Aspen
What makes a good picture?
Sometimes it’s just the moment, or perhaps a small thing like the way the windscreen wiper scrapes away the Aspen snow.
Or through the filter of time, it all seems a long long time ago, so we look back and reminisce.
Well anyway, this picture was taken with a small $20 dollar disposable film camera with a plastic lens.
Maybe that’s what I like about it.
Ansel Adams
The intrepid conservationist and master photographer would strap a large 10×8 camera on his back and trek into and upward and take those exquisite pictures of Yosemite National Park in California. He said. “Most people think I am taking pictures of mountains however sometimes I’m just taking photographs of the weather”.
I think he was also taking photographs of those beautiful redwood forests that he condemned his paternal grandfather for cutting down as he founded a prosperous lumber business which his father later managed.
Ansel Adams transcended the world of art into a more important one, that is of conservationism.
Cicero
“If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.” He said.
The Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero has always been my go-to.
And so has Redleaf Library – as it had both. This jewel in the crown in the most sacred of the Eastern Suburbs foreshore was a library filled with art books overlooking a garden and then uninterrupted on to Sydney harbour . . . and I was in heaven.
I would walk there from my home and take a swim at Redleaf Pool – and later in life on rainy days as an art student, I would spend weekends there pouring over the art books as it had Sydney’s best collection. There I fell in love with the works of Richard Avedon, Paul Klee, Cezanne, William Eggleston. And there, at sunset as the light shimmered off the harbour into the library, I would day dream.
So decades later it was a thrill to be the first artist to be selected to inaugurate the library as it transitioned to the Woollarah Gallery.
The following image from my series, Remains Of The Day. Large format photographs of a study of the last light of the day. Long exposures on large sensors. These long exposures promote reciprocity failure (or the Schwarzschild effect) causing aberrations to light and colour. My aim was to bemuse the photographic sensors, so when the digital file is enhanced the results are unique, random and asymmetrical. One of a kind. Showcasing the character of colour and the beauty of light.
This garden and library was indeed everything I needed. Marcus Tullius Cicero was certainly right.
Roman intellect that say is only second to the ancient Greeks.
Malibu
One of my most favourite locations to shoot, Malibu.
That Californian light, the colours, those smells. That vista has been such a favourite of many lensmen from Helmut Newton to Herb Ritts and everyone in between. Also the location for that most famous love scene in the film classic, ‘From Here To Eternity’ , and others ‘American Gigolo’, ‘Less Than Zero’ – extraordinary films that have become embedded in our experience and psyche.
So on one of those perfect afternoons on a shoot for Vogue I encouraged the six time Academy Award nominated Amy Adams to run into the water in a six thousand dollar dress. It was an exquisite Collette Dinnigan hand made masterpiece.
“I know Collette really well” I said, “I’m sure she won’t mind – she will love it actually, we do it all the time in Australia”.
And so with that, Amy ran into that Malibu surf with conviction.
And after we finished and ‘got the shot’ – back in the location van I confided to Amy sheepishly that I didn’t really know Collette, however what I did know of her is that she would probably hate the idea and would try to bill us for the dress and that we were in real trouble. Then and there she grabbed a bottle of champagne looked at me wryly and downed all but half it – then later, the rest.
And then we laughed and shared another. So it was us that had alcohol banned from all Vogue shoots in California from then on.
I couldn’t wait to get back to Australia and tell Collette who I have known for years and had also worked with on occasion. My mother also worked with her for a while. She thought it was hilarious. Colette Dinnigan is not only exceptionally gifted but also does love a good laugh. And of course that was the image of Amy is the surf in her dress that was selected of all the other pictures of the other brilliant designers that we shot that day that ran in the magazine. The one in the beloved Malibu water.
Be Australian.
Hollywood
Malin Ackerman at the Goldstein House. Los Angeles, Hollywood.
Designed by John Lautner featured in numerous films including the Big Lebowski and Charlie’s Angeles.
