Classical foundations

When I was six, mum enrolled me in private lessons for ballet. That’s right, classical ballet. My teacher, Robyn Hick, started me with a Pas de deux around the dusty floors of a local masonic hall. Im not sure why mum thought classical ballet was a good fit for a hyper child who loved kicking footballs, rolling in tyres, jumping off furniture and chasing girls, but it turned out it was a good call. After 3 months of private lessons, I joined a class: too young to question all the leotards or protest mum’s progressive cultural push.

Four years later I was dancing (classical, jazz and tap) five days a week, performing in concerts and the odd competition.?

Classical ballet is demanding. It requires the perfect balance of coordination, discipline, balance, power and most of all, expression. Although there were other forms of dancing that won the audience over more easily (I once enjoyed centre stage in a Tap rendition of A Chorus Line, channelling Gene Kelly) it was the classical ballet that could take the audience’s breathe away. It’s where the soul of dance resides and is a common foundation to contemporary performance. Classical training requires discipline, and seemingly endless investments of time. When it all came together, my body defied gravity and moved with the music like leaves in the wind.

Now that you know this about me, it may come as less of a surprise that I’ve dedicated my last three years to classical photography, 15 years into my career. Like dance, I recognised that black and white film photography, hand printed, offered a common ancestry to all the modern forms of photography- photography that to my eye has begun losing shape. Part of the appeal of photography is its simplicity: we steal light from a moment and immortalise it. It can be that simple. Which particular moments we chose to represent is a matter of choice, but a foundational principal of photography concerns the arrangement of time and space. We overcome obstacles to achieve this. Modern photography has removed many of these obstacles (the ability to dial up and down ISO, image stabilisation, faster lenses, very high resolution sensors, focus assisting, eye tracking, TTL flash metering, extended dynamic range, live view articulating screens and fully programmable exposure modes). This photography can now easily transcend the fundamental obstacle of capturing light, as it existed at some moment. It has for me drifted too far from something worth marvelling- is what we are looking at real?

Through all this removal of obstacle, creativity has been dealt a blow: obstacle is the fertiliser of creativity! What are we left with? Where did this all come from?

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to creating art that moves people is our own creativity.

I decided to stare mine down- to greet it head on as I did all those years ago when my poor posture had nowhere to hide in the mirrors of the masonic hall. Now, like then, mastering the basics takes time, perseverance and a bit of madness. Looking back at the greats of photography: Cunningham, Penn, Avedon, Callahan, Weston, Modotti, Cartier-Bresson, Leiter, Miller, Sander, Brandt, Margaret-Cameron, Sudek (and far more than I have appropriate space to mention here) it struck me how elegant and expressive their work is. How simply beautiful it is! What a gift their stolen photons turned out to be. I am still moved.

My foray into large format film photography, silver, lith, salt and palladium printing started as a return to the classical origins of my discipline to improve my "posture". Along the way, it has moved me, and like the photons of light, fixed me permanently to the elegance and grace of classical practice.

Next month I launch Platina Editions with the help of my great friend Cameron Baird. Work seen here will be available for the first time to art buyers who are looking for something unique, expressive and collectable.

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