESTON LANDMARKS
Launceston has a rich and distinctive built environment, and it’s this unique character and ambience that’s provided me with profound inspiration in photographing the city.
Launceston Landmarks is the culmination of countless walks exploring and photographing Tasmania’s putative northern capital. After more than two decades of being inquisitive, hundreds of walks throughout the city, countless experimentation, failures and successes, I have come to know Launceston, through the lens of my camera, as though it were my best friend.
The project, decades in the making, has culminated in a hardcover photography book and limited edition prints.
It’s only been in the last couple of years that my focus has shifted to documenting suburban life. It’s always been there as an integral part of my life, having grown up in the suburbs, and in my experience as a photographer. I enjoyed going through my archives and taking walks and seeing where the next street and laneway would take me, venturing from well-worn thoroughfares to byways, into nooks and crannies. I remember early on in the project finding a myriad of laneways and small spaces adjacent to the backs of houses that serve as kinds of hidden walkways whereby I was captivated by being transported into what felt like another world, into which I could escape and allow my imagination to run wild. Cobbled together tin and timber fencing, vines and random other plants are all vying for light in these tight quarters. It evoked powerful memories and took me back to being a child exploring and being curious as to what’s around the next corner. It never ceases to amaze me how this simultaneous process of exploration and attentive curiosity can steer ideas and projects in completely novel and previously unimagined directions. I enjoy the heterogeneity of suburbia, and for precisely this reason it’s impossible to definitively capture its essence as there are so many conflicting elements and contradictions that make it what it is. There is simultaneously beauty, ugliness, noise, quietness, the manicured, unkept, abandoned and neglected, modest, pompous and even comedy witnessed by the ubiquitous 'pick up your dog poo' signs that range from polite wording to outright suburban warfare!
INSIGNIFICANT MOMENTS
This project explores concepts relating to the built environment we engage with every day, including loneliness, isolation, atomisation and vulnerability, and considers the notion that the insignificant moments in our daily lives are the soul of these man-made spaces. Steeped in the austere and the lonely, there is nevertheless an inherent beauty in these insignificant moments.
As a photographer, I regularly immerse myself in exploring the built environment to find inspiration for my projects. Here, I’m inspired by the architecture, streets, and fleeting moments in a rushed world.
Impermanence (West Coast Tasmania)
This project explores the landscape of West Coast Tasmania and how the region has been shaped by the human presence within this landscape. Evidence of human impact on the landscape is everywhere and yet the vast and rugged environment of the West Coast provides a sense that we are but specs in time and like life itself we are, and the structures within the environment, are fleeting and Impermanent. The project explores the environment of West Coast Tasmania within the vastness of this landscape and explores how human interaction has shaped the landscape and it's communities, questioning the popularised cliché places like the West West Coast Tasmania are being undistributed pristine environments. Book and fine art limited edition prints now available.