Owner, the eccentric and flamboyant billionaire, Mr James Goldstein a fixture at many a front row of NBA games, sashayed around the house while I was shooting. He was in full leather – pants, leather shirt, leather cravat and leather hat crowning his long frizzy grey hair. And of course his trademark crocodile skin cowboy boots. All effortlessly worn in the full L.A. sun. “Don’t worry” the location manager said “he is harmless, he’s charming”.
It was rumoured that he did slip his number into the nubile little hand of one of the models before he roared off down
Mulholland Drive in his white Corniche though. Why shouldn’t he? He’s still got it doesn’t he? . . even at 70 plus.
. . . .Ah Hollywood.
The Greek Island
I have spent many summers on Mykonos. Over three decades. On the other side mostly, the less populated one – on and around the beach at Agios Sostis. Far from the madding crowd. If you have been there you know it. And it was always followed by lunch at Kiki’s way before Nobu said it was one of his favourite most spots in the world, and way before it had electricity. Vasilis would cook 2 inch pork steaks on an outdoor furnace and after lashings of Retsina, desert would be a simple chocolate brownie. I had no idea that its origin was ancient Greece. I would always though take a short pilgrimage to my favourite spot in the world and that is the island of Delos which is just a ten minute or so boat ride across the way. Every year I would find the old fisherman, Jakova on the beach at Ornos and he would take me to the eastern side on his rickety ‘kaiki’ and dock at a spot that we are sure that only he and I know about. I would walk up to Agia Kiriaki – and there I would find a key to the church that was hidden for me – light a few candles for those who had left us and meditate for a while. And I would be transported back to the ages, reset – and ready to face another year.
Delos is the most unique of Greek Islands, it is the mythological birthplace of Apollo and for a thousand or so years no Greek citizen is allowed to be born there or die there so as to not stake any claim on the land. It has one of the most extraordinary archeological sites that remains largely intact as it has been uninhabited since 7th Century B.C. Cleopatra for a time did have a house there.
Cleopatra, the original influencer.
My son and my family lawyer have all the details. It is there by the water near the foot of Agia Kiriaki that I will make a final return and my ashes will be scattered – directly across from Mykonos where in the peak of summer hundreds congregate at ‘little Venice’ and look across at that exact spot to watch the setting sun.
So I will be at one with the sun’s rays and the sea, and I will never be alone.
Monumentale di Staglieno, Genoa
On a trip to Milan a few years ago on the way to Portofino I made sure I took a hard left and a few days off and took a pilgrimage to see the extraordinary, sombre and moving sculptural works of the Monumentale di Staglieno in Genoa in one of the largest cemeteries in Europe. Designed in the early 1800’ s under a Napoleon edict. I was hoping it was worth it as it took time away from Portofino on the most glamorous and storied Italian Riviera.
I rambled around the estate for 3 days alone with my favourite lenses and captured a personal photo-essay that had been milling around within – haunting me for years. It must be the most beautiful cemetery in the world. The great houses of Genoa would commission the sculptors of the day to honour and immortalise the dead as a method in processing grief. And then, contagion set in and everyone seemed to want to keep up with the Joneses . . . in this case, Giovannises. And that created something extraordinary.
I didn’t know Oscar Wilde had a wife, but she is buried there. Friedrich Nietzsche would often walk its grounds formulating his thoughts. Mark Twain mentioned it in his book ‘The Innocents Abroad’ where it first caught my ear, and Joy Division used an image of one of the works as their album cover art.
The walk over those days was transformative – you would be lost and find the path again and after a while the sculptures seemed to breathe and you felt at peace with them. On the last day I felt it was time to put the camera away and just walk for a while and reckon with myself why I was really there, because maybe it wasn’t about the photo essay. My sister was in the final stages in her life and I was processing my own grief – trying to make sense of what she was going through. And I needed to do that way from everything.
God was merciful in the end though, because she suffered. She is in his hands now.
The Monuments Of Staglieno are profound and divine – with a unique inlay of black dust resting on the sculptures.
The dust of the dead.
